Sheila Kamara Hay is an Ecstatic Birth visionary, advocate, and trainer. She desires to share with women that childbirth is not something to endure, but a journey they can enjoy. As a mother of three, Sheila has experienced firsthand a range of births — from the traumatic to the ecstatic — and has advised and inspired countless women in the creation or reclamation of their births. Sheila loves empowering women to access their fierce feminine power in birth and life. Her own childbirth journeys left her exclaiming, “Why didn’t I know it can be this good? Women need to know!” Sheila can be found screaming it from the rooftops at ecstatic-birth.com.
ECSTATIC CHILDBIRTH
When you think about childbirth what is the first word that comes to mind?
For 90% of people that word is “pain.”
What if I told you that it doesn’t have to be that way?
Childbirth has the potential to be one of the most PLEASURABLE moments in a woman’s life– emotionally, spiritually and PHYSICALLY.
Emotional and spiritual pleasure are easy to understand, but physical pleasure? That can feel contradictory to the vast reality of women’s experiences and downright blasphemous (remember Eve?!?).
Yet we birth with our sexual bodies, using the same body parts and triggering many of the same hormonal systems as we do when we have sex.
Childbirth is not separate and distinct from the sexual act that led to conception…It is the culmination of it!
Childbirth is a sexual act.
If that statement makes you feel deeply uncomfortable, it should. It goes against every fiber of our conditioning. We have been taught our whole lives that everything baby related is clean, pure. Sexuality? Well.. that is a different story. So much of sexuality lurks in the shadows.
Of the 1001 reasons that most women are not currently experiencing ecstasy and orgasm during childbirth, many of them thread back to our personal, societal and cultural rifts with our bodies and our sexuality.
Have you ever had a sexual experience that felt sooo deeply pleasurable?
How about one that really hurt?
Can you see how both extremes are completely possible for the same woman, in the same body?
Much like with sex, the difference between a childbirth experience that feels orgasmic vs one that feels traumatic is the circumstances around the experience and whether the body and its process are being honored (or not).
Can you imagine having sex when you are not turned on? When you are full of fear? Ouch!
This is how most women are currently giving birth. Is it any wonder that the dominating word connected to childbirth is pain?
Pleasure is an essential component of female sexual anatomy. It is time to reclaim that in childbirth creating conditions that honor our bodies and allow for the flow of pleasure. This is the most powerful and holistic birthing tool of all.
Imagine, for a moment, the possibilities in a world where our babies are born through pleasure….
