Wholistic Sexuality During Pregnancy & Birth with Sheri Winston

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have some fun.

Hello, I'm Alexander J. Johnson and today's guest is Sherry Winston. Sherry offers empowering, enlightening erotic education for everyone as a teacher of holistic sexuality. She's an award winning author and founder of the center for the Intimate Arts. Her background and perspective has been derived from decades of experiences as a nurse, midwife, gynecology practitioner, registered nurse, holistic healer, doula and massage therapist. And today we're talking about pregnancy, birth and sexuality. These might be the most divinely miraculous and juicy topics there are to talk about. So I am excited to welcome Sherry Winston. Hi, Sheri.

Hi. Thank you for having me on. Such a pleasure to talk to you about this stuff.

Yes, I'm super excited. And just even preparing for it, I get excited. I mean, how can you not get excited about talking about, about creating babies and sex?

I understand that other people might find that confusing. Yeah.

Well, that's why we are talking with you today.

You know, it's funny because I used to be a midwife and now I'm a sex teacher. And when I say that to people, I would say the majority of people go, huh, what? That's weird. Like, what does sex got to do with birth? You know, that's really confusing to people. And you know, instead of being like, of course, you know, sex and birth are connected. So there's a lot of information here that people really need to understand to understand, you know, all of these things. Totally.

It's so amazing. And I always think it's funny and I know we'll get into it later on in the conversation, but that sex, like you wouldn't put those two. Obviously we have to have sex in order to have a baby. So it seems like that would those.

Would go together, you would think. But you know, our culture is so, so many things. It's so mechanistic, it's so antisexual that it's basically done such a good job of separating them out that it seems odd to people to think that they're connected.

Right. So you became a midwife and were you always interested in sexuality? Maybe just start off with your background of why you became a midwife and then how it turned into how you bec a sex expert?

Well, I mean, it's funny, there's different ways to tell this story, but this is sort of my favorite way. I became a midwife when I was about 7 or 8 years old and my cat, my beloved cat, had her first litter of kittens in the middle of the night. She came and woke me up and led me under the bed or into the closet, wherever it was. And I was with her while she had her kittens and subsequently was with her. She had two litters a year for three years before my mother wised up and got her fixed. But for me, I actually think it started there, that that was really just an amazing and significant thing for me. And literally I was there for every kitten. She would wake me up in the middle of the. She'd take me to the spot she picked, and I was with her. When I was in high school and stuff. I was planning to be an artist and I graduated high school and I went to art school in New York. It was all very cool. And after a year, I dropped out of art school because I realized that being an artist was not what I wanted to do as my livelihood. It was stuff I love to do and I still do. In fact, I illustrated the anatomy illustrations in my book are mine, but I. Yeah, right. But I was sort of in the like, hmm, what now? And I was thinking about midwear free and lots of other things. What I actually did at that point was I became a massage therapist because I sort of thought that would be a good foundation for whatever I decided to do. And I got to go to a home birth with one of my clients, and that was it. I went from kind of thinking about maybe the light bulb went off, the heavens opened up, and I saw this was my path. And I was just barely 20 at that point, and I started apprenticing with midwives, going to home births. And I became a childbirth educator and a doula and an apprentice midwife. And then I decided I wanted to get legal, which for most of the United States means becoming a nurse, a bachelor's prepared nurse. So I kind of bit the bullet, as it were. Funny phrase, isn't it? Bit the bullet. And I went to nursing school for four years, even though I didn't actually want to be a nurse, I just wanted to be a midwife. And then after nursing school, went on to become an advanced practice nurse, a certified nurse, midwife and practitioner. So over the course of 20 years, I did birth from lots of aspects of birth from the. Whether I was labor support or apprentice midwife or assisting as a nurse, or then as the midwife. And it was great. And it was my calling and it was my passion. I honestly thought it was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. It actually didn't occur to me that I was going to do anything else, except maybe that I would be teaching midwives when I got older. After about 20 years, I got kind of burnt out. You know, the hours are pretty awful, and it's a lot of stress, and the politics of it are pretty disastrous in this culture. And so I got kind of burnt out and I took a break. I thought I was going to go back. And on that break from birthing, catching babies, I was still doing gynecology. I thought about opening a holistic gynecology practice, but it wasn't juicing me up. And I've always taught childbirth classes, but also what I called women crafts classes, like vaginal ecology and these other kind of alternative holistic perspectives on women's health. And at that point, I started teaching a little more. I was doing the gynecology and I started teaching. And I started teaching a class for women about how to have better sex. And it was so much fun. I'm like, wow, this is great. And then I started teaching a class for men about female sexuality to help men understand how their partners operated. And then I started teaching a class for men and women, for everybody, about how to have better orgasms. And it just unfolded and became clear that that was the next best, the next part of the journey. First I thought I was on a parallel path, but then I realized I had just gone deeper in, that it was really all part of the same mystery. Right now I've been just teaching the sexuality stuff for about a dozen years now and retired from doing gynecology and clinical practice. And now I have a curriculum of over 50 classes. I teach mostly for lay people, but also different kinds of professional trainings. And, yeah, so it's still really the same mission, though. That's how I got here.

So what are some of the, you know, you were a midwife for 20 years and caught hundreds and hundreds of babies. What was some of the. What are some of the biggest lessons or things that kind of stick out for you that you learned in your years of being a midwife?

Well, you know, I had lots of great teachers. I mean, lots of midwives who taught me and lots of women who I learned so much from. But I have to say, the biggest teacher of all was the process of birth itself, because you can't really negotiate with it. You know what I mean? You can't control it. A lot of our Western medical culture is about trying to. Our whole culture really is about trying to control things. And in birth, that's just not going to work. So you really have to learn to respect the power and the natural process of it while still being guardian and alert and helping to guide it in the best possible way and looking out for danger. But ultimately, the process itself is phenomenal in its elegance and its brilliance. And most of the time, the best births happen when you sort of almost make yourself invisible and all you're doing is just. Just helping facilitate and staying in the background so that the woman can actually connect inside herself to that power. And that's really what I saw my job as. And the thing is that sex is exactly the same in that there's this powerful natural template that we all have inside of us and that we can learn how to do things to facilitate the process and we can't control it. We can learn how to channel it and access it and enhance it, but we can't control it. And the more we can learn how to facilitate it, how to dance with it, the better it is. That's some of it.

Yeah. I love that, and I love the control. It does seem like our Western culture, and especially giving birth in hospitals, there's a lot of control, controlling the woman, trying to control the whole process. And it's a very dynamic process, which I love the correlation between sexuality too, because you can't control that either.

You know, it's so interesting. Both sexual arousal and labor are trance states or altered states of consciousness. And the thing about an altered state of consciousness is we can learn how to enhance that. We can learn how to maximize our trance, how to go deeper into our trance. We can't control it, but we can learn how to. To get really expert at going into that trance state. And so that's, I think, where we get a lot of confusion. People are thinking, I'm going to control my arousal, I'm going to make something happen, I'm going to make my labor happen or make it happen a certain way, that's never going to work. But when you look at it from the point of view of I'm going to get really skilled at enhancing my trance state. And then whatever is going on, I can enhance it, I can go deeper in. Because the deeper we get into that trance state, the more the magic happens. So the more, in a sense, the more we get out of the way. It's like playing an instrument. We want to practice and get good at our skills. And then when we are playing an improv, we want to just relax, stop thinking, stop trying to make something happen and just allow the magic to happen. And that's when we make the most beautiful music. That's the same for labor and sex and a lot of other things in life. I love that.

That's so amazing because there's so much fear around birth in our culture as well. And do you think that there's also fear around being in this trance state, that it's like such a totally different world, that sometimes we as women and people and our sexuality as well, are nervous or scared about actually stepping into that space?

Well, I think. Yeah, absolutely. I think you said a couple things that are really important. One is our fear of birth. Most of us have seen thousands, probably millions of images of how horrible birth is, how terrifying, how scary, how dangerous, how it's the most awful, horrible thing. So we've got this fear of birth because we've just seen all of these negative images and ideas of birth over and over and over again. So there is this really strong fear of birth itself and not understanding what it can be and the potential of. Of primal or static or even orgasmic birth. So there's that which is huge just by itself. And then underneath that, probably the reason it exists in the first place, is our innate fear of our sexuality and the power of our sexuality and being in what we call, in Western culture, altered states of reality or non ordinary reality. In traditional cultures, there were just all these different forms of consciousness and what we think of as ordinary reality, the mundane form, was the least interesting. Our culture kind of switches that around. And we think that being in our thinking, neocortex, smart, clever brain is what's normal and everything else is altered. So that's really scary for a lot of people. So, yeah, I think you totally nailed really, both parts of that.

Yeah. And like you said, too, being afraid of our sexuality, I'd love for you to just talk about that too, because especially for us women, and obviously men have their own issues. But for women, being scared or not comfortable with our genital, and that is essentially where the baby comes. It's not surprising that people have fear of birth.

Right.

When they're not even comfortable with their own body. So can you talk about that and how we can work with that and kind of maybe heal some of that shame?

Big topic. I mean, when you start looking at these pieces, it's so evident why we have such a dysfunctional birth culture. We actually, for an industrialized country, we've got just horrible rates of maternal mortality and morbidity. We have crazy scenario infection rates, we have insane rates of use of medication. So we do birth very, very badly in this country. And these are some of the parts of it. The fear of going into these altered states, the fear of the power of our own sexuality and the discomfort and inhibition and even disgust that we have for our own bodies at all levels, for our relationship to our pleasure, our relationship to our power, and our relationship to our genitals. So it's kind of interesting. One of the things I realized towards the end of my birthing decades as a practitioner was, and as I was transitioning into teaching about sex, what I realized is birth is not going to change in this culture until our relationship with sexuality changes, because that's the foundation. So until we learn how to love our bodies and until we learn how to care, connect to our pleasure, and until we learn that our genitals are sacred and beautiful and sexy and delicious and wonderful, of course we're not going to have amazing, or at least most women are not going to have amazing birth experiences. So the relationship with the genitals is an important piece of that. And it's a good place for women to start. You know, to start by just asking yourself. You might want to journal or maybe you draw pictures or maybe you talk to somebody about it. But just ask yourself, how do you feel when you think about your genitals? What do you call them? Do you have a name for them? Are you comfortable with any kind of language for your genitals? Do you know all the parts you have? Do you think they're ugly or funny looking or wrong or deformed or they should be different. And once you become aware, awareness is sort of, I think, the number one mind skill here. Once you become aware, then you can start making choices about if you want to change that. If you decide, you know, I really, I don't like my genitals, I don't feel good about them. You can consciously say, okay, I want to change that. I want to reprogram what I've learned. I want to start to love that part of my body and accept, explore it and feel good about it and look at it and learn all the parts that are there and learn how she likes to be touched and pleasured and really start reclaiming that. It's incredibly empowering when you do.

That's so beautiful. And do you recommend that women do that during pregnancy before they get pregnant?

What's your thought?

Anytime, all the time?

Well, you know, wherever you start, if you're already pregnant, do it now. If you're not pregnant, you think you might want to be at some point, do it now. If you don't think you ever want to be pregnant, do it now. If your past ever be pregnant, do it now. Start now. They're right there. They're yours. They're easily accessible. And we have often enormous emotional barriers to starting that process. So you might want to take little steps. You don't have to spend an hour with a mirror and a light and looking at every single part. In my book in Women's Anatomy of Arousal, I give this home play assignment of taking the time and really looking at all the parts and discovering them and noticing how they change during arousal. Which means of course, you have to play with yourself during your home play assignment. And it's like this whole big project and I just had somebody saying, I haven't done it. It just seems so daunting. And I'm like, well, you don't have to do the whole thing. Just do one little piece at a time. Just check out one little piece today. Just do one little experiment. Just look at one part, just feel one part and just be with that for a while. Or just be with the mental reprogramming of perhaps why you're self pleasuring, that you just repeat things like, my genitals are so beautiful and they feel so good. I mean, just do one little bit at a time. So I think it's important to sort of not feel like there's this whole other big giant thing on your to do list of learning to love your genitals. It's like, just love him a little bit today, love him a little bit more tomorrow, find another way to love him the next day.

I love that. And I love that too, because you were just talking about, I don't know if you use the word heal, but heal our sexuality before our birth culture is going to change. And I just think that the little steps are so empowering for us to just. I love that that you just gave a fig. You don't have to do everything but just start slowly and work to kind of heal those emotional wounds.

You know, it's a process, it just is. And we need to be loving and patient with ourselves in that process because otherwise then we just wind up shaming ourselves and kicking ourselves in the butt because we're not loving our genital stuff. Right, right. No, like lighten up. It's okay. Take your time, have fun. Make it play, make it pleasurable. Like that.

Yeah, that's great. So I love in your. You have A great online course that I did. And you say that birth and sex aren't separate events that happen nine months apart. Labor, arousal, birth and orgasm share the same equipment and pathways. That is amazing. And we need more. Tell us more.

Well, some of it is kind of funny because it should be self evident that we're talking about the same equipment here. Babies get made and babies come out. Same equipment, same nerve pathways. And the things that might not be quite as evident are that it's almost the same biochemical soup, that arousal and labor, the same hormones, the same endorphins, the same neurotransmitters, all of the same body chemicals that are going on in arousal are what are going on in labor. And that's really fascinating. So energetically, it's really the same. It's a journey. We go, we leave mundane rehabilitation and we go on this journey. And if we can go with it and play with it and get into it, we get taken somewhere else. And when we're in that trance state, things are different. Time shifts and what we're aware of changes and our focus changes and our perceptions change. Just like pain and pleasure. That's a really good example. You know how if you're not aroused at all and somebody just like walked up and pinched your nipple, you'd be like, ow, cut that out, what are you doing? Right? But that same sensation when you're in a state of really high deep arousal, that same nipple tweak might feel really good because our perceptions of pain and pleasure shift when we're in that state. And then I just think at a sort of spiritual level, the journeys are connected. When we're in that deep trance state, we have access to the experience of the universal divine of bliss, of oneness with everything, of connection to everything. Places where in our day to day lives we might not have access to those perceptions or to the wisdom and information that we can get in those places. So those are sort of a short version, but some of the ways they're connected and why it's so empowering for birth to understand and know that.

Yeah, so amazing. I love all of that. I love the high arousal too. That's amazing that the pain isn't as intense. So obviously we'd want to get into a state of high arousal and like you're saying a trance state for birth, that would make the pain less intense, right?

And might even shift it into pleasure. That's how women can have ecstatic and orgasmic births because they are actually able to turn on the pleasure pathways. And that Overrides pain. Wow.

So is that. That is like the act of surrendering to the trance state and just allowing the sensations to kind of ripple through your body. Like, how does one get an ecstatic birth?

Well, I think the best way to practice is to have a lot of really ecstatic sex. I mean, seriously, right? We're using all the same equipment and pathways and we learn. The more we practice, the more we learn. It's like driving a car. Do you remember the first time you drove a car? It was like terrifying. You don't want to kill anybody. And you had a steer and pedals and I had a stick shift and I had like, not stalling, shifting gears and it was just. It was like, ah, right. But now when I'm driving, I don't even know what I'm doing. I mean, I remember when my son was learning how to drive and I was trying to teach him how to drive a stick shift and I couldn't do it. I did not know what I was doing anymore. I had done it so long and it was so automatic that I didn't know what I was doing. And when I started trying to think about what I was doing, I couldn't even explain it. I was just like, well, you have to kind of feel there's a sound. My son is very mechanical. He's like, what is actually happening with the clutch? I don't know. Somebody else had to teach him how to drive a stick strip. I couldn't do it. But going into trance states and learning how to enhance our arousal, trance is practicing that so that we get better at just again, like playing a musical improv. In order for a musician to play a great improv, they need to have practice, they need to be skilled with their instrument, and then they need to turn their thinking off and just go into the improv. And the more skill you have, the more magical the improv can be. So the way to practice for an orgasmic, ecstatic, or primal, whatever arises birth experience is to go into your sexual trance a lot to learn how to enhance that trance, to learn how to use your breathing and your sound and movement and learn how to reprogram.

Our.

Silly little brains that are always wanting to take over and thinking they know so much, learning how to shut that off, all of those things are going to maximize the chance of having the most empowered birth experience. And then not knowing what you'll get. I've known women who've had multiple births and had one birth that was really ecstatic and then another birth that they Would not describe as ecstatic, but they would say was intense or really primal, but definitely did have sensations of pain and. Was amazing. So you still don't know what you're going to get, but you can certainly maximize the chances of having the best birth and the most. And when I say primal, I mean a birth where your thinking brain is offline completely and you are just in it because when you are having great sex, you are not thinking about, okay, now I will do this. Now I will go here. When you are really in the most amazing sex, it is all just happening and flowing and that is how the most amazing labors will be. We just want to maximize it.

Yeah. It is trusting in the primal urges and trusting in our body wisdom and just doing what comes naturally, Right? Like whatever comes up is what we're supposed to be doing. Not trying to. Again, coming back to the control, not trying to control it of like, oh, I can't make that sound, or I can't move in that way, you know, it's exactly right.

It is exactly right, in fact, for those kinds of births as a midwife, so there's different levels of trance state, right? So somebody could be like, in the. In a pretty good trance, but not in the deepest trance. And in that pretty good trance, they'll be doing fine. They'll have a good birth. But still, as the midwife, I might be saying, I might feel the position of the baby and think, say to the woman, if you get in bed and you put your leg like this and you get in this position, that's going to help the baby shift and get into a better position for the birth. I'm still sort of thinking and kind of managing it and making suggestions. When a woman has gone into the deepest level of trance, I don't need to say a thing. All of a sudden she's in bed and in a position with her knee up and her hips cocked and she's there until suddenly she jumps up and she's on the floor and then she's on all fours and then she gets in the tub and then she gets out. And I'm not saying a word because she's so in her trance that she's doing exactly what needs to happen. She's in complete and utter cooperation with her trance state and with the body wisdom that knows right now this is the best place to be to get this baby out, to make things happen, to get things going, you know, and so there's different levels that we can get to. And ideally, the people who are going to be there at your birth are going to be helping facilitate you getting to that deepest trance level.

And then to get into this trance level, obviously you want to have, like you were saying, practicing static sex. Is there any other, like, guidance that you would give women to get into this, to practice before birth to get into that trance state besides ecstatic sex?

Well, practicing using all of your tools, practicing playing with your breath and sound, checking in to find out if there's stuff that needs some reprogramming or reframing about your body, checking in about what are your deep seated beliefs about birth? I mean, one of the things I used to do is this is kind of before the digital computer age, but I had a whole collection of videotapes of great births and books that described great births. And I would say to my women early on in their pregnancy, watch the videos, read the books, reprogram your mind so that you envision amazing, empowering, wonderful, ecstatic natural birth. So you can override a lot of that cultural programming. And whatever you do, don't watch tv, don't watch birth on tv, don't watch these horrible births, don't support that negative programming. So that's a thing you do where you start going, you know, I can't quite envision what an orgasmic birth would look like. Well, you get videos and watch orgasmic births and see them and look at them and then you start to go, oh, yeah, oh, I see that. I get that. So you have to kind of look at where you need to work, what you want to work on, where the stoppers might be for you, what are the things that might come up that would keep you out of that trance state.

And then so we kind of just have to relearn this, or I don't even know if relearn, but just kind of open up to it. Because it seems like it's so foreign for so many of us to actually be willing to open up to that space and then be willing to allow ourselves to be moved by that, by the divine, whatever is flowing through us.

Right. It's pretty big learning. You're absolutely right. It involves some unlearning and some relearning. And trust was a really good word that you used. So what else can we do to learn to trust ourselves? This isn't even necessarily about just birth or sex. Can we trust ourselves around food? Can we trust ourselves around movements? Can we trust that our pleasure is a good guide towards what's good for us? Can we trust our body when it says, I'm Tired, I want to rest. And our brain is like, no, no, we have work to do. And pregnancy is a great opportunity because especially the first pregnancy for a lot of us, there's this sort of feeling like you've been taken over by aliens or just one alien. Things are happening in your body that you have no control over. And it's an opportunity to kind of go, oh, that tiredness and sometimes exhaustion at the early part of pregnancy. It's an opportunity to listen to your body go rest. Because we're not. We're like, well, I've got work to do. I can't rest. But that fatigue in early pregnancy is an opportunity to go, oh, my body wants me to rest, I will listen.

We'll do that, right? So developing a relationship in our pregnancy with ourselves so that when the birth does come, we have that level of trust, like we can trust our body.

And there I think you just nailed it, that it's about this relationship with ourselves. So that's what we need to look at in our sex and in our birth and say, okay, what's working? What's not? What could work better? Where do I want to expand? What do I need to learn? But yes, the relationship with yourself is foundational and fundamental here. Right.

And then what about like, sex during pregnancy? What are your thoughts have to as much sex? How do you navigate the different phases, the different trimesters? You may feel tired or you may feel nauseous, or you may not be interested in sex or you want to have sex all the time. Do you have any tips or recommendations for sex during pregnancy? And some people who just think that you shouldn't have sex during pregnancy, that somehow you're going to harm the baby or something. Can you give us some thoughts on that?

Well, let's start in the first trimester, which is if for some reason you're having any kind of threatened miscarriage. So if something's going, you know, if something's going on where the pregnancy is at risk, that is a time to abstain from sex and orgasm while that's happening. Other than that, Other than that circumstance, sex and pregnancy is really good for you. Orgasms will get rid of nausea. If you're having morning sickness, have an orgasm and you'll feel better. True. Really true. But the other piece of it is that it's also an opportunity to tune into yourself and really figure out what's working for you. For some women, they feel like having less sex, and if that's what's right for you, then do that. Other women in pregnancy are just raring to go all the time. And if that's what your body is saying, then do that. So it's really a great opportunity to learn to tune in and listen and honor what your body's telling you. Now, that being said, if you're in a partnered relationship, we have a partner to consider, and our partner is not pregnant, and so we want to have less sex, then we also really have to attend to that relationship and communicate about that and acknowledge to our partner what's going on, acknowledge that that might be challenging for them. Or maybe we want to have more sex and they're not as interested. Particularly as pregnancy progresses, some partners are weirded out by the woman's changing body or turned off by it, or suddenly they feel like you're the mother and therefore not the sex object. So this brings up a lot of relationship stuff, as well as the fact that you're about to have a baby and everything's going to change. So again, we can look at these as opportunities to communicate and check in and find out how people are feeling and what's coming up and process that and work through and heal some of that stuff or transform some of that stuff. I encourage people to look at it as opportunity, definitely. Whether you have a partner or not, having lots of orgasms in pregnancy is a good thing things, and I highly recommend it. And particularly as you get more and more pregnant, lots of orgasms are good. And if you are partnered with a man, intercourse and semen is great. Semen actually contains chemicals that help soften and ripen up the cervix. So that's a really great thing to be doing. If you have a semen providing partner towards the end of pregnancy, get lots of it. It's good for. It's going to help me. All right, isn't it? I mean, it makes sense too, then. The other piece I have to say is postpartum after the baby comes, the vast majority of women could care less if they ever have sex again. And there is a minority of women whose sex drive comes right back and they're interested and they want to have sex. But for most women, I call it Mother Nature's birth control. For most women, after a baby comes, we go through a phase where we're really not interested. Not only is our vagina kind of like a desert, but our libido is usually switched off where it's really. I think it's actually rechanneled into the baby. And that can be very challenging for partner relationships. And a lot of Women think there's something wrong with them. They have this idea that six weeks after the baby, you're supposed to be raring a go. And for most women, it can be six months to three years before our sex drive fully returns. Wow, that's normal. There's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing wrong with your relationship and there's nothing wrong with your partner. And we need the skills to negotiate the impact that's going to have on our partner and our relationship if that's what happens. And again, these are things that we can learn. We can learn how to negotiate that. We can learn how to be with a partner when they're feeling sexual and we're not. So there's a lot of opportunity there and not a lot of information to help people figure out how to do that in a good way.

So that's fascinating. And I think that would be super beneficial for all of us too, because I've definitely heard after six weeks, everything, you should be good. So that's good to know that it might not return. I mean, it will return, but not right away.

There's a difference between your vagina and vulva being healed. If you had a little tear or something, that is going to be probably healed in six to eight weeks. That doesn't mean you're ready to be sexual at any level or that you might be ready to be sexual at a non intercourse level. You know, and there's different things we can do. Our culture is very intercourse focused, like real sex is intercourse. And there's so many other things we can do. And so sometimes it's like, you know, I'm just really not. I'm not ready for that. But we could have some lovely holding. And even if my libido is completely not interested, I could still love you and hold you while you pleasure yourself, or I use my hands or my mouth or. And to really look at new and different ways to be with a partner when our libidos perhaps are in a very discrepant place. Right. Okay. Let's just add some more scope to our toolbox.

And it's so interesting with, you know, because that's such an important topic. And I would imagine I'm pregnant, but not. They don't have any other children, but there's the woman taking care of the baby and that full force and intense. And then honoring. How do we honor and navigate our sexual relationship and our partner and really honor them so that they feel loved and cultivate that intimacy? Do you have any tips on how.

We can do that. Well, again, I think we have to start with acknowledging that having a baby is one of the biggest stresses on a partnered relationship you will probably ever have. And in fact, there's actually kind of a high rate of relationship breakup after a baby. And I think part of it is because nobody's telling people about things like, you know, 80 to 90% of women are not really going to be interested in sex for a while. And if nobody tells you that, then you start thinking as the woman, you start thinking, there's something wrong with my relationship. The man is thinking, there's really something wrong here. And instead of being able to go, okay, this is normal. How will we navigate it? I think there's also a. I used to call it, like, everybody moves up one. So before you have a baby, before you have a baby, say you're a woman, which I am, and say your partner's a man, which my husband was. And I realized after I had a baby that I had sort of been in the mothering role in our relationship in a lot of ways. So my husband kind of got to be the baby sometimes, right? Because I could easily be like, the mommy, you know what I mean? And that nurturing kind of caretaker. Suddenly there was a real baby. And now all my mothering, nurturing energy was going into the real baby. And I was looking at my husband and going, grow the heck up. Like, suddenly I was like, now I want him to be a grown up. And it's kind of a stunning shift that again, at that time, when I had my son is 23. When I had my son, I wasn't as aware of, but I was starting looking at my husband and kind of like going, like, grow up, Jack. Step up here. Be the grown up. And meanwhile, he's like, where did my nurturing, loving partner go? Right. Totally right. And then there's a thing that happens, and this is one of the reasons why natural childbirth is one of the really powerful forces. It is. There's a biochemical milieu that occurs when we go through a natural birth process that when our baby is born, we fall madly in love with them. Now this is going to happen even if we have a C section, even if we have medication and drugs and labor. This can happen even when we adopt a baby. But the biochemical foundation for that happening is strongest when we have a natural birth and then an uninterrupted bonding period. I remember holding my son and thinking, this is like the best falling in love I have ever experienced in my life. Times a thousand, like this is like falling in love quantum. And I was, you know, you're just absolutely enamored of this baby, and you are so in love with this baby, and suddenly you're in love with this little sweet, pink little thing when you want to eat their little toes and smell their heads and nibble their necks and you just stare at them and you want to touch them. And then I remember looking over at my husband, and suddenly he was this big, hairy, smelly behemoth, and I was kind of like, ew, yuck. It just was my falling in loveness had hormonally shifted onto the baby. And luckily, at least I had some sense at that point, because I had already been in the world of birth for 10 years or so at that time. I had some sense that I had to remember to love him up. I had to remember that I did love him, and I had to kind of consciously turn that love energy on him, too, and include him and love him and help him with the transition he was going through. So, I mean, that's kind of a long answer, but these are all things to take into account as we're going through that transition and how to stay loving with our partners, even if our in love energy is now slathered all over this baby. And it's understandable why men might feel left out or jealous. And there are a lot of things we can do to make sure we're showering love energy on them and appreciation and helping them with this huge transition that they're also going through.

Right. Yeah, I love that, too. I love. Because you're just so great at, like, making us feel calm in ourselves and that there's nothing wrong, you know, because I would imagine, like, there's, you know, us women, we want to be superwoman sometimes, and we want to be able to have the baby and love the baby and love the husband and everything be perfect, and we just superwoman it out. So I think it's so great. There's nothing wrong if you're not feeling that same love. I just thank you for that.

I'll say another thing, and just remember, humans, traditionally, we evolved as hunter gatherers in an extended tribe. Family, tribe. And so, in a normal human evolutionary context, we would not be alone with our husband and a baby or our partner and a baby. We would have our mother and our grandmother and our aunties, and the men would have their buddies and their brothers and their uncles and their fathers and their grandfathers. And we would have this tribe that would meet lots of different needs, and we would get taken care of. In all traditional cultures the world over, after women have a baby, there is a special time period, anywhere from two weeks to six months, where women are coddled and nurtured and they're exempt from their regular duties and they're fed special food and they're kept really warm. And there are special rituals and there's all this help and support and the men are helped and supported. And we don't live anything like that. Suddenly we're just like this little unit without that support. And we start looking to our partners to be everything, and they're looking to us to be everything. And we can't do it. It's not humanly possible. You know, I cannot be. I can't be my partner's uncle, My partner can't be my aunt. We're supposed to have all of these people to help us at this time, and most of us have almost nothing. So one of the things we need to do also to get some of the strain off our primary relationship is try and create as much as we can of that village. Make sure our women friends are going to gather around and help us make sure our partner has his men friends who are going to support him through this. Make sure we have our elders, make sure we have as much as we can. Because when we try and be that superwoman and do everything, we will fail at that. That's a guarantee. Because it's just not possible. We'll not be able to do all of those things. We just can't. So how can we make it as easy as possible to get as much support as possible so we can be in that falling in love with our baby place and, and having the time and energy we need so that our primary partner, if we have one, is getting their needs met. And it's a really important thing to be looking at prenatally.

Yeah, I love that. Awesome. Fantastic. And then I have, as you were just talking about that, like the support and the bonding that we're supposed to. To be bonding with our babies and people surrounding us, supporting us in relationship to the bonding. What's your thoughts on breastfeeding and the importance of that for bonding with our babies? And then also, how does sexuality play into that? Because I've heard some women can have orgasms or are turned on when they are breastfeeding.

Okay, I'm pretty hardcore about this, so I'll just acknowledge this. I think everybody should breastfeed. And I think if we are not breastfeeding our babies, it's a tragedy. It really Is breastfeeding our babies has so many benefits. I mean, just health wise, our baby will be healthier not just while we're breastfeeding them, but for the rest of their lives. Every single disease known to humankind throughout the lifespan is less likely to happen if a baby is breastfed for at least a year. And that includes Alzheimer's disease, that includes heart disease, cancer, allergies. So not just while we're breastfeeding, but for the rest of their lives. Breastfeeding teaches the immune system how to function properly. It teaches the metabolism how to function properly. And nothing that comes out of a factory can come close to doing those things. There is not anything close to a substitute for mama's milk. So just on a health level, I'll also say breastfeeding for moms is good because it reduces your lifetime risk of breast cancer. So that all being said, beyond the health issues, breastfeeding creates again a biochemical milieu that is beneficial for mommy and baby. The hormones of breastfeeding help mom feel relaxed, calm, centered. It creates the hormonal milieu of in loveness. And boy, we better be in love with our babies because they are a royal pain in the butt, right? I mean, they take so much time, so much energy, so much attention. They take so long to grow up. If we didn't fall madly in love with them, the human species wouldn't be here. But the more we can be madly in love with them, the better it is for them and for us. When we're madly in love with our babies, we interact with them in ways that create a template, a lifetime template of connection and attachment and healthy, energetic and emotional and spiritual well being. So I cannot even begin to emphasize how important breastfeeding is and why we should be doing everything in our power to breastfeed our babies, to have them with us, to not go back to work and to actually be with them in a hands on boob, in body to body way for, for as long as possible. That's how we evolve and that's the biological expectation and that's going to promote health in every aspect of the whole person. So can barely emphasize how essential, important, vital it is and how good it is for mommy and baby. Because we literally can get, we get into this ecstatic breastfeeding state which for a small number of women translates to orgasmic, sexual. It's a small number of women who feel that way. For most women, it's this other kind of ecstasy and pleasure that's not sexual. It's okay if it's sexual. It's fine if it's sexual. It's a minority of women, but for most women, it's this ecstatic state. Either way, enjoy it. It's an amazing gift. If you asked me at the end of my life to think back at some of the most ecstatic moments I've ever had, it wouldn't be sex. It would be breastfeeding my son.

Wow.

I've had some pretty amazing sex. Yeah. I mean, hello, don't miss it. You know, women, don't miss this opportunity to have some of the most amazing experience, meaningful bonding moments that you can ever have as a human. It's such a gift. So don't miss it. Don't think it's not that important. It is that important. It is that precious. And it's glorious. I mean, it's just glorious. Breastfeeding.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love it.

The best advice ever.

I don't know anybody listening who's not sold on breastfeeding. I don't know what else we can do. That's pretty amazing.

Yeah. I mean, I'm telling you, I'll throw this out too. The normal human lactation period. Remember, this is for primal. Humans before, we got all weird and civilized and strange the way we are now. So 99.9% of the time we've been humans, the average duration of the breastfeeding relationship is four years. Right, Right.

That just seems crazy to our culture. Like you said, it was normal and natural and now it's crazy.

And if you go at least two years, your kids will get maximum health benefits. And I have to say one other thing about nursing toddlers, which in our culture is so weird. I can't imagine mothering a toddler without having the handy dandy breast right there. Because it makes mothering a toddler so easy. It's not just nourishment, it's love, it's comfort, it's relaxing. It's just like, I think I would have been driven crazy by my toddler if we hadn't been able to just go here, baby, nurse, and be able to get into this loving, easy, relaxed, everything's okay state. So, I mean, it's just besides the fact, the fact that I was still breastfeeding at one point, kept my son out of the hospital when he was really sick because he couldn't keep anything down except breast milk, and because I was still nursing, he moves late. He was almost 2 and he was puking everything up. And at that point he didn't nurse much. Toddlers don't nurse like infants do, but he was still nursing, and he got really sick, and he was just puking and puking, but he went and could still nurse. And of course, I went to bed with him, and I just nursed and drank lots of fluids. And he was sick for five days, and the pediatrician and I were on, and he kept saying, is he peeing? And I went, yup, he's peeing. He. He's making wet diapers. This is great. And he doesn't have to go to the hospital. And if he was not nursing, he would definitely have had to be hospitalized and get an IV and all that stuff. I have no doubt. So I was so grateful that I was still nursing. And your milk, if they need to nurse more, they nurse more, and you just make more milk. So I was able to supply whatever he needed and keep him out of the hospital. So that was really great. So awesome. I love it.

Such good information.

Magic milk. It is the most amazing fluid, and our bodies produce it. And I think one of the reasons some women don't nurse is because they're so grossed out by our bodies and think, like, everything that comes out of it is disgusting. And it's like, so, you know, they're like, ew. About nursing. And it's like, really like, oh, my gosh. Your body makes this amazing, amazing thing. And you're like, oh.

And my husband and I were talking about it the other day is interesting, you know, because obviously your body's preparing milk for nine months, and then you give birth, and then if you just give formula, it's like your body's like, what just happened? I just had a baby. Like, is my baby okay? Is everything okay? Like, I kind of feed. I need to get rid of this milk. There's a whole other thing.

Exactly. Yep, yep.

Yes. Breastfeeding. Awesome. Thank you. So I have one more question for you, and then we'll wrap up. You know, we focus a lot on the physical transformation of pregnancy and the physical mechanics of birth. And, you know, obviously learning all these things are really important, but how do we create the space for pregnancy, birth, sexuality, to be part of our personal transformation, like our heroine journey, if you will, of really transforming into another version of ourselves? I thought you'd be a great person for this question.

Well, it's a great question. And pregnancy and birth are really one of the great opportunities in life to do transformation on the fast track. Right. Because it's what's happening. So. So let's see. So first of all, I think it's important to Be around other people who get that. So this is a really important time to find other allies so that you have, ideally, women who've been through the journey and have had those experiences that you can talk to. We need our sisters on this journey. We can also get that somewhat from books. There are some amazing books. There's actually a book that is quite old, but it's still one of my high. It's called Transformation. Oh, God. I have to remember the title. Transformation through Birth. I think it's called let's See if My Brain Will Work. Claudia Panuthos. I don't even know if it's still in print, but it is specifically a book about that. And then all of the things that we know about transformational technologies, how to reprogram, how to become aware of what's going on, how to use mind body techniques. So everything that's out there in the world that's about the process of how to transform can be utilized in pregnancy. Looking at our dreams, writing journals, making.

Art.

Meditation practices, movement practices, everything. I mean, we are so blessed right now in our culture because we actually have the riches and the wisdom of so many different wisdom cultures. So we can make use of all of those things. And really use this as an opportunity particularly. We talked about this a little bit, but to really reprogram ourselves about pleasure and trusting our inner knowing and our wisdom and the guidance we get from what feels good. So those would be some of the things I would focus on. And I mentioned this one also. But rest, taking time. So busy. What's time? So that, that's a really important, you know, this is. This is the time to start learning how to time. Yeah. Slow down. Yeah.

Yes. I love that you just brought that up because I've been feeling like I just need to kind of rest and kind of, you know, being pregnant, like, I just feel like I need rest, I need some shifts, I need some changes. I'm like, oh, I have so much work to do. And my husband's like, this is the time. This is the time for you to rest, do whatever you need to do.

I love that you said that well, and it's great. And there's having people around you to support that, that go, yes, yes. Your body is saying rest and listen to your body, listen to the wisdom. Trust that. Learning to trust our body is a real challenge, I think, for pretty much all of us in this culture, because we've been raised to not trust it. So this is a great opportunity to practice trusting your body and slowing down and listening to what she says and valuing it and that sort of thing. I love that. And having the allies around you. Having the allies around you, like your partner or your friends who say, yes, rest. Yes. Can I bring you a cup of tea? Yes. Go put your feet up. Yes. Go sit and listen to the birds.

Aw. Love it, love it, love it, love it. I love the Trust yourself and trust your body. I think that is a perfect completion message. So powerful.

All of us.

Yes. Cool. Is there anything else that you definitely want to share or pass on to women and men before we wrap up? And also, just let us know where we can find more about you and your online classes and tap into our wisdom?

Well, we didn't really talk about birth settings so much, so I just really do want to say that if you want to maximize your chances of having that primal ecstatic birth, your best chance of doing that is to have a home birth with a midwife. Next best would be a birth center. And it's really a hard thing to do if you're stepping into a hospital setting. So really, you have to get educated on your options. Home birth is by far the safest option for healthy women, women with a trained attendant. And when women ask me what's the one thing I can do to maximize my chance of having a great birthday? Have a home birth with a midwife. And if you have a tub or you can rent a tub, get a tub there, too. So I just really want to say that the setting you choose for your birth is pretty instrumental in what, what's going to happen. So I would add that piece and then, yes, people can find me again. I'm Sheri Winston, Sheriff S H E R I. You can go to my website. Many ways of getting there. You can always use my name, but it's also intimateartscenter.com and arts. Plural. Intimate arts. Plural center. The American spelling. And I do have online class you mentioned about pregnancy and birth and ecstatic journeys. There's a lot about it in my book, Women's Anatomy of Arousal. And get on my email list to find out when I'm teaching live. I do do private consultations with people about sex and birth and health and relationships. What else? Online classes, in person classes, book. Oh, blog articles, library on the website. Lots and lots and lots of info. That's it. Yeah. Come visit the website. There's lots of good stuff there.

Yes, there is.

Yes, yes, yes. Beautiful.

Well, thank you so much. Yeah. All the juiciness of pregnancy, birth and sexuality. Like I said at the beginning, I can't imagine a juicier conversation. So thank you. Thank you.

Well, thank you so much for having the conversation with me and for wanting to help get the information out for other women so they can have the option of making really empowering choices.

Beautiful. Awesome.

Thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Mama Goddess. Sending you lots of love and blessings. If you'd like to connect more, go to mamagoddess.com until next time, keep rocking it and have an awesome day.