There are conversations that stay with you long after the recording ends — not because of what was said, but because of what was felt in the saying of it. My conversation with Tema Mercado, birthkeeper, midwife, and founder of La Matriz Birth in San Diego, was one of those. By the time we were done, I found myself sitting quietly for a few minutes, letting something settle. Because what Tema carries into her work — and what she so generously shared with us — is not just expertise. It is a lived transmission of what it means to return a woman to herself.
Tema has six children. She began her birth journey at sixteen years old, walking away from that first experience feeling, in her own words, “very disempowered.” She spent years believing that suffering was simply the price of birth. And then, at twenty-eight, she sat with an acquaintance who had just had a completely different kind of experience — a natural birth with a doula, a placenta print on the wall, a body that had been honored — and something cracked open.
“Nobody told me that it could be this way,” Tema said. “And all these years, I thought that this was just the way it was.”
That moment of recognition — that grief and that wonder arriving together — became the seed of everything she now offers. What follows is my attempt to distill the wisdom she shared, though I encourage you, deeply, to listen to the full conversation.
The Delivery Room and the Detective’s Office
Before Tema became a doula, she worked as a sexual assault survivor advocate. She would accompany survivors to forensic exams, to interviews, sometimes all the way to the witness stand. She understood, in her body, what it meant to hold space for someone in their most vulnerable moment — and what it meant when that space was violated by those who held institutional power.
When she entered birth work, she expected it to be different. She was welcoming life, after all, not bearing witness to harm.
What she found instead stopped her.
“I began seeing the same power and control dynamics in the delivery room as I was seeing at the detective interviews,” she told me. “Except on one end somebody was wearing a badge, and on the other end somebody was wearing a white coat.”
And then, after the birth — in the very moment when a family should be opening into joy — she began recognizing something she had seen before. “I began seeing the same PTSD symptoms that I was seeing with my survivor clients in the sexual assault world.”
This is not a comfortable observation. But it is an honest one. And Tema did not look away from it. She also did not leave birth work. She decided that if she could not control what other providers did, she would become the provider. She went to midwifery school. She built La Matriz Birth around the principle that consent is not an afterthought — it is the architecture of care.
Consent as a Living Practice
In a hospital setting, consent is often a signature on a form. In Tema’s practice, it is something the body itself is invited to speak.
Her prenatal visits run an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. She and her co-midwife Alex Medina — both trained in somatics — don’t just track blood pressure and fundal height. They ask: How is this information landing for you? What are you noticing right now?
“We really welcome their doubts and their fears around childbirth,” Tema shared. “If you are feeling doubt, if you are scared — let’s call that in.”
This is countercultural in the world of birth, where there can be a kind of spiritual bypassing — a “positive mindset only” mandate that inadvertently shames fear rather than metabolizing it. Tema’s approach is the opposite. She invites the fear into the room because she knows that an unacknowledged fear doesn’t disappear. It goes into the body. It shows up in a clenched pelvic floor during labor, in armor that makes the soft tissues not soft at all.
By walking clients toward their fears prenatally, she does something profound: she removes the charge. A caesarean section that was feared and then discussed and then imagined and then held — if it becomes necessary — arrives as something that can be metabolized, rather than as a catastrophic rupture of everything that was hoped for.
“The only thing I can really ensure,” she said, “is that we walk next to them through that process. That they don’t have to do that alone.”
What the Body Registered
One of the most powerful stories Tema shared was about a woman who came to their community trauma-informed PAP clinic about ten months postpartum. She came, she said, simply because it was free. She had no trauma. She was clear about this.
And yet.
As Tema and her team moved through their slow, somatic process — bone holds, pubic hold, vulva hold with a sheet, then with a gloved hand on skin — something began to surface. Tema asked: What’s happening for you right now?
The woman had a memory. Not of her birth. Of crossing the border. Of being sent to secondary inspection. Of a border patrol agent performing a digital exam because they didn’t know what a pessary was.
“I know it wasn’t a sexual assault,” the woman kept saying. “But that’s what it felt like.”
Her rational mind had carried a story: this is what happens at the border sometimes. Her body had carried a different one entirely. And they had never met — until that room, that slowness, those hands holding steady, that midwife asking: how do you know you’re ready to move on to the next step?
The woman kept asking for more pressure. More pressure. She needed to be held.
“We gave her body and herself a moment to make this connection with her experience,” Tema said.
And in making that connection — in allowing her body’s truth to be witnessed without being argued away by her rational mind — something became possible. A neural pathway formed: that time was not like this time.
This is what somatics can do. Not fix. Not cure. But witness. Slowly. With enough pressure to be felt.
This story also answered a question I hadn’t fully articulated yet: why had this woman had no interest in sex for ten months? Not because of her birth. Not because of her relationship. Because her pelvis had been holding a memory that her mind had refused to acknowledge. The body keeps the score, as we know. But the body also knows how to release — when it is given the right conditions of safety, slowness, and consent.
Somatic Practice: The Held Pelvis
A gentle grounding practice for reconnecting with pelvic safety after experiences of invasion, violation, or disconnection.
Intention: To offer the pelvis a felt sense of being held — on your own terms, in your own time — and to begin restoring the internal signal that safety is possible here.
Setup: Find a comfortable position lying on your back with your knees bent and feet flat. You may want a blanket over you. Dim the lights if possible. Allow yourself a few slow, full breaths to arrive. Then continue with a few more to attune to your inner sensations.
The Practice: Begin by simply noticing your pelvis — not trying to change anything, just sensing what is here. Is there heaviness? Tension? Numbness? Aliveness? There is no right answer. Notice and be with what is. Let yourself linger here with your body and what is present for you.
Now bring both hands to rest gently on your hip bones — one hand on each side. Feel the weight of your own hands. Notice that they are warm. That they are yours. Feel this connection with yourself.
Begin to apply just a little pressure — not pushing, more like holding. Like someone who loves you is holding you steady. Breathe into this. If sensation arises — emotion, memory, impulse to pull away — let it be there. You don’t have to do anything with it.
Ask yourself, gently: Does my body want more pressure, or less? Follow that. Adjust your hands accordingly. Allow your hands to explore holding yourself until the touch and holding feels right.
Stay here for as long as feels nourishing — even just two or three minutes – or much longer.
Integration: When you feel complete, slowly remove your hands and let them rest at your sides. Take a few breaths. Notice: does anything feel different? Warmer? More present? More spacious? Simply notice, without judgment, and then gently return to your day.
Sexuality Doesn’t End When Motherhood Begins
Tema’s bio includes a line I have been thinking about since I first read it: integrating sexuality as a vital life force, not something that disappears when motherhood begins.
This is not a throwaway phrase. It is a reclamation.
Because in our culture, motherhood and sexuality are treated as mutually exclusive. The moment a woman becomes a mother — especially in the postpartum period — her sexuality becomes invisible, irrelevant, or worse, shameful. And the result is that countless women move through those first months and years feeling like a stranger in their own body, wondering if desire will ever return, and often blaming themselves when it doesn’t.
What Tema understands — and what she works to instill — is that the conditions for sexual desire are the same conditions as the conditions for safety, for attachment, for being seen. You cannot separate them.
“If the mother can find solace and comfort that her partner is going to be with her throughout those long nights — bring her water, take care of the other things — those are romantic acts,” she said.
And she means it literally. When a father takes off his shirt to do skin-to-skin with the newborn. When he learns to read the baby’s hunger cues. When his amygdala begins to change — and neuroscience confirms that it does, when men engage in primary caregiving — he becomes more attuned. To the baby. And to his partner.
“I see my husband holding the baby and I’m melting,” Tema said, laughing softly. And there it is — desire, tenderness, erotic aliveness — not despite the baby, but through the relational field that forms around the baby when both parents are present.
The path back to sexuality postpartum, in Tema’s model, is not a pelvic floor exercise or a six-week clearance. It is the restoration of felt safety. Of being held. Of watching your partner show up. Of having the mental load shared. Of being seen as a whole person, not just a feeding source.
Somatic Practice: Returning to the Body After Birth
For postpartum women — and for anyone who has felt disconnected from their body after a significant physical experience.
Intention: To gently reclaim a felt sense of inhabiting your own body — particularly the belly, the womb space, the hips — as yours again.
Setup: Lie on your back or sit comfortably. You may wish to have warm hands — rub them together for thirty seconds before beginning. Give yourself five to ten minutes of quiet – yielding to the support of the Earth, gravity, your own weight, to what is present.
The Practice: Begin at the belly. Place both hands flat on your lower abdomen, just below the navel. Feel the rise and fall of your breath beneath your palms. Notice your body’s sensations and feelings.
Now, very slowly, begin to make small circular movements with your hands — clockwise, if that feels right. Not massaging deeply, just tracing. Like you are drawing your own attention back to this place that has been through so much.
Breathe into your hands. If emotion arises, that is welcome. If nothing arises, that is equally welcome.
Slowly move your hands to rest on your hip bones – resting, allowing, receiving…. Then to your inner thighs, just resting, allowing, receiving…. Then back to the belly – for as long or as short as feels right for you… . Follow whatever draws you.
As you hold each place, you might whisper — aloud or inwardly — something like: Thank you. I’m here. You’re safe.
Integration: When you feel complete, take three slow breaths and let your hands rest at your sides. Take three more. Notice what, if anything, has shifted. Even a subtle shift is significant.
Remembering Who We Are
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Tema to compare her first birth experiences — those disempowering, frightening passages at sixteen and twenty-two — to her most recent ones.
Her last three births were with home birth midwives. By then, she was already deep in her birth work journey. And what she described was not simply a better birth experience. It was a different kind of selfhood.
“The most important part of that process was remembering my autonomy, my self-agency, my sovereignty, and seeing how the midwives really respected me and saw me. That was really transformative.”
And then she said something that I think is the heart of everything she does:
“That’s what I want for anybody who I get to support — that they really remember who they are. Who we are in our essence. In our natural blueprint.”
This is the through-line. From the sixteen-year-old who walked away from her first birth feeling like she didn’t know what she was doing. To the woman who now walks alongside other women in their most liminal hours. The entire arc is a remembering. A reclamation. A return.
And it is not incidental that this remembering happens in and through the body. In the pelvis. In the held breath and the released breath. In the moment when someone asks what is happening for you right now? and actually waits for the answer.
Soma — the Greek word for body — is where our stories live. And Tema Mercado has devoted her life to helping those stories be witnessed, honored, and when possible, transformed.
I am so grateful for the conversation Tema and I were able to share. If her work has touched something in you — whether you are pregnant, postpartum, a birth worker yourself, or simply someone who has ever felt disconnected from your body’s own knowing — I invite you to listen to the full episode. There is so much more in our conversation than I could hold in these pages.
You can find Tema and the beautiful work of La Matriz Birth at lamatricebirth.com.
And if this conversation has stirred something in you around your own somatic journey — around the places in your body that hold old stories, around the return to your own felt sense of wholeness — there are more episodes on Somatic Sexual Healing to explore – or to go deeper, self-paced courses as well. I am here. This is the work I love most.
With warmth and reverence, Rahi