Orgasmic Birth, Miscarriage & Pelvic Healing: How Trauma Becomes Pleasure in the Body

 Welcome to your Body. Remembers pleasure. I'm your host, Rahi Chun. This podcast is devoted to sexual embodiment, intimacy, and the body's innate capacity to heal, feel, and remember pleasure. If something here resonates with you, you're welcome to explore more writings and resources@rahichun.com. And now let's begin.

Today's guest, Katie Spataro, somatic sex educator, holistic pelvic care provider, and core faculty at the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education shares the raw truth about how her body. Initiated her into the sacred work she holds space for today through a miscarriage that required spontaneous ritual, an orgasmic birth that changed the entire trajectory of her life, and nearly a decade of holding space for survivors of childhood sexual trauma.

Katie reveals the profound interconnection between birth, sexuality, grief. And pleasure. If you've ever wondered how our deepest wounds can become portals to our most transformative healing, or about the beauty and therapeutic value of prostate and anal work, this conversation will take you there.

. We're in for a treat today. I have Katie she, her who is a somatic sex educator. A holistic pelvic care provider and full spectrum doula informed by the intersections of birth work and sex work to support healing of the personal and the collective cultural bodies.

Katie blends various modalities including somatic practice. Body work, skilled coaching in her private practice and facilitates a wide range of community classes both online and in person, covering sexual and reproductive wellness, embodied consent. Grief and pregnancy and birth and erotic education through a trauma informed and healing centered lens.

She currently serves as core faculty at the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education and as adjunct faculty at Antioch University Sex Therapy Certificate Program. Katie, thanks so much for joining us today. Yeah, what a pleasure. Thanks for having yes. Yes. Thank you. I also wanted to say that Katie, over the last 25 years has also studied and practiced various forms of yoga and dance embodiment exploring ways in which the body is a channel for the divine, including deep dives into the ecstatic realms through breath work, plant medicines, and erotic practice.

And I had the great pleasure of hanging out with Katie and other colleagues. Earlier this summer exploring the intersection of all of those things. So it was really cool. Katie there's so many, there's so many channels or kind of rabbit holes we can explore. But I wanted to start off by asking, as I often do with guests what have been the pivotal events in your life that have informed.

The sacred work that you hold today that you hold space for because it's a very unique calling and it's a very sacred and privileged calling. And I'd love for our audience to know, get to know you a little bit through those pivotal experiences. Thanks for that question, Rahi.

I love that question too because I definitely have been somebody who have, has pivoted into where I am now. I wasn't one of those kids on the playground that all my friends were asking sex questions to, or, I didn't always imagine being a birth worker. In fact, I had a whole previous lifetime of a career.

In the field of engineering. And when I look back on that time to where I am now I think about how important those pivotal moments were to put me on a different track. And I think there were many, but one of the first ones was my first experience with pregnancy which resulted in a miscarriage or a loss and how profound that experience was.

I now know as a birth worker and as somebody who works. Tending the womb space, how common pregnancy losses are, but at the time I had no idea. And I had no idea that it would be such an in initiatory experience in my body. My body went through a labor, my, that was at that time completely unsupported and my partner at the time also had no idea how to support me.

And I found myself doing spontaneous ritual afterwards. Creating the rituals and the support that I needed that was real, a real absence to wow. And then I, a couple years later, got pregnant again. And had. Unexpectedly and incredibly orgasmic birth. Wow. In fact, I was telling, dear friends of mine right after giving birth, I said, I don't know what happened to me in that experience.

I dunno what happened to my sexual body, but I know that I will never be the same. And that sort of sent me very much into a deep dive to finding teachers and lovers and experiences that helped me integrate both the miscarriage. This orgasmic birth in my body, because at that point I didn't have any scaffolding or infrastructure to integrate it.

Wow. That's really wild. So did both of those events happen while you were in your previous career as an engineer? They did. So I'm really curious help us understand how, now you're such a prolific teacher of this work. At that time when you had the miscarriage and your orgasmic birth, what was your, like sexual EQ compared to could you make.

Because it sounds like the intuition was there. You found rituals, like organically to grieve your experience. Did you even understand what was happening with either experience? Yeah, good question. I remember, I'm thinking about when we were together a couple months ago, Rahi, and we were all sharing some of our stories of how we got into this field of somatic sex education and sexological body work.

And a common thread for all of us is that we had found masturbation early like that, right? We were early on in life, and this is true for me, connected to my sexual body, probably even in ways that were about. Surviving challenging situations, and and finding power and pleasure even as a young person.

So I had that connection early on to my sexual body. And I grew up Catholic. In a very, I went into the engineering world in a very male dominated space. Really was immersed in heteropatriarchy for most of my life. And so I really honestly didn't know that there was much outside of those experiences.

And so when. I often say like, when my body literally got blown out from these birthing, these pregnancy and birthing experiences, I did have this foundation of like connection to my sexual body that feels not only a through line through my life, but. When I my mom's now passed, in conversations that I had with her, it was really important for her.

She would tell me to be raising a daughter that didn't experience the same kind of sexual shame that she experienced, right? And there are ways in which I realized that I was also brought up to be connected to my body in that way. Wow, that's so beautiful. Especially in light of what you shared earlier about being raised in a Catholic home.

Like you had a very progressive, I was raised Catholic as well. You I mean like hats off to your mom for being so cool. Yeah. And. And then, and to you to, grow up in a home where you could be so embodied and explore your sexuality, despite the religious, overtones.

So Katie, it sounds like both those experiences were really earth just earth shattering, shattering. Yeah. Yeah. And change like your, so how did the orgasmic birth, it sounds like you wanted to know everything about what was going on what you, your pelvis had experienced.

How did that lead you, into this field and into this work? Was it a gradual thing? Was it a dramatic pivot? Like how did that unfold? It was fairly gradual in that, birth as a birth, I became a birth worker soon after that and then supported hundreds of people and families through this transitional experience.

So I, I really got to dive deep into what is this experience of. Pregnancy and birth and loss and grief and pleasure that is centered around our sexual bodies. In my opinion, we can't bring, we can't separate birth and sex out, as much as we can try. They're integrally intertwined.

And birth is a event that often does have this very significant, pivotal moment, but can take years in the integration. And the lineage of light trained in the postpartum period is three years. Not because that's, our bodies are healing, but our psyches and our spiritual development is all happening over several years to help integrate the new physically and spiritually, people that we are after these big.

Profound experiences, and that's true whether or not there's a live baby at the end. So that's really true in my opinion, from people who experience pregnancies that end in loss. It's so fascinating that it was three years after the first pregnancy, right? That three year mark is when you gave birth to your son.

It's true. And then probably about three years after that I really found the work that I had been so passionate about. Was suddenly like I just, I couldn't bring myself to get out of bed for Wow. And I just knew that I was not gonna be a person that would, could just drag myself into, out of bed to a job that I didn't feel passionately about.

And so I took a period of time to really. Put that career and that part of myself to rest literally to come to a death of that part of myself which is what becoming a parent often does for us as a gift and to, do some inquiry about what came next. And in that process of inquiry of which I went through a very supported process with teachers and again, lovers and guidance.

And I found myself at the end of that period of transition training to be a birth worker. And I would never in a million years had maybe put myself there, but I just trusted because I had gone through this process. And as I started working with bodies and birth, I was doing a lot of healing of my own pelvis from my own birth injury experiences.

And that sort of guided me into the realm of finding people that could support releasing the trauma that was in my own pelvis. From there following some breadcrumbs into the incredible teachers in this counter normative realm of sexological body work, which I, I think is some of the most potent healing work of our time.

Yeah. I I so agree. I feel like the last few guests I've interviewed they really spoke about rewilding the body as activism. And it really is, given how domesticated and the pressure we feel from the systemic patriarchy and, racism and so forth.

Just all of the spoken and unspoken. I feel like the unspoken is almost more dangerous 'cause we're at the effect, of these systems without really realizing it. And how, like something like your orgasmic birth, it feel, it felt it sounds like it rebirthed something in you.

So before we go forward I wanna ask Katie knowing what you know now did you intend on an orgasmic birth? Did it just happen spontaneously? Looking back on that experience, what were the elements that I, that you feel like, informed or allowed for that to happen? Okay. Great question.

And I would say I'm just chuckling a bit because I think this is a bit of a controversial topic, but no, I was not planning for an orgasmic birth. I didn't even really know what that was. But I was throughout a, I had a incredibly powerful and pleasure filled pregnancy. And not everyone experiences that, like some people have a real challenge during pregnancy.

They don't feel great in their bodies the whole time. I was just very lucky in a lot of ways to be in a place in life and to have, the kind of pregnancy that I just was like radiating. Wow. I just felt I get to be big and beautiful in my body and I'm loving it. And I'm sure the cocktail of hormones, which is similar to the cocktail of hormones we experience in sex and in orgasm that was pulsating through my body, throughout pregnancy, was really priming it, in my opinion.

Wow. For this orgasmic birth experience. I didn't know I wasn't cultivating that, but and the thing of why I was chuckling while he is at. Becoming a birth worker and attending births that happened through cesarean delivery in hospital settings, or in candlelight bedrooms or medicated births in hospitals.

I really got to see birth in, in so many different settings. And I would say what I was studying in that energetic field of labor and delivery of birth is that birth is inherently orgasmic, always. It's like the way that life comes through our bodies is orgasmic, it's like an orgasm of the universe.

It's some, there's often like a. There's a, there's a crescendo in it, even when it's a really gentle and quiet space, and sometimes it's a big, and a lot is happening in that space. I believe that birth is an orgasm to begin with. And how we support people to be in that orgasm of birth is really quite variable, right?

Lots of people come out of a birth experience and feel traumatized by it. Feel harmed by the experience and that relates, in my opinion, to the systems that are, have erased a lot of the indigenous knowledge of how to be with birth and how to integrate those experience afterwards. And a lot of that is changing.

Yeah, a lot of that is changing. Thank goodness. But, because, my, my best friend who you've gotten to know, is also a gy, is a gynecologist. It's changing. And yet the kind of structures that were set in place by the field of gynecology were really developed by men.

Black women. Black women, black women, at least in this country. I think it just seems like a lot of the practices were designed for their comfort and not from the perspective of the baby or the mother. Yeah, there's a whole just tragic history really to what we know of as current, birth care and women's health and womb health for, women and, trans and non-binary people with uterus. Yeah. I wanna, I wanted to ask you, so first I wanted to get a sense of those pivotal events, but I also wanted to ask about your space holding because, and the experiences that we've shared, at Salt Spring in our lab I feel like you channel. You. It's like you, your consciousness is open for what wants to come through, and it feels like you're attuning for how the energy wants to meet itself. And so I'm, I wanna get a sense of like your path after the orgasmic birth you sought out teachers, you just really, it sounds like, did a really beautiful.

Dive into all of these wisdoms, what's been pivotal in informing how you hold space for your clients, whether it's for sexological body work, or pelvic, womb, rejuvenation or even the classes you teach. The question is making me pause and really think about some of the teachings that I've received around space holding and supporting others.

And I've been really fortunate to study with just some, just incredibly skilled. People and teachers, and I feel like I'm a bit of a junkie when it comes to finding skilled. Like I just wanna be in their presence and to track like how are they holding space and what are they doing or often not doing.

And I think that some of the greatest teachings I've had in that space, I'm gonna bring it back to birth work because it feels like my origin story. Is watching midwives who really skilled midwives, who know when to step in and guide and support and when to step back and to let the, and to trust the body and the body's wisdom as it cycles through and experience.

And there's such a, not everyone, I would watch this incredible skill and this incredible power. Sometimes birth workers have to know, and it, there's a lot of intuition, but there's a lot of training and a lot of the older practices of birth work came through like apprenticeships, right?

So we got to learn by being in the room with skilled people and watching them. I often, 'cause now I'm a teacher of sexological body work, I have had students say, wow, I just really wanna just be present in a session to see how people are doing. It's one of the reasons why when we teach, we do a lot of demos.

So what we're teaching is less about the skill or the technique and as much about the presence, what we're doing, and sometimes what we're not doing. And I think one of the. I don't know where, I think probably from birth work or what, where did I really get this sense is like I'm often not the one in control.

It's like this is not about me. I'm really trusting and holding that. My clients' bodies are the teachers in the space and how, and like a reverence for how I show up to meeting their bodies and what their bodies have to share. What they're wanting or needing or desiring and what they're ready.

Oh, I love, yeah. Yeah. I can totally see how birth work facilitating it, witnessing it attuning to it has been such a tremendous teacher for you to know. It sounds to me like what you're sharing is you're really in service to the wisdom of the body. And knowing when to get out of its way and when to support it so that the, that innate wisdom can come through.

Yeah. Beautiful. Wow. So beautiful. Okay, so I wanna dive into prostates. Because like part of the inspiration, I've been a fan of you and your work for years. When we were at Salt springing you had shared this exchange, the multi-year exchange you've had with with a colleague and your interest in.

Moving into prostate work and how for so long you've held exquisite space for pelvises, but that this is actually it's leaning into new territory. So I wanted to ask you like, the inspiration for you in working with men and trans women and prostates. Yeah, you were there in my aha moment that that sort of arose for me.

So yeah, I have been doing fa internal pelvic fascial release work for a decade with people with uterus and, not that people with prostates haven't, do, haven't, or don't need that work, it's just when they have come to my, contacted me for session work, I've usually just refer them on to one of my many amazing colleagues that are here.

I'm in community with, who specialize in working with men and working with prostates. And it's only been fairly recently that, I think maybe it's just like after being in practice as a hands-on practitioner for 10 years and seeing this, like what I've been developing skill wise with the fascial release work in inside the pelvis and where we're at in our world.

Like that sort of activation of the world right now. I started to put together the need for more prostate fascial work, internal prostate fascial work. Really as activism of for our time. And something lit up for me in that space of there's a huge need for this. Huge on lots of levels.

Partially as rahi 'cause you work in this way too. When we work in the pelvis in a slow way, meeting the body and meeting the tissues and supporting whatever release or unwinding once or needs to happen. There's often a intense downregulation to that. But there, there might be activation in the process, but oftentimes people are leaving in up with it.

In a state of presence that can be really challenging to access in other ways and in other spaces. And I do believe, like when we occupy our pelvises and move from our pelvises, we show up in the world and in community and d in a whole different way. Whole different way. You've.

Oh, sorry. No, go for it. There, there are a couple of, real things you shared that I wanted to underscore one. The root is our response to our sense of safety, security, and given the times we're in, there, I think there's a lot of clenching happening, in, in our world, in our country, and for example, the trans community, for communities that are feeling threatened and it's life and death threats right now, for prostate owning bodies, pelvic floor should be like a relaxed sling.

And when those muscles get tight, it presses up and it can really impede the life force flow in the prosthetic area. So that's huge. I feel like it's very exciting that, you've been so familiar with pelvises and releasing fascia, and this is, it feels to me like an, it's an extension, but at the same time, like a new terrain, but like an extension.

Yeah, and you mentioned before, and I wanna bring it in, that I've really been training hands-on in that, in prostate work with a colleague of mine that he and I have been exchanging, have had a pelvic fascial body work exchange for. The last 10 years. So it's a really interesting way to be in colleagueship but also to learn and to be, and to relate to another person's body, which is to exchange this level of present attuned, slow, gentle.

Internal pelvic, fascial touch. And so I have been and he's an amazing teacher and also really knows how to teach from the table, so to speak, right? So to guide and to teach someone as their hands are on him. And so I've been really training in this prostate work. I haven't just quite been ready to offer it yet.

Yeah, it's an amazing container that you've shared for over 10 years. That's just mind blowing to me that, as our bodies evolve, you've been able to track that evolution with each other. For the last 10 years, and I'm sure like, emotional challenges, personal professional challenges, like it shows up in the pelvis, and especially around the anal sphincter.

And it feels to me, Katie, like you've been in, in apprenticeship or preparing for this for a decade. Yeah, I would say so. And then I'm in this place now of if I'm going to offer that work. What, I don't see a lot of models out there in the world and in the medical community for this type of prostate work.

And so I can feel how important it is and how important it is to have consult and referrals. I can imagine the need for a urologist and a visceral manipulation, both somebody I can consult with as well as refer back and forth because none of those folks, again, as we know Rahi and why our work is so important, people aren't necessarily touching genitals.

Or touching inside the pelvis in ways that are attuned and present with. The physical, emotional, spiritual, aspects of our pelvises, but also that can incorporate pleasure into those spaces and pleasure as part of the healing process and not be a afraid of things like arousal if that were to come up in a session, right?

Like that. We know how to hold such a wide space for people in their experiences. Yeah. And I feel like what you're touching upon is speaks to the medicine that allowing, even inviting pleasure in these deep places of our pelvis, the core of our being, inviting and allowing pleasure is such a liberating and rewilding experience.

That is the medicine that we all need, right? Because we're living in a society that's anti pleasure. And we hold that, all of us in our bodies in one way or another. Katie, when you speak to the, it's not just physical, it's emotional, it's spiritual, when parts, and we know that.

Tissues, hold emotion, that holds a memory. And when it's recognized by a present touch, what can be released and metabolized is really profound. It could be something as simple as. Your mother taking your temperature when you had a cold and sticking a thermometer in your butt, when you're five and it didn't feel good to, unwanted penetration and just the acknowledgement of that tissue that's been guarded or afraid or hurt for years or decades.

Just acknowledging that by touching it with your presence can be profoundly life changing. Yeah. I just am excited that. Potentially prostate fascial release work could be beneficial for anyone who feels like deeper connection to this part of their body. Holding and releasing tension, holding and releasing trauma, accessing more pleasure, right?

That's true maybe for anyone with or without a prostate. Yes. Yes. Okay. So I wanted, I wanna zoom in a little bit about this very unique partnership container, body work exchange you've had with, our dear colleague. How did this come about? Did you imagine when you started, like over 10 years later, it you'd still be, holding space for anal massage for each other, and does it, is it pretty much focused on anal like a, an anal massage exchange, or does it go beyond that?

I wanna name my colleague Charlie Dickman because he's an amazing teacher and also somatic sex educator. It, I don't think we knew what we were up to when we got started. And so it has been emergent over the many years and it has sometimes taken on some different rounds. Like I had scar tissue from my birthing experience that I asked him to do some work on.

And, there's times where we have maybe deviated from, anal touch work, but for the most part, we have been exchanging anal fascial release work. And at this point, it's we joke that, like my partner will be like, I think you need to go see Charlie. It's like how important for our wellbeing and our nervous system it is to continue to receive that kind of touch from each other.

Wow. And it's not that we can't do that touch on our own bodies. We can we all have the ability to, to do that. Same kind of loving slow touch and it can be so much, easier to have to be, to do a give and receive practice. And one more thing I wanna say, rahi on that, is that the reason why this works so well is Charlie and I have also really studied and practiced.

One of the things that I teach is the wheel of consent and the wheel of consent. Practices of giving, of pulling apart, giving and receiving so we can really get clear about what those roles are and who it's for and how we show up clearly in those roles. And because Charlie and I have studied and practiced in that in the wheel we can really.

We take turns getting on the table and giving and receiving with each other. And we do those in separate sessions. So we don't have one time together where we take turns giving and receiving. We have one session on one day where one of us is in receiving and then we schedule a whole separate session on another day when another person's in receiving.

And that really also gets us, allows us to show up fully. As in the role of receiving, which I think is essential for us practitioners. Yeah, it's essential for us practitioners. Yeah. I love that the container is it's set up so that you're not needing to switch your energy into space holding after you've received or, that's really great. For listeners, Katie, I really wanna encourage people to find a friend, a platonic friend, to create a container for this kind of exchange. It doesn't have to be for anal massage, it can just be playing the three minute game, some sort of exchange of touch because, we're really conditioned depending on.

What your situation is to not under, not, we're not practiced in attuning to what it is we really want or give voice to it. And I would say the other factor in there is I think there's a lot of people pleasing that we're conditioned to, to, succumb to. And so I really wanna encourage people to find a practice buddy.

It could be a platonic friend to do some sort of one way. Touch exchange around. And Katie, I wanted to ask you like the elements that have really made it work for you and Charlie, it sounds like you're both very astute in consent and boundary work. You're both very skilled, as we, because you both do this professionally.

Are there any other elements that people should consider if entering into this kind of like platonic one way touch container? I love a time a timer. Yes. I think a timer is an essential part of practices like this. Because it means we're gonna agree on when we start and when we stop and what we're doing in the time period of this.

Agreed upon time container. Charlie and I, we commit to a two hour session when we show up with each other and we also hold each other to that session, right? So we're, as a practitioner, I get a kind of a stickler about holding the time container as part of what I'm holding for my clients when I'm in the role of giving.

So I love a timer. I think that there sometimes can be, and Charlie and I have had to do this sometimes when things have come up in the practice and the exchange where we needed to maybe have a check-in or do some like tending to os or Oops in that space, right? Maybe we had to like, take time outside of.

A body work exchange to tend to things that came up in that session. And, I'd say having the opportunity to do that a little bit over the several years also allowed us to deepen into a lot of trust with each other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really great. So I wanna ask you, 'cause when I was looking at the community classes that you offer I mean there's a whole beautiful range of subjects practices for pelvic self-care anatomy mapping through a pleasure centered lens.

Desires and boundaries. Pleasure mapping, menopause. I just got the sense, and also from knowing you, the important role community plays, like learning in community. What do you, what have you noticed? What's the kind of ma, what's the magic that can happen in a community space of learning about sexual embodiment that's different than one-on-one?

Because I think each offers its magic. It's true. And the majority of my work has been one-on-one or private session work, whether it's with individuals or I off. I also work with couples or people in relationship structures, but the majority of my work has been private session and it's many years ago I also, I wanted to bring what.

People are accessing in private sessions into more community spaces because for lots of reasons, one, it makes it more financially accessible to some people. Can't afford a private session. And two, what it does, and I think this is so important when it comes to sex and intimacy, is that it brings.

Multiple experiences into the space is truth, right? So sometimes we can get so binary in our thinking of what's right or what's wrong, or how it should be or how it shouldn't be, particularly around our sexual bodies. And I love it in a group space when somebody shares, oh, this is my experience and somebody else shares my experiences very different than that.

And I feel like there's so much power that can happen. Even in a group case of I'm, maybe presenting about anatomy and somebody chimes in and says something like this, their experience is different. I think there's so much for us to learn and often unlearn in a more communal, collective setting when it relates to our sexual bodies.

I really value that. I learn more that way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah and it seems like there's a lot of permission giving in a group space when someone shares an experience that's actually shared by many others, but the other folks may be shy to share about it. It normalizes, or, takes the stigma away from something that some someone may feel some shame about or, unsure about, outing themselves around.

Absolutely. That is such a big piece of com, of collective and community work as well, where somebody might be really challenged to bring into the space something that they're experiencing in their bodies. Sexual shame. It runs deep. It sometimes embedded so deep in our bodies, in our lineages.

Like I often say, I had to. Excavate parts of my sexual body, out of generations of, sexual shame. And then there's somebody sitting right next to you who just freely talks about, the question that you've been wanting to ask. And it's so liberating and, yeah. It's so beautiful.

It's so beautiful. Yeah. And when you talk about lineage, you look at the puritanical lineage of this country or like Catholicism, which again I grew up in and it, it is it's so many generations of collective shame that is in our, DNA Oh my gosh.

We grew up with the Virgin, right? Totally. It's totally it's pretty deep in there. It's so deep. It's so deep. Yeah. I wanted to ask you Katie, on your website, and we you had shared about this during our retreat that you offer a healing retreat for survivors.

And I think it's coming up like in January. Could you, one, I'm curious how did this container evolve? And what have you witnessed as the benefits of survivors coming together? What is the medicine in that? Yeah, I'm so glad you're asking about that. I just feel such a tenderness and a preciousness to that offering.

And it's something going on nine years. So I co-facilitate a retreat for survivors, specifically of survivors of child sexual trauma. And I didn't know when I got into private practice that would be the majority of experiences that my clients are coming with. It's so prevalent. It's so common and it's often not talked about.

So this retreat was birthed, I think in 2017. And at the, right before the height of the Me Too movement when so much was coming out and being revealed around the pervasiveness of sexual trauma. And even still when we were hearing about all of it none of it necessarily related to childhood sexual trauma.

Or even about incest. And there's a real reason for that in that even when we're talking about uncovering what's pervasive trauma around sex and our sexual bodies, it's still very taboo to talk about childhood sexual trauma. And so this retreat was born from a survivor who said, I wanna grieve, I want a grief ritual, and I want to be in community with others.

I want to know that as I'm doing some healing work and breaking this cycle of what is often. Generational cycles of sexual trauma that I'm not doing it alone. And she gathered several of us together to create an offering that not just created space for the grief work. Of healing for sex from sexual trauma, but also the embodiment practices and the joy tending and the resiliency tending, which is such a, now, eight years later, this retreat has really grown into being an offering that includes both grief and joy work.

The next retreat will be in January, 2026 in California. But we're offer, oftentimes they're around the Seattle area 'cause several of US Prep facilitators are here in the Seattle area. Ooh, that's so exciting. If people wanted to find out more about the retreat that's happening in California in January, they can go to your website.

They can go to my website and I don't know if you have show notes, but I can also give you the direct link. But from my website, you can find it. Survivors Healing Retreat. And that is at sacred womb services com. Katie's website is Sacred Womb Services.

All of the information about the retreat can be found there. Wow. I it's, I would be fascinated to see, I didn't realize it was going on, eight, nine years. I'd be so fascinated to see the evolution of the space holding and the container, and how profound, the link between pleasure and grief.

I was talking to someone recently about how, how important grief is and having the space to grieve and how interlinked pleasure and grief is. You, I think you mentioned it. Circling back to the experience of your pre or your first pregnancy and then your second orgasmic pregnancy, there's like grief and pleasure, like right there.

Yeah. I often think of each of them being a portal into the other for me, sometimes when I'm having. When I really need to express some grief, but I'm having some resistance or some difficulty accessing my grief, I often feel like if I'm attending to some Downregulated pleasure or upregulated pleasure, like really using pleasure as a portal for accessing that grief.

Maybe it's like a big orgasm and then a big cry comes because my body was in a place where it could actually open to feeling more. And when we feel more, right? To be able to access that deeper grief. And so I think that a lot of times our erotic practices can be. Grief tending practices.

Yes. And vice versa. Having done grief work around pregnancies and losses and birth and sexual trauma, I'm just gonna say that at some point, I'll never forget, one of the people in one of my retreats said we were, doing some like embodied expressions of grief and she said, wow, this is incredibly erotic.

And it was like, yes, once we start really working grief through our bodies, we can also see where breath sound movement, we can start getting into an orgasmic state with it. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't it fascinating that when you focus on sensations and feeling you can find pleasure in almost anything, but also, to your point gr both open up the kind of feeling state of the body.

Whether it's, pleasure opening up the capacity for grief, or feeling the grief so deeply that it leads to, deeper pleasures. Katie, as we're bringing this to a close, I just am so glad that you had such an orgasmic birth. Not only for your body and your consciousness, not only for what it must have healed intergenerationally.

But because it really put you on this path, to doing what you're doing now, which is really profound, that, you're doing what you're doing as a result of your body experiencing that orgasmic birth. It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. Yeah. Okay if people wanna find you again, Katie's website.

Is Sacred Womb Services, and as she shared you're in the Seattle area. But all of the community classes I noticed they, you offer them both in person and then one online, so people can be anywhere to tune in. It's my preference is to be in person with people, to be in bodies with each other, and it feels important to also offer things directly in my community. And I also teach at the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education. So this is for practitioners in training who are coming into the field of somatic sex education and sexological body work who. Get some training into both healing of their own bodies before moving into becoming practitioners for others.

Yeah. I feel like that's one of the, enormous gifts that a lot of students don't realize they're actually on. It's like by studying the work you do face and you have to hold space for, your what your body's gone through sexually and so much healing takes place, as a result that was not necessarily always intentional and just so beautiful.

Katie, you hold space for. Such exquisite energies to be unleashed into our world. I just wanna acknowledge that and thank you so much for who you are and everything you're doing and all that you're being. And yeah, it's a real pleasure to know you. Thanks Rahi. ...........how are the themes from this episode landing in your body right now?

If you're pregnant or intending to give birth, what are ways you can attune to and embody the orgasmic wisdom of your birthing process?

And if you are a prostate owner, what are the ways you can meet, feel and connect with the material awaiting you. Within this sacred portal, and for all listeners, how can befriending the deeper layers of your grief provide access to the deeper realms of your embodied pleasure?

 Thank you for listening to Your Body. Remembers Pleasure If this conversation supported you, the simple way to help this work reach more people is to leave a five star rating or a brief review. You'll also find more resources and teachings@rahichun.com. Until next time, take good care.