Let’s Talk About Feminine Power

Let’s talk about feminine power. How it has been both repressed and feared in childbirth and in sex. How women’s power has become commodified. How we have been taught to fear our power or strength. How we’ve been taught not to harness it, trust it, or let it guide us.

The first step to a life of true agency is to realize the power you have inside yourself. It is to realize what your strengths are. It is to become close friends with yourself, to take the journey to full embodiment, to realize you deserve it all.

You deserve the multilayered experience of having a body. You deserve to feel your life force, to feel the pleasure and strength that is hidden within every day.

Words are absolutely powerful tools that control the mind. Labor has been sold to us as painful, as too much to handle, as dangerous, as a problem.

Labor is power, an explosive power. It is the power of life. Labor is the power of your life force coming through you. The fact that this has been sold to us as a problem, as dangerous, and as pain is truly disempowering.

If the first thing we are told about birth is that it is painful, then immediately it becomes scary. Immediately it becomes something we are taught to fear. If the first thing we are told about birth is that we won’t be able to “handle it” or “manage it,” then already we are less than.

Women have been continuously told we are less than. Throughout history women have been told that we aren’t smart enough, strong enough, or brave enough. We aren’t enough.

I know it’s a radical idea, but what if birth is the same thing? What if birth is another instance in which we are being told that we are not enough, when in fact we are.

I am not talking about orgasmic birth in the sense of having a full climax orgasm when you are birthing your baby, but a birth where you are fully in touch with yourself, fully connected to the power within your body and life force.

Women are taught from an early age to be small. And birth is not small. When you are giving birth you have to take up space and demand the full attention of your care team. You have to use all your life force to bring your child into this world. This is the complete opposite of being small. So, birth has to be a full rebellion against the conditioning of being small, of being polite.

This is radical for many women. 

The revolution in birth is internal and has repercussions outside of the birth room. The revolution in birth is women demanding to be heard, to be seen, and to be well cared for. The revolution in birth is women identifying what their needs are and then demanding that those needs get met by their partner, medical team, and whomever is providing care.

The revolution in birth is AGENCY. It is women finding their voice, connecting with their bodies, and getting their needs met.

We have a history, a global history of women being neglected, dismissed, and controlled. And this history is embedded in childbirth.

When a woman’s body is viewed as less than or weaker than a man’s body, how could one possibly believe that it is capable of childbirth?

The misconception around birth is so wrong that it's hard to even state the level of lies we are being told.

It’s like being in a cult that shares ideas that sound true and make so much sense that you fully believe them. You live your life by them, until suddenly you realize:

“Holy hell, this was just some wild person’s idea of reality. It’s all been lies, so that I can be controlled and they can make money.”

I hate to be so radical with my words and ideas, but it truly is radical.

There seems to always be a caveat that people place around this conversation. I am not saying: 

That birth doesn’t require medical care. That some births aren’t high-risk. That things can’t get complicated. That all cesareans are unnecessary.

I’m not saying that at all.

I mean, in some ways the opposite is true. Birth always carries a level of risk; there is no way to have a baby without risk.

So, we must realize the starting point for women. We must recognize we are giving birth within a society that does not value women or the female body. It’s just that simple. That is the water we are swimming in. And in most cases it’s unconscious – even within ourselves. We may not realize how much we hold ourselves back with limiting beliefs about our capacity to birth.

Honestly, it sounds wild, but we have to create a new world. We have to take ownership of our bodies, our voices, and our needs. We must question society's narrative around birth. We have to double check whose stories we are listening to. Because there are A LOT of different experiences around birth, and there are MANY women all over the globe who enjoy giving birth, but these stories get labeled as the outliers, the flukes, the happy accidents. The narrative around birth must be controlled by someone different.

One of the most powerful acts a woman can complete is to birth her baby. Society has spent hundreds of years stripping women of their power. For a while society hesitated to interfere with birth, but it has become apparent that this, too, needed to be taken away from us. Placing birth outside of the home (away from family, friends, and community), often in the care of strangers who are men – and demanding that women give birth medicated while lying on their backs – put women in a compromising position that made birth both scary and painful.

I do not think that birth needs to be inherently painful or scary. I think these qualities have been embedded into birth because of the way the majority of our culture’s women have birthed.

There is risk. There is risk to life. 

We have spent the past one-hundred years trying to eliminate risk from birth, and it has not worked. Full stop.

We are not improving outcomes for low-risk women. It’s not happening. At all.

Birth is difficult; birth is transformative. This cannot be taken out of birth. It can’t be.