Hello everyone and welcome to the Sex, Love and SuperPowers podcast show. I am your host Tatiana Berindei and today I am really happy to have with me my dear friend Chaya Leia Aronson. We’re going to be talking about sex and motherhood as a spiritual journey. Before we launch into that conversation, I want to tell you a little bit about Chaya. I’m going to read you her bio and then I’m just going to tell you what I know of her as a beautiful human being.
Chaya Leia Aronson is committed to the healing of the planet one womb at a time. She embodies her commitment through her private bodywork, health, and nutritional coaching and spiritual and emotional counseling with women in North Hampton, Massachusetts. The main forms of bodywork she practices to support pelvic health and embodiment are the Arvigo Techniques of Maya Abdominal Therapy and holistic pelvic care, both of which are informed by her degree in nursing. Another great passion of Chaya’s is to facilitate transformational healing and empowerment through the practice of tribal belly dance. Lastly and maybe most importantly, Chaya transforms the planet through conscious mothering of a young developing son, Birch, who is a wonderful, wonderful human being and I think a great testament to Chaya’s brilliant mothering skills.
Yeah, I’m just so pleased and honored to have you with us today, Chaya. You have such a dear place in my heart and we’ve grown and cultivated and deepened our friendship as our children have grown and gotten to know each other more. They just love each other so much and I love you so much. I’m just really happy to have you on the show today.
Thank you so much. I love you and Sunna and Daniel so much too.
Yeah.
We have some good family funny moments together.
Before we go into this, I’m so excited to have this conversation with you today. It feels really important and really relevant about sex and motherhood as a spiritual journey. Before we dive into that, I would just love to hear what are your superpowers?
I think all mothers have superpowers.
My superpowers. Well, one is certainly mothering. I think all mothers have superpowers and that is mothering. I think I’m great at listening to women, asking poignant questions to help them find what they want and start to slowly, intentionally, and lovingly cultivate the pathway to getting that.
Beautiful. Tell us a little bit about your work and how you came to be doing this work with women? It’s really valuable work. If you don’t know anything Maya Abdominal massage therapy, I would really recommend checking it out. It’s powerful work. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s been a really powerful path for me. As you mentioned, I am also a registered nurse. When I was in nursing school, I developed a condition called interstitial cystitis, which it’s a bladder condition. It’s basically an inflamed bladder. So for anyone who’s ever had a bladder infection or a urinary tract infection, it feels like that but there’s no bacteria or known cause for it so there’s really no treatment. So it just feels like a bladder infection but there’s no real pathway to healing and most doctors will tell you that it’s a life condition. In fact, two people who Jack Kevorkian assisted in suicide had that condition. I was in excruciating pelvic pain. Sex was painful. I wasn’t able to have sex for quite a long time. I woke up to pee many times every night so I wasn’t sleeping. I was in pelvic pain pretty constantly. I was moving through nursing school like that.
Someone suggested that I try Maya Abdominal massage. I had done a lot of things dietarily and herbally and spiritually that got me to a place of feeling like the condition was manageable, but sex was still irritating and I still suffered from intermittent pain and discomfort. I began my pathway with Maya Abdominal massage by attending a weekend-long self-care class. When I was there the first evening, I just knew in all of my cells that that was going to be the thing that tipped me over the edge of feeling the way I wanted to feel in my body again. That ultimately became true. I have no symptoms of interstitial cystitis anymore. I had a baby and only had to get up once at night to pee through my entire pregnancy. I have lots of sex and lots of pleasure with no discomfort at this point in my life.
That was my pathway to discovering the work. I work with a variety of different conditions around menstruation, around pelvic health, pelvic pain, urinary incontinence, endometriosis, chronic digestive complaints. It’s rare to meet someone who has painful menstrual cycles but their digestion is absolutely perfect. Everything that’s in the abdomen tends to be related. Usually, there’s relationships between a variety of different symptoms and conditions that women struggle with.
There’s a lot of shame associated with most of these conditions. I mean there’s a lot of shame associated with the womb, with our yonis, with that part of our body in general. So I know that that’s something you work with women with a lot, right?
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean we can never work with the physical condition without also talking about the emotions and feelings, one of which is often shaming. It’s easy and comfortable to say, “Oh, I have a cold. I have a head cold. My nose is sniffly.” There’s no shame in that, but HPV is just as common as a common cold, yet to come out and say, “I have warts on my vagina.” That’s, whoa, there is so much shame in that. I’ve been really working to decouple the shame from the physical experience because it’s so common and because releasing that shame, I think, is the pathway to embracing our pleasure.
Totally. Can you talk a little bit about that in terms of … We’re talking today about sex and motherhood as a spiritual journey. Can you talk a little bit about how that’s played out in your own experience and how you’ve seen that in clients through that journey of the relationship to sexually, the relationship to shame, both before and then after becoming a mother?
Wow. That’s a big question.
Yeah. I know.
No, to break it down into a bunch of tiny little pieces. My relationship to sexually before becoming a mother and after becoming a mother. Well, I think the first thing to say is that sexually and mothering separately are each their own spiritual paths. It’s funny because motherhood is often taken out of spiritual. Like you can’t bring a child to a yoga class. You got to keep them quiet in church and all these different places. Really, the spiritual path is meeting … My vision of what a spiritual path really is is meeting adversity and moving through it with vulnerability and grace. What are mothers doing every moment of every day but that? Just mothering by itself is its own spiritual path in that place.
Beautifully said.
Sexually is like, what are our desires? What are our desires and how do we want to get there? The yoni is a canal, so there’s like this pathway. The yoni is like a pathway to what is our pleasure? What are our desires and how do we want to manifest those? I really believe that connecting with our pleasure and our sensuality is this pathway to manifesting desires that aren’t specifically connected to our sexually perse.
Totally. Total agreement with you on that one for sure.
The initial response, we hope, is just pure love.
Right. Then we take spiritually out of mothering and then we take sexuality out of mothering and we start to feel lost as women. What happens when we become a mother? First, I think we become a mother the moment we get pregnant, even before we know that we’re becoming a mother yet. Then we prepare for this journey of birthing. Regardless of how we birth, maybe we have a vaginal birth, maybe we have a cesarean, either way, the initial response to giving birth … Well, the initial response, we hope, is just pure love. Then it’s profound healing and all these things we don’t talk about like depression, like incontinence, like pelvic pain, like we can’t have orgasms anymore. This is not what happens all of the time, but these are all common things that happen to women. Then we go through this healing process where we are inherently disconnected from our sexuality. We’re focusing so deeply on this other being who really needs us all of the time and completely letting go of our own needs and desires.
The question of how these spiritual paths of mothering and sacrificing ourselves for another, then how can we also meet our own selves and our own desires and our own passions? Which in the sacrifice of motherhood, we inherently shame ourselves for even wanting that or feeling those desires in those moments because we’ve just brought to life this being who needs us all the time. First, it becomes this question of, can I want my own passion and feel like that’s okay?
Yeah. Then there are all of the physical changes that we go through too on top of it. I mean I remember from myself when I was pregnant, I felt like a goddess. I had this big beautiful belly and was just really in this full of life and full and gorgeous. Then as soon as the baby was born, I had this flabby sack hanging off of my front and no longer felt beautiful or gorgeous in any way, shape or form, and I had gained all this weight and I wasn’t getting any sleep. There’s just like so much, so many layers of things and overnight. Then all of a sudden, there’s this little person that needs me all the time. It’s a lot and I think we don’t talk about it enough, about the reality of motherhood. We sort of gloss it over as this shiny package of you want the car and the picket fence and the two and a half kids. There’s no conversation about what that actually entails on an emotional and a spiritual level.
Yeah. That’s true.
We have to take a quick break, but when we get back, we’re going to dive into this topic a little bit deeper because Chaya has just such a fascinating perspective on it and she and I share a lot of juice around this topic. Before we go to break though, Chaya, will you tell everybody where they can find out more about your work?
Yeah, absolutely. I’m at yoursacredpelvis.com.
Beautiful. When we get back, we’re going to dive deeper into this topic of sex and motherhood as a spiritual journey and hear a little bit more about Chaya’s own story. Stay tuned.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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