Reconnecting With Your Body After Having a Baby

There is almost nowhere to go for honest, grounded guidance on sexuality during and after pregnancy. You ask people and they do not know where to get informed. It is just a blank. And silence carries its own message.

What the silence does

I think it creates a kind of desexualisation. Suddenly you become a mother and the culture does not know where to put you. Your partner might look at you differently. There is a Madonna complex, where it becomes: you are the mother of my children, therefore I can no longer see you as a sexual being. And for the woman going through that, wondering where is the space for me to express this part of myself, that can be really disorienting.

When desire becomes quiet

After birth, the body is in a different state entirely. Hormonal shifts affect lubrication and the general readiness for sex. The pelvic floor goes through a tremendous amount during labour and delivery. Some people experience pain during penetration in the months that follow. Some experience numbness where sensation used to be. When we bypass it, tell the system it does not matter, the system contracts. It holds. It becomes more numb. When we do not try to resensitise, using intention, touch, and breath to indicate to the system that the genitals no longer need to hold pain, we can turn pain into pleasure. We can turn numbness into pleasure.

Rebuilding the pelvic floor

After pregnancy, a lot of people do Kegel exercises, squeezing, squeezing. But orgasm happens from a place of relaxation, not contraction. A lot of people end up with hypertension in the pelvic floor from squeezing too much in one direction. The shift is to push into your pleasure, not squeeze into it. When you push, you increase engorgement. You bring blood flow. And blood flow is what brings lubrication, which sweats into the structures, and it carries the nitric oxide that connects to the nerve endings, which is what allows pleasure to be felt and communicated back to the brain.

When you do your pelvic floor training with your breath, everything starts moving. Voice training, breath work, anything connected to the vagus nerve also communicates to the pelvic floor. You are working with the sexual system even when you are not doing anything explicitly sexual. The body responds to this. It keeps the system active.

Starting from where you are

Trauma and tension are stored patterns. Any embodiment practice done with intention helps to release them. I do a small abdominal massage before sleep. It releases what has accumulated through the day. You can do it daily. The body responds to continuity. Each time you return, you are building a relationship with a part of yourself that needs attention.