Your Body Remembers Pleasure
Your Body Remembers Pleasure — with Rahi Chun
What if your body already knows the way back to pleasure, intimacy, and wholeness? Your Body Remembers Pleasure is a podcast devoted to sexual embodiment, relational intimacy, and the body’s innate intelligence to heal, feel, and remember pleasure. Through intimate conversations with leading somatic therapists, sexologists, sexological bodyworkers, and holistic practitioners from around the world, we explore what actually supports embodied sexual awakening — not in theory, but through lived, hands-on experience. This is an invitation to listen beneath performance and technique…. to the organic wisdom of your body,
the truth carried in sensation, and the quiet intelligence of your erotic life force.
Explore more writings, courses, and resources at RahiChun.com.
Your Body Remembers Pleasure
Birth as a Rite of Remembering: Consent, Pelvic Trauma & Sexuality After Baby with Tema Mercado
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"Her rational brain said this is what happens at the border sometimes. Her body registered it as a sexual assault."
Explore this episode and deeper teachings on somatic sexual healing: https://rahichun.com/podcast/tema-mercado-birth-consent-sexuality/
Who this episode is for: Anyone navigating postpartum disconnection, birth trauma, or the quiet question of whether desire and a felt sense of self can return after everything the body has been through.
Tema Mercado is a Licensed Midwife in California, Partera Profesional Certificada in Mexico, and founder of La Matriz Birth in San Diego. A first-generation daughter of Purépecha and Yoreme lineage, mother of six, grandmother of two — her own births span the full spectrum from medicalized hospital settings to reverent home births. Before midwifery, she spent years as a sexual assault survivor advocate. When she entered birth work, she expected it to be different. It wasn't.
What she found in the delivery room — the same power dynamics, the same coercion, the same PTSD symptoms in mothers who were supposed to be celebrating — changed everything. Out of that recognition, she built a practice grounded in somatic consent, ancestral medicine, and the truth that sexuality doesn't disappear when motherhood begins.
In this conversation:
- Why the delivery room mirrors the power dynamics of a sexual assault investigation
- How somatic prenatal care metabolizes fear before it becomes armor in labor
- The woman who arrived saying "I have no trauma" — and what her pelvis revealed
- Why postpartum loss of desire is almost never about hormones
- How a father's newborn caregiving rewires his brain — and reopens intimacy
- Belly binding as ancestral somatic practice
- How being truly seen during birth transforms how a woman moves through the world
Timestamps:
- 00:08 — Tema's origin story
- 14:33 — Consent as somatic practice
- 22:58 — Ancestral medicine and belly binding
- 32:13 — The woman who "had no trauma"
- 46:18 — What actually brings desire back postpartum
- 59:29 — From disempowerment to sovereignty
Resources & Links
Tema Mercado: https://lamatrizbirth.com — @matrizmidwife
Somatic sexual healing and embodied intimacy: https://divineunionforlovers.com/course
Awaken Pleasure course: https://rahichun.com/reclaimingyourpleasure/
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