Bodily Sovereignty in a Time of Upheaval

Introduction and Welcome

Britta Bushnell: Hello folks, and welcome to transformed by birth, a podcast about the rite of passage of pregnancy, birth and new parenthood. I'm your host. Britta Bushnell, author, mythologist, childbirth educator and an all around deep diver with a side of goofball. I'm so glad you're here. Today's episode explores bodily sovereignty in this cultural moment. So grab your comfy beverage of choice or take us along for a walk as we connect with somatic practitioner, embodiment coach and full spectrum doula. Pamela. Pamela Samuelson, before we begin, we start the way we always do by lighting a candle. If you want to join me, please do or just take a breath as I light mine. Today's candle is in honor of the wisdom we hold in our bodies

The Cultural Moment: Violence, Women's Bodies, and Systemic Attacks

Britta Bushnell: every woman I speak to right now is overwhelmed by the state of the world, or perhaps better said, the state of the US white women especially, are feeling the bedrock shifting underneath our feet, realizing that we what we thought was true is not What is actually real. Our sisters of color have seen this coming more clearly for a long time. We're living through a time when attacks on women's bodies, dignity and safety are everywhere, from the everyday to the systemic. The Olympics ended recently with us. Hockey teams won women's and won men's winning gold, but celebration feels icky at best, as the men's team publicly laughed at the women's team as part of so called locker room antics. We're reading about pregnant and nursing parents being abducted and traumatized by art, by ice, and evidence of widespread sexual abuse and trafficking of girls and women by the rich and powerful is being largely ignored by our government. Many women feel that our rights, our value and our safety are under attack. My guest today is Pamela Samuelson, a somatic practitioner, a multi dimensional, manual therapist and an embodiment coach who has offered trauma sensitive care and inclusive empowerment based body literacy and sex education for 25 years. She is a feminist health care advocate, a full spectrum doula and the founder of the Center for the Advancement of body literacy and the school for ethical, ethical touch. She's also the Wizard of Oz, at Oz, at take back the speculum, a co instructor at raw power, self defense, a writer, an organizer and a very proud parent. Today, we're going to talk about what it means to truly meet people in their bodies when the broader cultural cultural conversation doesn't respect bodily sovereignty, and how to divest from body fascist esthetic standards in pregnancy and beyond, and how to create and nurture the roots of community. Welcome, Pam. I'm so glad to share this conversation with you. I can't think of a better person that I want to talk to and unpack all of what seems to be going on right now, and of course, we won't be able to unpack all of it, but I want to touch on this, because there's a strong intersectionality between what is happening in the cultural moment and reproductive health care and rights for people in lots of different identities. So welcome. Do you want to respond to anything in my intro before I dive in with a first question?

Beauty Standards, Memes, and Body Fascism

Pamela Samuelson: Well, Wes, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be with you. The thing that comes up actually, one of the love languages that I have been cultivating and living in for some years now is the language of the meme, which I love so much and have been like before I even knew that it was called a meme, but just the the marriage of image and text is something that hits me really, really well, and I posted something last night that I saw and really loved a lot, that's just the one liner. Because so much of it is one liners, I'm going to need everyone to stop holding themselves. Holding themselves to beauty standards that were set by men who are attracted to children. Yeah. And I was like, Yeah, that's exactly right, yeah.

Britta Bushnell: I'm going to need everybody to stop holding themselves. And that's boy. I mean, that hits in my belly, my. My My boys would call that not a meme, because it doesn't make you laugh. Their specific definition of a meme means it has to be funny. And I'm like, oh, no, this, this one hits in my gut, like I feel it in in my belly in a really big way, and that's connecting into also what happens when we're pregnant and postpartum and using beauty standards against ourselves. And I want to, I want to get into that, and I want to start kind of with what what? What does someone what do you communicate to women and survivors about whose body matters when this is the conversation that is happening on a governmental level, like, where do we where do we go? Where do we heal? Yeah, how do we talk about this?

Re-Establishing Ground: BIPOC and Indigenous Leadership

Pamela Samuelson: Yeah, I think we talk about it honestly and with each other honestly, because we have to re establish ground when it feels when our experience of what's happening is that the ground has shifted, as you named in your intro. And you know, plenty of people who don't have the benefit of, you know, privilege in a white supremacist culture have never felt like they had particularly stable ground underneath them. And I think it's really always the moment, but is, you know, increasingly evident, I think, to more of us, that the moment to be taking leadership and listening to bipoc and indigenous, you know, particularly bipoc people and indigenous people, AFAB people and queer people is now like, that's the other direction. Like everyone who has been marginalized by the dominant culture. The dominating culture really has a has a better analysis, like people who are closer to the center of what has been used and circumscribed and rejected by the circles of power that we are currently operating within.

Britta Bushnell: They've been fighting it and understanding it and seeing it for so much longer, and there's a like a lag for a lot of white women, yeah, for sure, white heterosexual, heteronormative, yeah.

Pamela Samuelson: Well, women, proximity to power, feels safe. Proximity to power, right? It doesn't feel safe. And what's happening right now is that lots of people don't feel safe at all. I read a piece in The New Yorker a couple of days ago about Giselle pelico That was, I think, written by Rachel Leviev, who's an amazing staff writer.

The Giselle Pelicot Case and the Failure to Protect Survivors

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, there's, there's just tell the listeners who, who that is, so that if they're not aware of who you're referencing.

Pamela Samuelson:  Giselle pelicos, case broke, I believe in 2024 when her husband, she's a woman who was living in a small town in France, and her husband was caught trying to take photos up the skirts of women in a supermarket, and upon further investigation, it was determined that he had, and I have to issue a trigger warning here, that this is as bad as the abstention files, or worse, in some cases, that her husband had been drugging her and soliciting men online to come and rape her while she was drugged and asleep. Within their fairly small community, there were 70 men. 50 of them were identifiable, and 50 of them are facing consequences, including, of course, him as the person who instigated all of this, and her decision to go public with her trial, rather than to keep it all private, which is, you know, is written about really well in this article. If you can stomach it, I recommend it. It was made her into a hero. Made her into a hero. For a lot of people, a lot of female identifying people who are survivors themselves and who have navigated that in privacy and in internally, most of us, like those of us who identify as survivors have been thrown off the rails by the system. A lot of people have been failed by any kind of legal mechanism that might have brought consequence as a crime, and it has destroyed a lot of relationships and people just generally have been really egregiously unsupported in that experience, which you know, for me as someone who's working with a lot of survivors after the fact, in my practice and in my in the body of my students, is worse in some cases, than the crime itself. It's. Worse than the event itself is not being believed or being ignored or being rejected, or, in some way, being cast out of community. Yeah is what makes it into a trauma, right? And an experience of harm. It makes it into something that really lives in the body for a long time. Yeah, changes the way that we function.

Britta Bushnell: And there's a way in which what is occurring as as we're unpacking bit by bit the atrocities say in the Epstein files, for example, how, and in particular how, there seems to be very few ramifications of what's being seen and unpacked that that is activating a lot of people in that secondary trauma that you're kind of speaking to. I mean, I I have had conversations with men in my life about what's been going on for me witnessing this, and what it feels like it's rewiring. Yeah, and I've had a couple ask me, Well, what do you mean specifically? And tell me the data and which part, and I'm like, What? No, it's a felt sense, this is what I'm feeling. And there's an activation that's happening, and it's been really kind of a knock on effect of having to kind of explain why I'm having a response to it, and I'm noticing that with a lot of people, a lot of women, are kind of putting on a face of this is all fine, and we're moving on and speaking to other women, saying, my sense of self is collapsing.

Pamela Samuelson: I mean when the response when you speak to men in your life, and I'm assuming when you say that, that these are men who you have personal relationship with, who you're friends with, or who you know are in your family, who you have a loving relationship with, and if their response, if someone who cares about you, is responding by wanting facts and data to justify your feelings, that registers to me as like a way of distancing, you know, and if what we're met with is distancing and refusal and rejection, or some suggestion, you know, the hackneyed suggestion that, you know, women's feelings are hysterical, or whatever the fuck like, all of that, it doesn't encourage a lot of dialog outside, outside of places that are only women, right? Yeah, I would love to any men who may hear this to do fucking do better. Please do better.

Britta Bushnell: Yes, and that's a lot of what is being requested is do better. And then we see something like what happened after the Olympics in the locker room and it's like, oh, wait a minute, we're not doing better.

Pamela Samuelson: No, like, people are talking about the death throes of the patriarchy, but it's only an initiation if you survive, right? Like it's only going to be the death throes of the patriarchy if we make it so, yeah, and yeah, we are in the majority.

Pregnancy, New Parenthood, and the Intersection with Cultural Violence

Britta Bushnell: And and yes, we are in the majority. And all of this kind of landscape that we're kind of painting a picture of is impacting those who are pregnant and newly postpartum and in the early days of of parenting, yeah, in a very acute kind of

Pamela Samuelson: way, tell me what you're seeing

Britta Bushnell: so well. I mean, there's that the the accidental, traditional roles that can show up is impacting a sense of powerlessness that then is showing up in the state of what's what's occurring, and reinforcing some of that. I mean, and body body I mean, let's, let's talk about the body stuff, because there is also the energy of needing to stay thin, needing to remain beautiful, needing to focus on esthetics, rather than on what it is that is being called for and asked for from their body, from their baby, and somehow, if you know, and this is a squirrel that just popped into my brain, but, and the TRad wife energies, Whoa, yeah. Like there's so much kind of being stewed in the pot of of what's happening for folks who are becoming parents and new moms in particular. So talk, talk to me about sort of is, is there a through line between these conversations we're having around violence against women in their bodies and reproductive rights and new new parents like pull some of those threads together, we've weave us an understanding of what's happening. I mean,

Pamela Samuelson: there's a it's all on the same continuum, right? And the fundamental question, I feel like a little bit looking at the commentary, and I mean, everyone's in a tornado of feelings about the Epstein files and everything else. We're now in a second Trump presidency that started with him revealing himself as the pussy grabber. So there's nothing actually that surprising happening. If we had listened to the survivors who came forth about the Epstein debacle, like the Epstein sex ring, sex trafficking, we wouldn't need the files, you know? So there's also that, right?

Britta Bushnell: So that that piece of now, wait, show me the files and everybody's like, but we have all these women,

Pamela Samuelson: the files are extraordinary because it's giving us a way of listening in to conversations that we otherwise would have no access to, that are confirming all of our worst assumptions. But our worst assumptions are there, because when you know it's that thing again, when people show you who you are, you believe them. This has all been very evident for a very, very long time, and you know, the President of the United States is right in the middle of it, so,

Britta Bushnell: but a lot of women that I know were kind of hanging their hats on the reveal in the exposure of the Epstein files, being that then, there would be accountability and and the slap in the face that I've been hearing about is that we've gotten to that point where there is exposure and there's no there's no accountability. 

The Root Belief: Women as Property and Systemic Domination

Pamela Samuelson: Well, I mean, not that long ago, we saw Brett Kavanaugh confirmed to the Supreme Court after Christine Blasey Ford came forward with completely credible evidence that he had sexually assaulted her, and she came forth about that, and in many ways derailed her own life to give us that. And he was confirmed anyway. So I think anyone who is deeply shocked by this is either young or hasn't been paying attention or has been continuing to participate in the larger cultural fiction around and I mean, I'm seeing this. I'm seeing this in people's processing, you know. And I think you are too. I imagine many of us are seeing the processing being like, well, it's not all men. It can't be all men. I have good men in my life. It's not all men, and of course, it's not all men. And that's not it's not about feelings. It's about a fundamental belief held by everyone, regardless of sex or gender, which is the belief that women are or should be, property. This is logistical, it's economic, it's very highly practical, and it's simply the core belief, which is, you can see all along the whole spectrum, when it comes to reproductive rights, when it comes to heteronormative relationships, when it comes to the institution of marriage, when it comes to who's allowed to make money and who's not, when it comes to who's doing the labor after birth, who's doing the lion's share of parenting, who is doing the labor of the birth like, who? Who is doing these things, and who is therefore in charge of them or not? You know, like I was born in 1977 three years before I was born, was the first time women were legally allowed to get their own credit card in their own name. That is very recent.

Britta Bushnell: It's so recent, and I feel like it was in both of our lifetimes.

Pamela Samuelson: Yeah, it's with, I mean, it's my mom got her first credit card in her own name three years before I was born as a woman in her 20s, you know? So the questions like, yes, of course, all of the feelings and reactions and all of the relational pieces stem from that. All of the behaviors stem from that as the root, like the shitty, rotten root that we're trying to pull, which is that women aren't fucking property. You know, nobody owns me. Nobody gets to tell me what I can and can't do with my own body, you know. And I think for people who have been racialized in whatever way, black people, indigenous people, brown people in this country, certainly with what's going on right now with immigration and heights, you. So the assumption of ownership, and therefore the assumption of unpaid labor, or of sovereignty over bodies of other people, is core to what we're talking about when we're talking about patriarchy, you know, which is a word that I don't use that often at this point, because it's not it's not enough for me. It's not actually like big enough to talk about what's happening, which is a system of domination and violence that has been going on for millennia. At this point, it happens to be particularly loud right now, because people in charge are particularly loud in their enactment of it, you know, and it's politically speaking, it goes right along with fascist tendencies and authoritarian rule. And, like all of these other things, are heavily paternalistic systems, yeah, you know. And certainly enabled by women, not as much in my experience, at all, enabled by queers, by gender non conforming people who are, if anyone, the most marginalized in any of this? If gender is a binary where one gender has to be defined as dominating the other, and queers don't fit into that, yeah, they become a very easy scapegoat. And we're seeing that with everything that's happening around gender affirming care and trans rights in this country and elsewhere, also in the UK. And I say, I say that I come into that as someone with a 10 year old daughter who has loved Harry Potter and JK Rowling in our house is a fucking villain, right? She's a villain. My kid is well aware of what she's done, and my kid's life is full of trans and non binary people,

Britta Bushnell: and yet both being able to as a child hold the complexity of loving Harry Potter.

Pamela Samuelson: It's a point of real tension. Yeah, in her and in us. Yeah, you know, it came up not from us. We did not bring it up, but it came up and she was like, oh, I want to read those. And we were like, okay, but we're going to do that in a way such that we're not buying new books, we're not buying the movies, we're not putting any money into her pockets, because she's then turning around and using that money to hurt trans people in the UK, and we're not going to contribute to that, then reading the books. And she's like, wow, that thing's really racist. That name's racist. And I'm like, Yeah, it really is. And she's like, but she's writing about inclusion and family and people who love each other and will, like, go to the end for each other. How can she? And I'm like, yeah, how can she, yeah?

Britta Bushnell: I mean, even just the othering of muggles and the magical realm and having that, I mean, there's so much in there that can get unpacked that is really hard to process with an adult sensibility, totally let alone a child sensibility of of how to navigate it. Yeah.

Pamela Samuelson: I mean, she's really she's really clear, which is fascinating to me. She's really clear about what is right and what's not right. And is also clear that it's not always that obvious, and that sometimes you have to hold two things at once, which I feel really proud of as I'm watching her grow up. But she's very clear that, you know, she's very clear about what she's seeing. She's very clear that she's worried about her best friends, because they are all they're all people who are not white. All of them are people who are not white, pretty much like the people that she's the most invested in. And she's like, What happens if ice comes to our school? What happens if they come during pickup, you know? And she's scared out of her fucking mind, you know, we thought shooter drills were bad and they were, you know, this is entirely unacceptable,

Britta Bushnell: and this is our youth being directly impacted and seeing what it is that's occurring and what it is that's happening,

Pamela Samuelson: yes, and also following the good news and coming to protests and, you know, making phone calls and writing emails like all of these

Britta Bushnell: things too. So teaching, teaching the action, teaching, paying attention to the helpers pay, you know, in in the Fred Rogers way of doing things, you know, look for the helpers

Pamela Samuelson: and be in the Black Panthers way. You know, like, how do we get to know our neighbors? Jelani Cobb was a wonderful writer, said something that I'm going to paraphrase and hope I get right, which is, in a democracy, this the smallest civic unit is the neighbor. I don't know if I got that right. I hope I did, but I hope that the meeting is, yes, I love how do we get into our neighborhoods? How do we meet the people around us? How do we undo whatever has been, you know, taught to us or wired in around, viewing people we don't yet know as scary in some way strange, like, how? How do we engage? And again, I feel like the civil rights leaders are are. Best example of how to proceed at this point, like people who really trained as organizers and are continuing to train as organizers, like, if we're not involved with that very directly.

Pockets of Safety, Community, and the Perinatal Period

Britta Bushnell: I love that when you're when you're talking about neighbors and community, it makes me think of the the need to find pockets of safety, yes, and especially when there is a feeling of of culture being fundamentally unsafe. Yeah, finding pockets of of safety and safety is a tricky one, because it's, it's a concept, not a universal thing, that you can say everybody feels safe when it's like that that doesn't exist. Safety is, is a concept that is individual, that our bodies have different ways of feeling it or knowing it. And when you speak about neighbors, I'm thinking, Oh, finding finding safety, finding community, finding that, that sense of safety, which is really important in the perinatal period, yes, and postpartum, because they're I mean, can you speak to that? What it what is the importance of that sense of safety during that time in particular?

Pamela Samuelson: Yeah, I think there's a wonderful quote, and I don't know who it originates from, but it's that there is no safety, only trust that I find really instructive in considering what it is that creates the feeling of safety. You know, it's not a condition, it's a feeling. It's a felt experience where I feel able to, like, do one of those like breaths, and when, you know, we refer to it colloquially in our household as, like, you know, when does your butthole unclench? Like, when? When do you I mean,

Britta Bushnell: that makes sense to me, though I can picture

Pamela Samuelson: it, you know, it's comes out of like, how do we labor? At what point does your cervix open? It's when, you know, the person who stresses you out isn't sitting in a corner of the room reading a newspaper. It's when they leave, you know, that labor moves. And why labor stalls when a stressful person is present, you know. And why we try to protect that and protect physiolog, the physiologic experience of birth, as much as possible, no matter where we are. I think establishing safety has to begin with trust, and it has to begin with trust in ourselves, which is a hard thing to come by if we don't have that experience. And this comes this, for me, touches into our relationship with technology at this point, which is, okay,

Britta Bushnell: let's go there. Tell me. Tell me

Pamela Samuelson: that connection. It's also an ongoing conversation in our household, because wants a lot of screen and a lot of screen time, and she wants it to be social, and she wants it to be this and that, and the other thing, she wants it to be like a connecting tool. But also it's something that is absorbing an enormous amount of her attention, and we're in a lot of conversation, the three of us, the kid and me and my partner, about how to create antidotes to that as a way of allowing her the time and space to be bored and to have the emergent qualities of boredom that we need, which are all creative, and to be present in her body and present on the earth, to not have everything be abstracted through a little square, I think, In establishing trust in ourselves and in our own bodies requires things that very few of us are given from the jump. It requires that we have it mirrored to us that it's possible to have a loving relationship with our own bodies that isn't just about extraction and the cruelty of self improvement, it requires that we be held in a way that isn't full of expectation. That requires that we center someone else's experience above our own. And in that I'm talking about body fascist esthetics and this kind of objectification that you know, FEM bodies are, and honestly, masculine bodies are subjected to, although in different ways, you know, the notion, or the kind of prevailing belief, which is largely unconscious, I think for many people, that femme bodies are only valuable insofar as they are attractive and serviceable to people in male identifying bodies, masculine bodies, in some way, that's a thing that immediately strips trust out. And I think, honestly, like having talked with a really dear friend of mine, is coming to mind, who was raised in an evangelical church, I think that the the patriarchy that's present in. Much organized religion plays a huge role in this, in that people are being taught in their places of worship and in the kind of container created within that of their family unit, the bodies aren't to be trusted. Bodies can't be trusted. And you know that that's the devil talking if your body wants something that it's

Bodies as Untrustworthy: Religion, Birth, and the Medical System

Britta Bushnell: absolutely and that's making me think of that relationship with sex and birth very much. We're also sharing that message that our bodies can't be trusted in birth, yes, that they need to be watched and they need to be deeply monitored. And I'm not saying that those things are inherently evil, because I don't believe that. I think that monitoring can be a very good thing and can be very helpful and, and it's a physiological

Pamela Samuelson: process, yeah, it's when it becomes an override that it becomes a problem, right?

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, and the messaging that we can't trust our bodies, especially a femme body, is is really rampant out there totally and so here are pregnant folks heading toward birth, saying, How do I redevelop or develop for the first time? Trust, trust, yeah,

Pamela's Pregnancy: Sexological Bodywork and Embodied Trust

Pamela Samuelson: it's making me think. That question. Makes me think of something that I did during my pregnancy, which was extraordinary, which was that I became a psychological body worker while I was pregnant. I went through that program.

Britta Bushnell:  I didn't know that you did that while you were pregnant. I'm smiling because now I'm putting two and two together. Wow,

Pamela Samuelson:  it was so good. I went into the program just pregnant, and said, Is this going to be a problem? And my instructors were like, No, that's great. I think you might be the first to do that. And I was like great. And then was in the kind of glory of second trimester when I did the intensive portion in San Francisco, the in person part. And it was, for anyone who doesn't know sex logical body work, or somatic sex education, as it's often called, is a certification course that is offered in different places in the world by different excellent teachers, which basically champions of the body's erotic capacities as a necessary part of human experience, and is deeply therapeutic at least. That's my that's my interpretation and my take as someone who came in with, you know, decades of therapeutic background. Many of the people in my cohort were sex workers, and it is, it is a merging of those two lineages, certainly. But I also, you know, hold that all forms of sex work are also inherently therapeutic when they're held that way. So that too, I did sex logical body work while I was pregnant, and the experience that I had was of getting to deeply explore my body in a very beautiful, healthy, robust, alive, complex way, like because I was really with my own arrows in that time, and also provided me an opportunity to connect deeply with my baby while she was in my body in a very particular way, in a very tender and loving way, as someone who was an extension of me and that, and you know, in some ways still is, even though she's 10 years outside.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, and do you, how do you reflect on that now, in terms of your experience of the labor, birth and early postpartum, oh, journey like I would, I have speculations about what might have occurred, but I'd love to hear from you like, what getting getting To Know yourself in the ways you just described prior to going through those what? Yeah, yeah. What happened?

Holistic Pelvic Care, Home Birth, and Protecting the Postpartum

Pamela Samuelson: I was already a doula at that point, and had been a doula for a long time, birth doula. And the thing that happened immediately before I got pregnant was I went and did my first training with Tammy Lynn Kent, who is an amazing teacher and now a very dear friend and mentor to me. And she is a pelvic PT, who is also a witch of high you know, of his stature of great magnitude. And she teaches of she teaches holistic pelvic care, which is a form of therapeutic pelvic touch that is rooted both in her the her profound understanding of the energetics of the human body in its connection with the earth and and also the structural elements of pelvic physical therapy that she learned in her formal training to do that. And I then immediately went and got pregnant. I didn't think that I could get pregnant, because I was one. I was the seventh of my mom's pregnancies and the first who came through, and because both of my closest friends at that time had had to go through IVF in order to become pregnant. And even though none of those stories were about my body, it had created a kind of field

Britta Bushnell: for me. Yeah, there's that those external stories can very much impact how we view ourselves. Yeah, it was very powerful.

Pamela Samuelson: And in that training with Tammy and receiving that kind of touch for the first time, and that kind of attention, like rolled a boulder away from from that particular the mouth of that particular story for me, and I was pregnant, I want to say, less than two months later, and had decided, because of the path of my work and my practice and what I wanted to be doing, and what I felt compelled to do as someone trained as a manual therapist in all these different ways, where we're trained to never touch pelvises and never touch breasts and chests. I was like, I want to touch all those things because they're very important to touch respectfully and in collaboration and in full, more than consent, like with the full agency and participation of the person receiving touch. And so I was sort of beginning that trajectory when I got pregnant, and then the pregnancy informed all of it, and I, at that point, had already been present at enough births that I was clear I didn't want to birth in the hospital, and had to get around my get my head around the possibility that births do all sorts of things, and that I wasn't in control of that, and that that was also going to be a collaboration with life and the universe and circumstance and your baby, and my baby, very much my baby I ended up having. I ended up getting to have her at home. And I it was rough. It was a rough road. It gave me a lot of respect for people who choose to go into the hospital and get an epidural. Yeah.

Britta Bushnell: As as it can do for for folks, yeah, absolutely

Pamela Samuelson: managed to deliver safely in our home. The birth was wild, and I knew enough to protect the postpartum. So it's like, something that I did was to tell all of our parents, who we love, that they weren't invited to come over for three days. And there was some fuss about that. But then ultimately, they were like, okay, cool. And then we had that three day period of just us before other people started coming in, and that was precious. I cherish that, and I cherish their receptivity to it as something was really clear about.

Britta Bushnell: And you created that boundary very intentionally. It sounds like,

Pamela Samuelson: yeah, and I all of that, all of the things that I'm naming came from a place of deep trust in my own process and in my own sensations and feelings, which I think for me, begins in the roots of of somatic practice, like where I came into that and just that I learned in the company of a giant, like a person who was unfazed by me in every way that my body is wise, and that if I'm paying attention and I'm taking that seriously, that that often gives me everything I need to know how to proceed in any given situation.

Sensation as Communication: The Body-Mind as One

Britta Bushnell: Okay, let's talk about that. Let's talk about the body's sensations as communication. Like, what? Because when we're talking about trust, right, those are connected. Oh, yeah for sure,

Pamela Samuelson: sensations, feelings, perceptions, the I'm not going to get it right, but in Buddhism, the different aspects of attention are laid out in all of their elements really beautifully. Sensation is where everything begins. You know, there is nothing that happens to us that doesn't happen to us in our bodies or as our bodies, and it's fundamental to my understanding of being alive, that there is no separation between body and mind. Those are the same thing, you know. And to talk about the body mind connection is an abstraction of what's actually happening, which is that your brain, in the form of your nervous system and your endocrine system, is shot through your entire body, top to bottom, in every single iota of our experience, our awareness, is informed by that. So there's, there's no way around it or out

Britta Bushnell: of it, but I do, I think that sensation is something that a lot of us have been taught to fear. Sure, yeah. Saying to close off from, well, I'm thinking about even, I mean, in this moment, the thought that came up was around our menstrual cycle and having like, I remember being an early teen girl and having horrific pains and flow with my period and going to

Pamela Samuelson: class, yeah,

Britta Bushnell: yep, like, move along. Yeah, ignore, yeah, push through all of the in lots of different ways. I mean, that's just one example. And I do think that one of the things I see as folks are coming walking their toes toward the threshold of birth, yeah, is a an awareness of how much they're going to need to feel,

Pamela Samuelson: yes or not or not,

Britta Bushnell: exactly, but how much that moment is is being is in influencing decisions about birth totally and the whole conversation seems to circle around labor and birth, and then when sensation is still a big part of postpartum, it can be really surprising and surprising and scary and hard and traumatizing for some

Pamela Samuelson: totally so I think this brings us back to the overwhelming cultural narrative that holds a fab bodies, which is that we're supposed to function like Men. You know that menstruation is something to be hidden, and we're just not accounted for. You know, the way that we actually function isn't accounted for. I'm thinking now of the the astronaut who was sent into space with 100 tampons or something like, isn't enough. And they were like, What are you You know, there's just, or, like, all of the things that aren't designed for women's bodies, the crash test dummies that are always, you know, cis male bodies form and shape. So, yeah, I mean, I think, when I mean, I'm thinking about this like as a as a parallel, thinking about this as like an individual child who is perpetually disregarded and dismissed and ignored and asked to be functional. That's abuse. That's abuse that is a non relational way of being with a child. And I think writ large, culturally, what has been going on for yay, these many millennia, is abusive in that way that our bodies are discounted. The actual true functioning of our bodies is discounted. Our intuition is discounted. And by what I mean when I say intuition isn't some like airy fairy abstraction, it's the very real sense of knowing something because you feel it that way. You know right wisdom of the belly truth as Yeah, and it's a certainty, like we talk about this in in fight class when I when I have the great joy of being part of the teaching team of a self defense class with a group called raw power self defense, which is adrenal stress scenario training. One of the things that my lead instructor talks about in every single group, in every single class, no matter what, is that, if it feels wrong, adjust, if something down the block feels wrong across the street go around and we in that context, call that target denial. Target denial, I will not be your target.

Britta Bushnell: I will. Yeah, no, I just had to process it a second to capture, yeah.

Pamela Samuelson: I mean, it's, you know, that's a, that is a fighting term. That's, you know, I imagine that target denial is something that could be equally discussed by people training police or the military like deny them that you're not a target, but in the context of what we're talking about,

Britta Bushnell: I mean that could also be a provider that doesn't feel right 100%

Pamela Samuelson: yes, my God, yes. Like, wait,

Britta Bushnell: I can't explain why it is that I'm not feeling great about this provider. But something tells me run

Pamela Samuelson: Yeah Or like, That's wisdom, yeah. And often, I find that the inability to articulate is because we're avoiding conflict. Because if I did say the thing that would make me a bitch, that would make you confrontational, when, in fact, I probably know exactly what it is I don't like your tone. And you have every right to have your tone, but I'm not going to work with you, you know, or if you would like me to come to you, this needs to adjust,

Building Self-Trust as the Foundation for Authentic Relationship

Britta Bushnell: and that I feel like this is all circling back to trust and safety.

Pamela Samuelson: Yeah, totally. And when establish that,

Britta Bushnell: how we establish that and how we respond to our body's communications?

Pamela Samuelson: Yes, if I can trust myself, then I can make myself a trustworthy person for you, whoever you are, whether that's my kid or my partner or my friends or a client or a student, you know, like, and if I can make myself a trustworthy person, you know, there's certainly lots of people out there who believe that they're trustworthy who are not. And so, of course, part of that loop is being relational and is being open to feedback, like genuinely. You know that if somebody comes to me and is like, I don't like that, that we get to have a real conversation about it, where I actually am listening. You know, if someone that I trust is telling me something about myself, I have to pay attention to that. But I can't even enter into that relationship if I don't trust myself first, yeah, because then feedback from anyone, if I fundamentally don't trust myself, hearing back from anyone is the undoing of my identity. You know, if I'm too fragile, then I can't How can I function in actually a truly dialogic way with anyone?

Britta Bushnell: I have so many thoughts, they're all merging in my brain at the same moment. So I've got like a roadblock in my consciousness as you're speaking. But it's it. It feels all connected to navigating systems. And there are so many systems that we are currently navigating where am I right in hearing that navigating systems, there's systems work fixing systems, and there is work that involves making yourself trustable to yourself to be able to be authentic and connected and trustworthy to oneself when facing a system,

Pamela Samuelson: yeah, when facing, I think, at any scale, when facing any relationship. And of course, systems are

Britta Bushnell: made of relationships, any relationship, right? Yeah.

Pamela Samuelson: I mean, I think part of the issue with the issue with the systems as we're facing them is that they're not relational. They're non responsive. You know, they've become closed loops, and that has accelerated enormously under the current administration. The case because their tactic is a slash and burn tactic. That's what they're interested in. They're trying to, like, basically loot the country for spare parts.

Stepping Into Self-Authority: Birth, Vulnerability, and New Parenthood

Britta Bushnell: So some of your work is about authority, self authority, right? There seems to be a lot of through lines in your work around that sovereignty and and authority over our own experience. So, so how do you how do you help folks like what would you say to folks who are wanting to step into that place of feeling more of their own authority over their own experience. Because I think there's a lot of folks who want that in as a concept, and feel daunted by the very first step, and I would say especially around like starting a process where one knows there is going to likely be inherent vulnerability, like birth, like new parenthood, that touches up against that place of, am I going to have authority? Am I going to have sovereignty? Yes, I'm going to feel vulnerable. I think

Pamela Samuelson: it's a process. And I think there, you know, I think human life is a string of opportunities to explore exactly that you know, in every you know, in every aspect that I can think of, what is it to be a bodied consciousness, wherever you are, you know, wherever you are with that, whether whatever your level of ability, whatever your age, what is it to experience pleasant sensation? Pleasurable sensation like, what is that like for you? And how does. It feel to champion that? How does it feel to orient around that in the things that do and don't move you? One of the thing that's coming to mind right now is a class that I teach, or a class a circle, a circle of people that I've been holding for many years as part of a lineage that I'm holding of feminist healthcare that I call take back the speculum, and that is a class that culminates in people being able to do cervical self exam, which is a thing that people often hate and are terrified by and refuse to go to a gynecologist for care because that part of it is so awful, and I steadfastly hold as a possibility that it doesn't have to suck and it doesn't have to hurt and no one has to touch your body. You can do your own insertion. You can do your own swab. Increasingly, this is becoming clear statistically, and people are now getting self swab kits that they take home with them that they take home with them that don't even require a speculum, which is fantastic, right? As someone who's like, I want to see my cervix, like, what is that? As someone who's interested in like, what are the mechanics of an abortion, you can't understand what an abortion is until you can see your own cervix. And it's something that's not part of medical training. It's not on offer to people when they go to their gynecologist. Their gynecologist has not been trained in like, Hey, would you like to see this? Midwives do that a lot of the time, and, you know, some very wonderful doctors will do it some of the time, but it's by far not, you know, the majority narrative, and it's something that we just can do alone. And my mentor, Carol downer did this for decades. She and her best friend Lorraine Rothman, drove across the country with a ton of speculums in the trunk, doing these workshops for people and teaching people how to do it for themselves. Because that alone, like in the class, I describe it almost every time as like, the thin tip of the wedge, like it's such a small thing, it's a three hour class where it's like, a deep dive into anatomy that you will otherwise probably not learn, you know, like, actual, real anatomy. Like, what are we talking about when we talk about, you know, female genitals. What are we talking about, actually? Like, truly. What are the pieces? What are the elements? How does it work? How does it fit together? Does anyone actually know the full extent of clitoral tissue? Very few people. Very few people do, including medical providers, are not trained to understand the full extent of the nurture of the clitoris, which is as much nervous tissue as a penis, but internal and arranged differently. People don't need it. So we like

Take Back the Speculum: Body Literacy and Cervical Self-Exam

Britta Bushnell: do well. And yeah, I mean, and I notice it in my classes for childbirth, when talking about effacement of the cervix. How many people don't know that the cervix is bulbous,

Pamela Samuelson: is has, has

Britta Bushnell: thickness to it, and and that when we're talking about effacement, you know, or even before that, if we're talking about dilation, it's imagining it like the aperture on a camera, where it's flat and,

Pamela Samuelson: as opposed something that opens,

Britta Bushnell: yeah, well, and that starts out thick, like it tells me that It's like, wow, there are so many of us who have not even looked inside our own

Pamela Samuelson: bodies or touched number of people with vulvas who have never touched the inside of their vagina and touched their own cervix and have never, in fact, put their fingers inside themselves for anything other than masturbation

Britta Bushnell: or tampon inspiration,

Pamela Samuelson: yeah, totally. Or a cup is wild

Britta Bushnell: or a cup, yeah, yeah.

Pamela Samuelson: So there's something that too, of just like, and there's something in the narrative around that too, of like, don't touch yourself there, right?

Britta Bushnell: That when we're talking about sovereignty and self authority,

Pamela Samuelson: yeah, you got to know. You got to know. You got to know. Yeah, I received a client, this is now years ago, who had gone to a doctor because she was worried about something. There was like a growth, basically, there was like a little tag, or like a little tiny poll. There was something in her vaginal wall that she was worried about. And what the doctor who she went to see said to her was, Why are you touching yourself there? And I was like, set that person on fire. Like, who is that? Who is who is that? And how are they still licensed? Like, it made the hair on the back of my neck

Britta Bushnell: stand up. You saw my response just now, and my hands went straight to my forehead.

Pamela Samuelson: And that was, you know, that was an older OB GYN, you know. And certainly there has been conversation amongst younger OB gyns in my hearing where it's like, yeah, we're waiting, you know, we're waiting for a certain generation to be gone practice so that we can improve this. But it's like, what, you know, again, it's that same continuum. Question of looking at women's bodies as property. This is something that comes up in the Epstein emails, is that his emails with women are largely about how you can improve yourself, things that you're going to do. For me, it's, it's like, it's all critical. It's all like, this is what I want you to be. So go do that.

What Gives Pamela Hope: Community, Fight, and Hope as Discipline

Britta Bushnell: So I'm so in the face of all of this, what gives you hope?

Pamela Samuelson: Oh, well, a lot of things, a lot of things. Give me hope.

Britta Bushnell: Pick, pick a couple. Share a couple.

Pamela Samuelson: The kids give me hope. I give me hope. You give me hope. The people who are listening to this, who may, you know, find themselves stirred in some way give me hope, all of the fight, all of the fighting back like the real spirit of the fight that is in is in people who have been historically oppressed, and the people who have figured out How to lead and organize the artists give me hope. All of that gives me hope. And, you know, I'm going to bring in Mariam Kaba, who is one of our great minds, who says, hope is a discipline, and she is right. You know, that's a commitment. That's a commitment that we make, not that it's okay, but that it's going to be okay, because we're going to make it okay. You know, if my daughter says to me, checks in with me, is it okay? Is this going to be okay? I say, Yes. And she says, How do you know? And I said, I don't, but I'm going to make it that way. I'm going to make it that way for you,

Britta Bushnell: right? And

Pamela Samuelson: I feel my metal in that. I can feel my spine in it, and then hear it in your voice that's real, yeah, you know, yeah, I have ground under me, and I'm in continuity with the body of the earth. And, you know, I have a lot of muscle to bring to this particular fight, and so do we all. But it's in that, like camaraderie. It's like, in the enjoyment of being together in it, that we're going to get it done

Britta Bushnell: being in it together. And even the piece we were just talking about about touch yourself, oh

Pamela Samuelson: yeah, touch yourself. And let's do it together, like, Let's do cervical self exam together, because it's weird and fun

Britta Bushnell: and breaking of all kinds of false norms. Yeah, it

Pamela Samuelson: breaks a big taboo. Yeah,

Britta Bushnell: that's the word I was looking for. But False, false norms popped in instead of taboo. But you know, we'll go with it. Yeah, I

Pamela Samuelson: was filmed doing take back the speculum for a documentary years ago, and was menstruating, was on the first day of my bleed in a big group of people and a camera crew, and was like, Yeah, film me. Film me. Doing this absolutely like, let's break, let's break it all.

Britta Bushnell: Let's, let's smash some of those taboos and and witness people. Yes, you, you. It is your body for sure, sovereignty means it is yours. You get to decide what to do with it,

Pamela Samuelson: yeah, and that you belong. You belong among among other people who are also sovereign in their bodies.

Britta Bushnell: Oh, I love that. Now that's community.

Pamela Samuelson: Yeah, because it's never, it's not. I mean, you know, it's cliche, but it's not power over. It really is power with at that point. You're not trying to prove something if there's nothing to prove, it's all power with.

Pamela's Offerings: Classes, Circles, and Where to Find Her

Britta Bushnell: So you've mentioned a couple of courses and classes and circles that you do if folks are interested in learning more about you and your work. Where do they go? Where's a good place to find out about you?

Pamela Samuelson: There's a couple good places. The first is my website, which is m, bodywork, dot, L, A, E, M, B, O, D, y, w, O, R, k.la, and there is a section of services, which is about my private practice, where I'm doing session work with people. And there's a section of classes which has a whole list of things that are coming up. The ones that are coming up next are that I'm teaching two series of sex ed classes for tweens and for teens, and those are going to start sometime in March, and I'm going to be doing another course that is for parents who find themselves frozen around talking about anything to do with sexuality with their kids. That's called using bees, which is so fun. It's always a really amazing, interesting group, really good conversation that's about looking at how we were raised, and like, why we're feeling stuck and frozen and uncomfortable with those things, and coming into a better relationship with that material, so that we can be present with our kids and center them and looping on our own, you know, our own inherited shit, whatever that is, take back the speculum, will probably happen also sometime in March. And I would love to do an in person group as well as an online group. I love them both. Now, I didn't think it would work online. But then in covid, of course, everything starts working online.

Britta Bushnell: It's amazing what that. Pushed us into right?

Pamela Samuelson: Yeah, it's incredible. I've had gotten to have people attend those classes from all over the world, which has been the

Britta Bushnell: accessibility barrier drops so so quickly. It's kind of also

Pamela Samuelson: people, people dealing with illness or disability or anything like are unable to get get to a place, or are more comfortable doing it at home, and also people who are just shy and private and would rather do it at home, like great. Order a speculum. Here's a link. Get a speculum, and then we'll do it together online, and it works really well. So yeah, there will be at least a couple of those in the spring in LA there's going to probably be one up in Sebastopol. I'm going to go up there at the end of March, for anybody who's in the North Bay, North

Britta Bushnell: Bay, love that, yeah, and, yeah, okay. And then are you on Instagram? Instagram person?

Pamela Samuelson: Do you have that is where I that is where I meme. Lord, okay,

Britta Bushnell: that's your meme. Lord, and, and what's your Instagram handle

Pamela Samuelson: that's also embody work? La, okay, great.

Closing Question: What Pamela Wants New and Expectant Parents to Know

Britta Bushnell: It's all it's all there, and we'll make sure it's in the show notes as well. So I like to close with the same question each time, and that question is, what's one thing that you feel passionately about that you want new or expectant parents to see, hear, feel or know during this profound period in their lives,

Pamela Samuelson: becoming a new parent is going to plunge you into your own material and the best thing, your own material, meaning The things that you hold as true, consciously and unconsciously, will be laid bare in becoming a new parent, and I urge you to do it in community. The nuclear family, in my opinion, is a scam. I think it's I think it's a way that capitalism has evolved to separate us and to extract from us by making us pay for things that should be just available in our family, in our village, in our community, I urge you to do whatever you can do to form real community, to form community based on mutual indebtedness and on ongoing listening and relationship, so that you can be held in that as you navigate this new time. And to give that to your kid, give that to your children, so that they grow up in that too, so that we get to evolve, you know, out of this kind of bizarre, you know, devolution of capitalism as it's happening, like the collapse in whatever way that is or is not actually happening that we build the roots that we need. I think Sophie strand said, you know, if we're going to survive these times, we need to tie our roots to other roots. And I find that to be a beautiful truism in that we got to do this shit together.

Closing Candle and Sign-Off

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, and a beautiful metaphor to hold on to is to tie our roots together. Totally beautiful. Thank you so much, Pam. Thank you for joining us and thank you listeners for sharing this time with us. If something that was shared today impacted supported or moved you, please share this episode with a friend. I produce this podcast myself, and your support makes it possible to show a little love for the podcast and these conversations, please follow rate and review. If you'd like to continue the conversation, please join us on Instagram at transformed by birth. I look forward to being with you again on the next episode of transform by birth, and now let's gather what we want to take away from this episode with an inhale, and as I exhale, I'll blow out our candle until next time bye, friends.