The Menstruality Podcast - The Healing Connection Between the Womb and the Voice (Shakirah Sabira)

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Across the ages women and birthing people have been invited by midwives and doulas to relax their jaw and throat to support the opening of the cervix in labour. In today’s conversation we explore why this is so important, we explore the connection between our throats, our voices, and the emotional and physical health of our wombs. I’m talking with Shakirah Sabira who is a doula, African womb healing practitioner, and the founder of Barakha’s Doula. Shakirah began her career as a doula serving women in the Middle East and West Africa, including seven months working in a rural clinic supporting the local midwife in the Mauritanian desert, a trip which profoundly changed her life, and guided her to her calling.Through Shakirah’s story, and the experiences with her teachers and clients, as well as Sophie's own womb healing experience, we look at what it means to give your womb a voice, how release stagnant energy, express yourself and find a profound source of healing within us. We explore:How Shakirah sang her period back, after her menstrual cycle stopped following a traumatic relationship breakup and divorce.The connection between trauma, the womb and the voice, and how speaking truth, singing and freeing up the throat can facilitate deep healing. Why women and people with periods need to share our stories, to release our shame, and support each other to heal, simply by no longer feeling alone.Registration will open soon for our 2023 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can register your interest here: https://www.menstrualityleadership.com---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @red.school https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolShakirah Sabira: @shakirahsabira https://www.instagram.com/shakirahsabiraBarakah’s Doula: @barakahsdoula https://www.instagram.com/barakahsdoula

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey there, it's good to be back with you here in my favourite place, the Menstruality Podcast, here with you and our amazing guest for this week. And I want to thank you before we start for listening, for tuning in and for being part of this movement to restore the wisdom of the menstrual

cycle of menopause of the deep feminine back at the heart of our world. Thank you for being here and today we're taking an interesting route because we're actually expanding our menstruality explorations by looking at the womb and the connection between the womb and the voice and our power and healing. Though because I can't not talk about the menstrual cycle we do anchor this in menstrual cycle awareness at the beginning. What we're exploring is how across the ages women and birthing people have been invited by midwives and doulas to relax their jaw and throat to support the opening of the cervix in labour. And in today's conversation with doula and African womb healing practitioner Shakira Sabira, we're exploring why this is so important,

what the connection is between our throats, our voices and the emotional and physical health of our wombs. And through Shakira's story as well as my own personal womb and trauma healing experience we look at what it means to give your womb a voice, how to release stagnant energy, express yourself and find a incredibly profound source of healing within you. Welcome to the menstruality podcast Shakira, thank you so much for making the time we actually had to reschedule this because you were fresh out of a birth just when we were about to do our last interview so I'm so glad that this timing worked out. How's it going for you today? It's going well thank you for allowing me to reschedule.

Yeah sometimes births can pop up out of nowhere and they take a lot of physical and mental strength so when it's over it's really difficult to do anything but rest really yeah I imagine your life must have to be very flexing and flowing and ebbing and flowing around your work it's the nature exactly so I try not to have any plans and try to just go with the flow as much as possible I mean it's difficult but as much as possible yeah especially when you're running a business I would love to talk to you more about that that's where it all sort of is up in the air but yeah yeah I mean life doesn't really have any plans in many ways like when you look at the natural world it just does its thing day by day doesn't it there's a there's a fundamental rhythm and arc and I feel like the more I'm a mother the more I just I am aligning with that more than whatever my head thinks I should like. I'm strategizing. I should do, you know. I would love to start with a cycle check in.

Where are you at in your cycle at the moment and how is it influencing you? Yes, at the moment I am on my period, actually. So usually when I'm on my period, I like to take time out as much as I can and rest and eat well, hydrate myself. But this at this moment, I'm too busy to do that. So I'm trying to take a few minutes here and there to slow down as much as possible. But, yeah, I don't have much time this cycle. So trying to take it as easy as possible but we're quite busy so yeah what's happening in your world at the moment what's creating the busy

so I have a course coming up I have doula clients and um just general womb healing clients so it's all a bit difficult to juggle it all and you know at once and trying to keep on top of like the social media side of things it's just it's a lot to deal with yeah it is a lot to deal with especially with um wombs that are uh giving birth and you never quite know when it's going to happen I mean sometimes I wish I could just I wish the baby could just tell me yeah I'm coming on this day at this time but it never quite works out like that so not having a schedule like a clear-cut schedule is what makes it a bit more difficult yeah yeah because every now and then I bet you just have a big surge like it

sounds like you're in at the moment with a court, you know, normal clients and a course and then births that come in. And it's just a case of like jump on the horse and run, I guess, and go with it. Just keep going because eventually it slows down anyway. There's always periods of quiet when all the clients are sort of, you know, gone and everyone's relaxed and there's no courses going on um so just trying to keep up now and then rest when the rest comes yeah I totally hear you I feel similarly in my bleeds often at the moment and I can beat myself up and be like you know you work in the menstruality field you're supposed to be resting and like well that doesn't help you know there's no point in bringing that voice in but also I loved what you said about just finding the moments of stillness because I find that

I have to sort of take my moments when I get them and I feel like I'm threading them onto a string like beads and throughout the day I do end up with a necklace of moments of calm but it's not that you know the whole day of lying on a sun lounger in the sun that I really wanted for example no that's that's I love that analogy that's beautiful because at the end of most days you'll always have enough beads to be able to reflect on and you know it's it's true taking what you can is so important yeah how is it i've got so many questions for you how is it for you if you're bleeding and then you're needed at a birth do you notice that you bring a different quality depending on where you're at in the cycle um yes definitely when i'm at a birth when i'm on my period I think it's uh I think my intuition is

definitely higher and I really rely on my intuition when it comes to birth when so when I do you know go to a birth and I'm bleeding I'm quite happy because I know that my intuition is going to make sure that everything goes as smoothly as possible you know and I'm a bit more calm I think I'm quite calm anyway but a bit more calm a bit more reserved which is good for birth at any point as well if I had to choose you know where I'd like to be in my cycle during every breath it would probably be when I'm bleeding actually. Wow that's amazing and it's beautiful to hear how it activates that intuition at the next level. Yeah. I know at

my birth that yeah that calm reservedness was so key in the people that were around me just knowing that they were there looking on but just standing back was like everything yeah exactly that's one of the most important things when it comes to being a birth worker in general you just have to know how to not make the situation about yourself and stay within your own bubble but be there if the mother needs you at any point and bleeding just does that sort of naturally in a natural way that's so true you get into a menstrual bubble and then that can sync with the mama bubble oh that's fascinating how is your pre-menstruum your inner autumn do you ever find that your state in that phase is challenging as a as a birth worker in your work yeah definitely I think

my um my patience is a bit less patient I find that when I'm if I'm working with a mother especially in the hospital during that time I tend to get quite frustrated at midwives and doctors and I'm a bit more snappy with them and you know my energy is a bit more um yeah less patient and not as reserved as when I'm bleeding so I prefer not to my last birth or the birth before that I could feel the the the frustration you know and I could feel the fact that I wasn't as reserved as usual and I wasn't as patient as usual or quiet as usual um and it worked out because that's what the mother needed at the time too so it did work out but yeah definitely it's a whole different me at that time yeah I relate I definitely feel like a whole different being in autumn as well I would love to hear more about your story of how this work evolved for you and particularly

your focus on the connection between the womb and the voice which I think is so from what I know from you and I've been like semi-stalking you on Instagram for a while that's quite key to your your work is this connection with the womb and the voice and it seems to start with your business name Baraka's Doula because you share the story of how Baraka Umm Ayman was the first black Muslim doula could you tell us about that um so Baraka Um Ayman was an Ethiopian slash Eritrean woman who helped the prophet my prophet Muhammad's um mother so she was there after she got married and during her pregnancy, during the birth, after birth, and then to the point where she passed away. So for me, when I was looking for

a name, so Baraka's doulas initially began as just a doula business. So just somewhere I could find clients and share things and blogs. And I was looking for a name that sort of encompassed a Muslim black healer to slash doula. And I was doing a lot of reading on Barak Allah Aiman and just everything she stood for. The fact that she wasn't a doula like back then, you't have called her a doula but she was a companion you know she was a woman's woman's companion and the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him is like one of the most he is the most important person within our religion and having the fact that his mother had support I thought that was a really a beautiful way to incorporate her into the work we do and the work I do um so yeah so she was the first black

Muslim doula within the Islamic tradition so within the Prophet's life and then he was the one who came forward with Islam. So she was the first one and that's how the name came about. It's beautiful to hear that story and feel the connection you have with her and to imagine her life yeah exactly like um the fact that she you know was quite nomadic as well and she came down from Ethiopia and Eritrea and came to Middle East and Arabia and spent her entire life there like she didn't leave and go back home after all the work she did so she's different and like somebody who loves to travel too she just ticked so many boxes and it made so much sense to have her name within our name. I imagine it gives you a sense of grounding and rootedness in your work to have a connection like that, such a soulful, meaningful connection. It's really beautiful that's that was an important thing I mean when I was first trying to find the name I remember it was like womb this or peace this and it was all great but I just didn't feel it in my bones I didn't feel the connection to it and I believe that you have to have a real

deep connection with your business otherwise when you feel like the ideas aren't coming, et cetera, there's no connection. There's no deep-rooted soul connection there. And Baraka Omeyeman is somebody I respect and admire completely. So having her reminding me of her every single time I open an email or a a website it really helps keep the momentum going I totally get that and it also speaks to the importance of the stories of women yeah the stories of women are so important and we'll get to this in our conversation because it's a theme that you share in your work of um gathering the stories of women within these traditions,

as in the women who have been companions throughout history. And it's not, you know, we don't tell a lot of stories about those women, do we? And are they not some of the most important people that have ever existed? Because they're literally supporting the birthing of new humans it's yeah it's another part of the of kind of women's history and lineage that could be buried I think and it's beautiful to see you illuminating it yeah um so have you always felt drawn to be a companion in this way is it something that you like wanted to do when you were younger or how did it evolve I think the thing that I always knew I wanted to do was to help people

that was the main thing that I always knew I wanted to do so it went from being a nurse to a doctor back to a nurse like that sort of medicalized form of being able to help people. But I knew I just didn't feel like being a medical professional was something that I could sustain in the long term. So I was really battling with the idea of becoming a midwife. I got into all the right universities and it just still didn't feel right I was just like something's off I you know and the people around me my family were really happy that I was like gonna pursue this midwifery NHS midwifery but it just didn't feel right for a

very long time and it wasn't until I met a doula who was very close to the family and she sort of shared what she does and shared you know how she got certified etc that I decided okay I'm not going to say no to midwifery but I'm going to put a put a full stop there for just a minute and pursue doula care etc and companionship and I did that and then I've never I never looked back at you know the midwifery NHS route I believe that it's really important for women to have women who they can communicate with on all levels so midwifery is very physical like that's what you're taught you're taught to be physical you're taught not to use your intuition because your intuition doesn't mean anything

um and you can connect to a woman emotionally but there's a limit to that there's a you know there's a number of things you're not supposed to ask so being a doula becoming a doula was like the best thing I could have done um and it showed me that that was the route that worked best for me and I feel like I've been able to help more women as a doula than I ever would have been able to help as a midwife does it feel like it's your calling oh definitely yeah 100 yeah and I started off with doula work and then through that and through learning more and traveling that's how the womb healing side of things came into it so it was the beginning and without becoming a doula I would have never fallen into the womb healing work that's what I was thinking because I'm just eternally obsessed with what is a calling?

How do we know what we're being called to do? How do we follow it? Because it's often like little whispers and we're not really sure what it is. But I love that your calling has sort of been calling you forward and like it looked like maybe nursing or being a doctor or being a midwife. And that was all to get you to there's this I just love it there's this intelligence at work that's getting you to this place where you are now where not only are you this companion but you're also doing this groundbreaking work of understanding the connections between our womb and health on all levels and vitality and wisdom and so oh it's exciting I've got chills

so the womb and the voice when did that piece start to fascinate you that's a good question I think it's always been something that I've found interesting because I grew up in a community where singing was a very big part of our day-to-day life. So singing and hand drums. And when I was really young, I used to sing Arabic poetry and I learned how to play the drum. And then from then, like it grew and grew and when I came back to the UK during big events in the Muslim calendar I would go and tour the UK and go to different people's houses and events and sing and it was all women and we would gather and we'd be using our voices so when I started looking into womb healing I just I found that connection kept coming up in different ways. Like I was in

Mauritania and the women there, they sing a lot as well. And you'll just enter a room and there'll be like 15 women and they're all singing. They're not doing anything else. They're just singing and relaxing and singing is a big, big part of their tradition and culture. Female singing is a big part of their tradition and culture. So I was researching a lot and looking into it a lot. And then I went through my own trauma when I was going through a divorce. And I used the voice to heal my womb during that period because I found that my period had stopped. And I was stressed and the trauma was around and I wasn't dealing with it. And during that time,

my period stopped. After I had managed to get it to be quite consistent for a while. So it was a big surprise for it just to stop completely like that and I used my voice so I used my voice by sharing how I was feeling with other women I sang and I used different techniques and after using those techniques I was able to have my period again straight away and it was a great period and it was just right and I realized how important the voice and the womb are how connected they are I've had thyroid issues like my mom has thyroid issues we all have thyroid issues and even that finding the connection between the thyroid and the womb and really looking deeper and deeper into it I realized how many women don't use their voice because they've been told that they can't use their voice or their voice isn't important enough and once I shared like my

first womb in the voice course the feedback that came from it was just groundbreaking for me you know it was absolutely life-changing we had women telling us you know I've yeah again not had my period then my period to come I've had really painful periods and they've managed to to be less painful now you know some lady was telling me that she's managed to share things with her mother that she's not been able to share for the past 10 years other women are telling me she's having like a much more um intimate and vulnerable relationship with her daughter so the the power of the woman the voice is it seems so simple when a lot of people enter the workshop and they're like well i think i speak enough i think you know i say what i need to say but it's about connecting the two and allowing your your

womb to have a voice i think that's the key in this entire project that i've been looking into it's giving your womb a voice and allowing your womb to speak and through that releasing and expressing yourself um and connecting to your womb in a way that you could never have done before wow you just said so many amazing things that i want to explore more i'd love to start first with, it sounds like essentially you sang your period back. Yeah. And I'd love to hear more about, yeah, what was happening in you due to the divorce? And what was it about finding this freedom through your throat and your voice that you think or that you sense or that you intuit was able to facilitate that healing um i think through my marriage i was very i was silenced for a good amount of years

physically emotionally spiritually and i had forgotten how to speak my truth when I needed to to the point where my voice was foreign to me for after a while like I didn't recognize my own voice anymore and that happened for quite a few years and then when the divorce happened it was quite emotional and traumatic and suddenly I needed to speak and I didn't know how to because the womb and the voice are so connected and they mirror each other So my womb mirrored my voice and said, okay, so now we need to go silent as well. And therefore my periods stopped. And so all of that stagnant energy within my body was all tied up and knotted in all these places and had no way of being expressed and being released. So by sitting down and making intention first and foremost that I'm going to release whatever needs releasing from my womb and my voice

and release it through the voice because I can't release it through the womb because my womb has stopped bleeding. Yes. And then singing and expressing myself in a very feminine way really singing it's quite a feminine art form and a feminine way to express and doing so with women so when I was singing and speaking and expressing myself I was always surrounded by other women older women younger women you know women in all stages of their lives and And they all held space for me too. And held space for me to be able to express myself without judgment and with gentleness.

And through that expression and through singing out loud, which is also another important thing in making sure it's out loud and it's heard by others too. I was able to really move all of that stagnant energy, move that sadness and pain and trauma that my womb had just soaked up like a sponge and made like a blockage there. I was able to remove all of that energy and after removing the energy it's like my womb said okay you've released me now and your voice is now free and you've learned how to use your voice again now I'm safe enough and ready enough to bleed and release from the womb wow wow and I can imagine the cascade of hormones that come with that you know like you said there's this huge connection between the womb and the thyroid and yeah isn't it fascinating

to think how the spiritual emotional levels then have a healing impact on the physical and definitely like even if i look at my thought my thyroid issues during that time i had gotten my thyroid to a point where i didn't need to take medication but i had to keep on top of it like it was something I had to always go back to and make sure that everything's okay, get a blood test, make sure everything's stable. And during that time of not using my voice and having my period stop,

I was in the hospital for my thyroid and my heart rate was so high. And the doctors were just like we for some reason it's not going down and we're trying to give you all this medication for it to go down and it was like my body said well no this is a spiritual thing that needs doing and an emotional thing and you can give us as many tablets as you like and I remember they just kept giving me tablet after tablet I had all these you know heart monitors on me and there's no change and the doctors were you know really flabbergasted and it was at that point where I was like no this is a spiritual and emotional issue and if I don't

deal with it in that way and keep taking medication nothing's going to change and we're just going to be sitting here for a good couple of weeks but the thyroid too and I feel like a lot of women once we start talking about the voice in the womb you know they'll say you know I have a thyroid issue and these thyroid issues a lot like if I look at my own family and the fact that we have thyroid issues the women in my family have always been silenced since my great-grandmother and this is specifically on my mother's side so my mother is half Scottish, my grandmother is Scottish so we have this Scottish McVitie lineage and if we look at all of these Scottish women they all were silenced for whatever reason and they all come from quite difficult backgrounds um and they all had thyroid

issues you know because they didn't use their voice they all had their thyroid gland affected in some way because all of this energy building up over years and years and years generationally and then their own energy just building up, their thyroid just couldn't take it anymore and some of them were hyperactive or underactive. And then that's passed on to their daughters and their daughters' daughters. And then I come forth and I have this underlying issue of thyroid issues.

So if I don't keep my voice clear, if I don't keep my womb energetically clear, then I know that my thyroid is going to be affected. Wow. It's a powerful legacy you're going to leave for future generations that you've cleared this pathway. I feel like it's something that many people in our generation are able to do now like there's the resources there's the support there's the community to heal some of these ancestral patterns that we've received it's it's an amazing time it is it really is I mean I know my grandmother didn't have the resources that we have now you know it's so important that we keep growing and understanding these techniques so that our children for generations have even more than we have now yeah so true I think our grandmothers would be smiling at us right now definitely definitely um I've got my own personal experience of this which I'd just

love to share briefly when I was young coming into the world 18 19 I had a relationship that was very difficult because he was just a young guy he went off and slept with other people and I contracted STDs from him and at that young age like now I know you know chlamydia lots of people get it you know it's unfortunate but you know you can take some pills and it and it goes back then it was it was huge I felt a huge stigma and so much shame that I even though he was quite an abusive person and really an alcoholic person I stayed in a relationship with him and I shut everything in myself down shut down shut down because my intuition knew I don't want to be with this guy

he's actively cheating on me you know he's hurting me but I shut it all down because of the power of the shame I didn't want to talk to anyone about it and it took me so many years years and years and years of actually repeating that pattern by accident of getting with guys that weren't good for me to finally you know I won't go into it but all going all around the world and the houses you know and different relationships and then I found myself I took myself into a circle of women and I was in a year long program with a woman called Jules Wingfield, who's an amazing healer whose teachings are rooted in the womb in many ways. And I sat with this group of what, probably 18 of us. I was able to bring my voice. I was able to share what happened. I was able to cry. I was able to roar, roar you know and have them receive it we sang together too

I'm so with you on the importance of us singing together and I know that that was key to just freeing up so much in my life then like my work started to make more sense and I found my now husband and I just and it was that being together with women and being able to bring my voice that seemed to free up so much of that. Yeah, that's beautiful. I mean, shame is one of those things that totally just eats you from the inside out. That's why I also believe sharing your stories is so important because I know I share quite a bit about certain things that have happened in my life and I've had people ask me like why do you don't you feel embarrassed or ashamed to share such things with people you don't know and I think that's that's the problem with shame it makes you feel like you have to hold it in and you can't share it with people.

And the amount of people that, the amount of women who can heal from hearing another woman's story is incredible. As you said, sitting with women and being heard with women, I always like to say that we're taught that if a woman, if women live in like a closed space, their wombs eventually begin to synchronize and their periods will sort of synchronize and they'll have been the same place in their cycle together. But what I truly believe is that when you enter a space with women intentionally as soon as you're in that space your your your wombs begin to start to synchronize in that second so if you're sitting with a bunch of women or like when we like to do women groups or singing groups here as soon as all this women these women come

together and we're all sitting down with the intention of expressing ourselves all of our wounds are knowingly to us are beginning to synchronize and connect and restore themselves and take what they need from there give what they need there and it's an unseen beautiful dance that our wombs are doing in that second. And the healing that comes from wombs for our own womb, I think it's really magical and it's really healing. And it's really, even though we can't see it and we're not, a lot of us aren't paying much attention to it.

The work that our wombs are doing silently energetically you know just by hugging there's one there's a saying in islam that when you hug a woman or you hug a man you know if you hug somebody your heart to heart and your hearts begin to beat as one and there's a lot of healing that goes on when you're hugging somebody i believe it's the same thing when you hug a woman and it's womb to womb, you know, just the way it's heart to heart, it's womb to womb and your wombs are connecting and healing and giving and taking and, you know, so yeah, women need women. We do, we do, we do. I totally agree. If you're loving this conversation about the womb and the power that lives in your connection to your womb, we'd like to invite you into another womb-based way to explore and befriend and embody your power

with Alexandra and Sharni's book wild power discover the magic of the menstrual cycle and awaken the feminine path to power you can order your copy today at wildpowerbook.com and if you're heading towards or are in menopause then alessandra and sharni's new book wise power is your guide to harnessing the transformative power of this phase of your life of the menopause initiation and you can find more about that book which comes out on september the 20th at wisepowerbook.com one of the things i loved in one of your posts recently is you were make a connection between you know like you've said the the larynx the voice box and the cervix right and they actually look incredibly similar in anatomically right which is amazing isn't it and often midwives and imagine you do this as a doula that you actually actively invite people to

relax their throats in order to open their cervix during birth oh that's where I was going to go well I was just hearing you talk about women needing women, I was thinking back to when I was in labor and it was during lockdown. So they had us all in this triage room and it was taking ages to get through. And I was alone in labor in this. No, sorry. I wasn't alone. I didn't have my birth people with me. I didn't have my husband and my daughter with me, but I did have

these two other laboring women so it was me and these two other women and we were we were like ping-ponging with uh contractions and I was the I was the noisiest one I used like sound a lot I was like oh you know groaning to get through I used my voice a lot in late in labor and one of them was really silent but you could just see when she was one but one was really deep into labor and she was making quite a lot of noise too but the togetherness that I felt you know and although that was not the ideal way to be in labor at all in many ways there was there was a real gift about you know being in labor with those two women at the same time that something was shared between us I could not even show I could give voice to it but something like you described was

shared between us so yeah that you talk about the connection between the larynx and the womb and how like do you do this as a doula that you all invite women to to relax their throats in order to open their cervix oh yeah definitely that's one of the the first things that i will make sure the mother's doing during labor the the larynx and the uterus in as a whole are connected via a nerve that goes directly down. And when your jaw is tight, your cervix is tight. And when your jaw is relaxed, your cervix automatically loosens up and becomes a little bit squishy and is then able to open up which is exactly what contractions are basically trying to do is open up your cervix so if your cervix is tight and then you're having these contractions you're basically fighting the um the whole purpose of the contraction

and then the the pain of these contractions and surges is going to be amplified because if you fight your body it's just gonna cause more pain in general so the first thing we do is tell the mother to loosen her jaw and i even like to tell every woman to loosen your jaw especially doing it right now do it right now especially on your period because when if you're like really tight during a period and your jaw's always really tight you're you're trying to bleed and you're trying to release but then your cervix is you know trying to squeeze itself shut so a lot of that blood isn't going to be able to be released and that's when you find um women who have a lot of dark blood or black blood after their period is finished because they've been so tight they've not

let enough of the blood release it's got an old and oxidized and then it's you know coming out afterwards um so it's so important to keep your jaw relaxed and i mean it goes back to what we were talking about before singing singing because you can't have a tense jaw when you're singing it's not yeah you have to relax your jaw so it's even beautiful to know that if you are singing and expressing yourself through song um your cervix is open i mean you know the cervix sometimes during the cycle it's going to be tighter than usual but in general it's about keeping it as loose as possible so that it can be in the position that it wants to be in for your womb and your uterus what would you say to someone who isn't part of a culture of singing in their lives you know that it's not um just part of what they've grown up with or what they're surrounded

by but they can hear the wisdom of what you're sharing right now what would you say to sort of encourage someone to use their voice more in that way? I would just say, you know, just sing. I mean, I feel like everybody has one song that they're connected to and one song that brings up a lovely memory and that they're connected to and they probably can, they're not ashamed of how they sing it or how it comes across because that's an important part of using singing for womb healing it's making sure that you do so without judgment so it's a form of somatic healing because you're doing so without judgment you're allowing it to be released any type of way it needs to be and you're not judging it and you're being gentle with it so i would say whatever song like it doesn't have to be a particular song it doesn't have to be in a particular language, a particular type of song, it doesn't have to have a specific meaning at all. It's just, it's just sing, just let it out, you know, just let it out however it wants

to come out. And it's a beautiful, a beautiful way to begin that is through humming um and just humming tunes humming you know anything that comes forward for you and if you begin with humming that might be enough for you that might be enough to remove this energy and keep the flow between your womb and your voice open um and if it's not then you'll know and you'll feel it. And then you can, you know, sing actual words, even nursery rhymes and things like that. I know one lady was telling me that she was singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star for some reason. That was the song that kept coming to mind. And as she was meditating with her hands on her womb, she just kept singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

So there's no right or wrong yeah yeah and also maybe in the car like I think that's a place where people can feel safe because there's no one listening you're in a little sealed box and you're just moving through the world I've been um belting out tunes while Artie's sitting in the back I've been like singing my like favorite songs properly like like um let it go from frozen i'm a bit late to that party but that's one of my favorite songs to sing let it go and it is it's just so freeing and so it brings it creates joy doesn't it in the body exactly like even in the shower whenever you need to just close the door and just let it out yeah great advice you also share

a couple of other practices for helping to cultivate this connection between your womb and your throat and one of them is simply to place a hand on a belly um hand on your throat take deep breaths and allow whatever your thoughts are to be spoken out loud which sounds really simple and i imagine it's actually very profound what happens for people oh yeah very profound again that's the way of giving your womb a voice and touch is so healing generally i'm placing one hand on the womb woman one hand in the voice you've connected the two physically and consciously and intentionally and then it's very it's very much like it works in a way as like intuition by holding them both you allow them to speak the way

they need to speak and it works the same way as singing in terms of physically when it comes to the voice if you're trying to heal the wound with the voice you have to express out loud that's the key here out loud expression even if nobody's going to listen to you um or you're alone it has to be out loud because you know the opposite of depression is expression and we're trying to express it and do the opposite because inwardly is silent by expressing it and becoming loud you release it so that technique is one of the most simple techniques and i think it's really important to find simple ways to do these things because life has become so complicated social media is you know there's so much going on so much stimulation there has to be these simple

techniques to be able to connect to yourself that don't take too long because i know we're in this fast-paced life right now but they don't take too long and they give you the healing that you need in that moment and in that time so that technique was one that I came up with after spending a lot of time with women in Mauritania and I felt as though it for me personally it worked every single time I did it. And then when I began to share the technique with women as well, like so many of them said, like, I didn't expect anything because I thought it was so simple and, you know,

just a hand here and a hand there. I didn't think I would actually say anything or express myself. But then I started crying and then I, you know, I started singing and I started, one woman said she was even like roaring or strongly expressing herself so yeah that technique is one of my favorite and the one that I use for general womb healing but also when it comes to pregnancy and birth when you're in labor as you said you expressed through your voice and let that loudly yeah that's that's amazing like so many

women even in labor they'll hold their jaw tight and they'll be silent they don't feel like they can be heard in such a vulnerable intimate difficult time in their lives the one time where you would think that a woman would have no inhibition and just express herself um so many women you know they hold their jaw tight and they don't want to make noise they feel like they still won't be heard and they won't their voice is still not important during this time so even during labor placing one hand on your belly you know on your baby one hand on your womb it gives you that that channel to be able to release the the energy through your voice beautiful it sounds like that time in Mauritania was very transformative for you oh extremely I I would not be doing the work I'm doing now

if I hadn't gone to Mauritania. And even if we look at what you just, what you said in the beginning about callings and the callings, your callings of life and how they're all connected. Again, if I had never gotten divorced, I went to Mauritania because I got divorced and I needed just to do something different. If I had never gotten divorced I would

have never experienced that you know having my period stop and using my voice I would have never gone to Mauritania and if COVID never came I would never have stayed in Mauritania wow you know so everything sort of made sense and pushed me to Mauritania and being there it's I mean it's very simple it's extremely extremely simple I mean it's still the desert but the women there are so connected to themselves and their cycles um and to their intuition and to other women and um yeah I was able to really really learn from them. You wrote a beautiful post about your West African heritage and how it influenced your work and I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes so that people can explore that and read it because I found it really beautiful to read about how well you said the elder generations are called

back to the realm from where they came the knowledge is buried within them returning to the earth you know that there's this uh lineage of wisdom of this history of women healers that we need to keep alive yeah you are keeping it alive i'll try to keep it alive it's it history is a really important part of Islam in general you're told to know where you come from and know your family roots is a really really important part of the tradition the religious tradition but also as a West African person and also if I look at my Scottish heritage too we're all very much connected to our roots you know and our surnames are connected to our roots and whatever you do in your life I believe that if you look at your past and look at your history you're going to see how you have come out of this looking at my past I can see how

doing the healing work is part of my DNA and something I can't run away from. And if I chose to run away from, I don't know where I'd be right now. But we all have. We all have it within our blood and we all have it within our ancestors and we all. It's just it's beautiful to see the connections between yourself and your ancestors when you're doing the work that you're supposed to be doing and you're not fighting against the struggle of what you think you should be doing and what you want to be doing and what you should be doing because it's what you're supposed to be doing right now

with this journey that we have right now on Earth. Yeah, it sounds like it creates real alignment to know where we've come from yeah you write a lot about islamic womb healing and you often refer to the quran in your writings in your work so i just love to hear yeah what is islamic womb healing for you and how does your faith uh serve you and weave into the work that you do? So growing up Muslim, a lot of the teachers, no, most of the teachers actually, and people who, you know, the sheikhs, the imams, those people, they were all males. And I remember having a few questions growing up.

There was always these points where I would have a question that I needed answered. And every single time I would ask these questions, no one could answer them. And it kept happening, kept happening. And then once there was one question I had about something to do with women. And all these questions always had something to do with women and no one could answer them and then the last question that came for me was really like I needed it to be answered because it was just you know all consuming and I asked somebody and he just outright said I don't know because I've never been interested in this and so I don't know what the answer is and that was sort of a light bulb light bulb moment for me because I've been around a lot of female scholars and female Muslims

Muslim women who had a lot of knowledge and were able to help and assist but there were really there weren't too many of them especially here in like the UK and the West there weren't too many of these women and so women just had to go to men because that's all there was available um but it was so true i just thought myself yeah of course you're not going to know the answer to this because even if it's a simple period question you're not going to know the answer because you don't have a period and why would you want to know you know why what would make you think you want to know this you know you need the answer to this question um and so when that happened i made a vow and i was like okay i'm going to only learn from female scholars learn my history from female scholars and you know questions i have about the religion

and when i did that suddenly this whole other form of Islam came forward. And I call it the womb healing, but it's not called womb healing in so many words. But that's basically what it is. It was a form of womb healing. And once I dove into that, I was like, wait a second. There's so much that we've just been that's been stolen from us because we've allowed the men to take on this knowledge and because we've done that all these questions things like placing your hand on your womb the meaning of women arabic and the position of a woman and femininity in the universe and this dimension.

You know, how to deal with each part of your cycle and period and how to connect to your period and why the period is such a sacred, sacred part of our lives. You know, I wasn't taught that when I said I was nine when I started my period and I remember a man saying to me oh well you're a woman now and that was it I was like what what's what's that mean what's what's you know and suddenly there's all this knowledge and all of this information and I was I just felt really like as a Muslim woman we can sometimes feel very shunned and feel very just not feel as important as the men in the world you know you start to feel like was there a mistake why was I born a woman why are there even women in the world it can be very very very painful and experiencing all these female scholars who had all the information they weren't hiding the

information either they were just like well no one wants to listen to us we we've been here and we've been sitting here and we've had this for generations and it's been passed down from our mothers and our mothers mothers um but nobody's been interested in hearing what we have to say. So, again, when I went to Mauritania, I was able to find these women, find these older women, and a lot of them are older now because, you know, the new generation isn't interested in this knowledge anymore. And I was able to sit with them and learn about the womb from an Islamic perspective. Because all the womb healing work I had done before, it came from more of a Buddhist or New Age perspective. And a lot like I was very connected to the Buddhist community. And I do a lot of meditations and silent retreats and things like that. And I find a lot of healing and benefit from it. But it was really important as a Muslim

and as somebody who's come from Muslims, like my family and my history, it was really important for me to find the connection between the two and then share the connection. And when I began to share it, the amount of women who were just so surprised, I mean, we had mixed reactions. Some people were like, no, what are you doing this isn't Islam you're you know you're you're messing it all up and those were mostly men anyway

um and then we had the women who were like wow I've been searching my entire life and you're sharing all of this and it's just making me it's reminding me of things that my grandmother used to tell me back home or my mother used to tell me back home or something an auntie told me years and years ago and suddenly it's all making sense we've just lost it for you know a good couple of years I really want to thank you and celebrate you for your courage and your tenacity to keep following your questions inside until you found these women to learn from. Because now, you know, you're sharing this in a really powerful way. So I want to point people to this resource. If they're interested, you know, you talk about, like, for example, the names of God for the different phases of the cycle, the how to connect to your womb during Ramadan or tips for menstruation during Ramadan. There's so many, such a wealth of information that you're sharing with the world.

And, you know, people are loving it. You can see that people are really engaging. So, yeah. Wow. What a beautiful story. Thank you. Like a reclamation story. It liberates something in me to hear it. Thank you. Thank a reclamation story. It liberates something in me to hear it.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for giving me the platform to be able to share this and express myself again and do a lot of healing through expression as well right now as I sit here on my period. So, yeah, a big, big big big thank you is there anything you'd like to share in closing as a final thought about the womb and the voice hmm the woman the voice there's so much to say about the woman the voice i mean i could i feel like i could speak about it for days and days there's always something popping up i would love to i'd love to say um um i would say and i'm saying this because i was having a conversation about this recently with somebody and someone asked me how do you know if you have womb trauma or stagnant energy within your womb and your voice because if you've not been something like I've mentioned my divorce and things like that like if you've not had like a big

shift in your life do I really need to heal my womb and do I really need to heal my voice and I would say in this last piece of advice for all of us um myself included sometimes uh you know I think I'm fine and I'm not fine and I need some healing and I need to use my voice and open my womb up and if that is you and you're a woman and you feel as though you your womb is closed off um or not closed off or you feel like you don't know where to start you don't know where to begin um i would say just sit down anywhere comfortably place one hand on your womb one hand on your throat and take three deep belly breaths into your belly and out just to make some space and just speak your truth whatever that may be wherever that may not be also if you expect it to be something and then

it's something totally different if it's a sound if it's a sentence if it's what tears whatever it is just give yourself that space to express and start that healing and begin that healing it's been such a joy to connect with you today i feel i feel this freedom in me and this healing in me so thank you so much shakira thank you for having me ah thank you again for joining us on the menstruality podcast it's so good to have you with us please do leave us a review on apple podcasts if you're loving the podcast it'll help us reach more people and I really look forward to being with you in our next episode and until then keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm