Ep. 92 - Psychedelic Cervix: Can Childbirth Evoke Pleasure Instead of Pain with Dr. Jenny Martin
Childbirth is often defined by pain, fear, and medical intervention— but what if there was another way? Ancient wisdom traditions understood birth as a sacred, transformative process that could activate deep states of pleasure and connection through a woman’s primal brain-heart-womb axis. Pioneers are now rediscovering these possibilities, teaching that our very biology is wired for ecstasy during labor and delivery when supported by safety, trust, and an open mind.
This episode explores the profound yet often overlooked capacities of the female body during birth and sexuality with our guest, Dr. Jenny Martin. Dr. Martin is a pioneer in the field of orgasmic birthing and the psychedelic cervix model. Through her teachings, she helps women understand their innate capacity for spiritual experience and pleasure during childbirth by activating their genital-brain and heart-cervix connections.
Listen in as Debra and Dr. Martin reveal how a woman’s unique genital-brain connection allows her cervix and uterus to directly interface with the brain and central nervous system, simple techniques to help activate the “psychedelic cervix”, how endogenous psychedelics in women’s bodies can help create an effortless, nurturing passage for both mother and baby, societal myths around female sexuality and spirituality, and science-backed case for our innate human capacity for sacred pleasure and consciousness expansion.
Episode Highlights:
02:32 Unlocking a Woman’s Sexual Potential Through Birth
06:34 Psychedelics and Neuroprotection
13:42 Challenging Societal Norms
17:36 The Psychedelic Cervix
24:19 Sexual Empowerment During Pregnancy
28:55 Reclaiming Feminine Power Through Surrender
Episode Transcript
Debra Pascali-Bonaro: When you think about pleasure and childbirth, what feelings do you have? Does it evoke a sense of connection to your brain, to your heart and to your yoni? If you could learn how to activate this deep state of pleasure and create a blissful birth, would you like to learn how then you’re going to really enjoy today’s podcast? Guest, if you said yes, as she shares about the psychedelic cervix? How can childbirth activate pleasure instead of pain?
Hi, I’m Debra Pascali-Bonaro, Founder and Director of Orgasmic Birth, and host of the Orgasmic Birth Podcast. I am truly honored and excited today to welcome Dr. Jenny Martin. She teaches programs on the psychedelic cervix which focus on the shift in consciousness that sexual pleasure can produce for women and their partners. The psychedelic cervix model of female pleasure is based on the unique genital brain connection in women. How and when activated through lovemaking or childbirth, it can trigger the release of naturally occurring psychedelics in the brain and body. Psychedelic cervix training helps women learn the scientific basis for mystical experiences during sexual intimacy and in childbirth, and how to activate them for themselves. I’m also really honored to say that Dr. Jenny will be a guest teacher in our upcoming orgasmic birth practitioner program.
Dr. Jenny, I am so excited to welcome you to our podcast today.
Dr. Jenny Martin: Oh, thank you so much, Debra, I’m so grateful to you for being such a pioneer in this field and opening people’s minds and hearts to what’s possible with birth. That information could truly change the world. It really could. And you have done more than anyone as far as I can tell. There’s a few others, but that has really brought that to the world. I’ve just honored to be here.
Debra Pascali-Bonaro: Thank you so much. I know that each of us that have this passion, it started somewhere within ourselves. Can you share a little bit about your own personal journey that brought you here to the psychedelic cervix?
Dr. Jenny Martin: Yes. We were talking before about your great grandmother, and how she really inspired you to understand that there could be a different experience in birth. In my own family coming from Ireland, I was born in Ireland and the influence of the church and the culture was very aversive to sexual pleasure to childbirth being a pleasurable experience and all of that. So my whole journey was actually being disconnected from my body, not feeling sexual pleasure was something that was possible for women. And it was only after actually meeting a partner and realizing, okay, we could have a sexless marriage. It would be possible. He was willing to actually, okay, I’m not gonna have you do this for me, but I want to be with you. And because of me wanting to have the full experience of our relationship, I realized, okay, I could have lived without this. But I think I do want to explore this as a possibility for this relationship. And that’s what began my journey. And for me, what I really needed to do, because what had locked me in this mindset of pleasure is not right. And so possible was actually a religious teaching. And what I needed to do was to learn some of the things in my religious background.
My partner gave me a book called The Woman With The Alabaster Jar by Margaret Starbird. Actually from a local woman that lives here, she wrote it in the 1990’s, and it really helps me unlearn my Catholic tradition. And it helps me realize that there was a beautiful sexual teaching. Even my own tradition blew my mind. What we realize today about the importance of the brain, beliefs and expectations, if you have the belief that something is not going to happen, it’s not possible or even that it’s wrong. Your body can be capable of producing these experiences. But because you have this mental delete, like this block, your body won’t do it. And so for me, it was actually realizing it. Not only is it possible, not only were we designed this way, and that led me on the whole journey into goddess cultures and how not only birth, but just our bodies in general, were celebrated throughout their entire lifetime. Not just younger women, but the entire life spectrum of being sexual beings and being empowered. And that gave me an insight to something that’s possible.
The next thing that happened was I started to have these experiences organically during lovemaking with my partner. I didn’t even know about the cervix and orgasmic potential. I didn’t know about it until I went and looked into it later in an academic sense, but I first had the experience of it. And again, the experience would have happened if I hadn’t unlearned some stuff. But when I had the experience of it, I realized, oh, my god, there is so much power in a woman’s body. So much power like shape shifting. The very first time that happened for me, this sounds bizarre to say, but I felt like I could walk out to the street and pick up a vehicle with my hands. So much power. And the thing is because I had this understanding of ancient times when this was acceptable, I didn’t hold back. I was able to fully be. I gotta be honest with you, I am talking as someone as a incest survivor. So seriously. No, but here’s the good news. My identity is not as a survivor. Actually, the divine design you could say of sexuality of this in powerful shape shifting consciousness expanding experience. Yes, there was some learning to be safe in my body. Again, I had to go through purging the grief and the anger. Sure, there were some steps there. But the good news underneath all of that wasn’t a broken person. And it’s the same for everyone. This aspect of you, this primal aspect of you that operates on the realm of quantum physics is not ever disturbed. It’s there.
And so to be able to get to that, so it’s not like, I’ve had a bad experience that happened to me. I’m ruined forever. And I have to try to rebuild myself. When you get rid of the anger, the pain and all of that, underneath all of that is something very beautiful. So when I had the experience and I felt this power surging through my body, I’m like, what on earth? Why do I actually feel more connected to the Divine than I’ve ever had? I had beautiful experiences in nature as a child with a divine, but why did sex give me even bigger, a more amplified experience of that? Why do I feel so fused to a presence that’s beyond my own personal being? I had never heard of psychedelics. I had never heard of all of that. I had never really experienced that later on in my life. I actually did go to Peru and did ayahuasca, but I’m here to say, doing ayahuasca which has DMT in it, which is the same that’s in us didn’t match sex. Sex was better. It was better, seriously. And pure.
By the way, if anyone’s thinking about doing ayahuasca, guess what you have to do? Vomit and have diarrhea to activate. Here’s the deal. People are spending fortunes and traveling all over the world to do these plant medicines. And those are some of the things you have to do. The shaman said to us, if you don’t vomit, and if you don’t take care of purging, we were in this room to do the experience we’re not gonna let you enter the room and go. We have to monitor you because it could be toxic if you don’t purge like that. And then once you purge, then all the psychoactive experience happens. Well, here’s the deal. People need to know that these substances are inside of us. And by the way, it’s in a woman’s placenta. DMT is in a women’s center. I didn’t know that. Now, here’s the deal. What would happen during birth? Why would divine design happen during birth? Well, part of what DMT does in the human body, and it’s actually been shown to be a neurotransmitter as well. But what it does, it has neuroprotective elements to it so it reduces inflammation as well. So babies go down the vaginal canal, and it could lose oxygen or something like that. DMT surges oxygen. That’s part of what it does. It has an oxidative effect, and it protects the brain so there’s a functional aspect to it. And do you know that they’re using and researching DMT? Stroke victims are given DMT because it grows brain cells. When you study the female body and all of this, you realize, oh, my God, we are so powerful. We are so amazing. All of these things kick in if we don’t have a lot of interventions. Medical interventions. You’ve done a beautiful job in your work not shaming anyone if they need to go do that. 100%, absolutely. But it is most definitely going back to your great grandmother.
We just went to the simplicity of letting our body do what our body knows how to do, that these things happen. These things happen not because I teach programs and stuff. But it’s kind of an oxymoron because it’s not about, oh, my god, I gotta learn this stuff to make my body do that. You don’t have to learn this stuff to make your body, it’s more about, I gotta learn what am I doing that’s blocking this. Am I too in my head? I don’t feel safe. All of those different things that block us from the experience, but the experience is wired into you, and it’s the way that you could say it was designed to be. You get the benefit of this ecstatic state. The baby gets a safe passage. This unlearning thing has been so powerful for me because I grew up in a family of women, disempowered, didn’t have empowerment around their sexuality. And part of that was just the alcoholic culture. You just expected that if you got beaten up, it was just part of what happened at home by your husband. And it was kind of enforced by some of the religious practices of men disciplining the right. It’s just a very toxic thing. And so to unravel myself from all of that, and to unravel some of the Christian teachings, one of the things that I learned as a child was something in the Bible that said, God said you’re gonna have pain in childbirth. I’m telling you, this is a man made invention of what’s true. Because if we do believe in a divinity, and I do, we have to go back to, how are we designed? Well, guess what? We are designed to be able to give birth without pain. For instance, the French Dr. Michel Odent, he has talked about the fetal ejection reflex. I don’t know if you’ve had them there. With that surge of oxytocin during the birth process, the delivery can happen even without a lot of labor.
Plus the fact that Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University, the one that discovered that the cervix is orgasmic. He has shown that cervical vaginal stimulation happens organically during birth. That stimulation in and of itself, which can also happen to a woman during intercourse. It lights up a part of the brain that doesn’t light up in a man’s brain. The periodontal gray, which modulates pain in general, but it also lights up during ecstatic pleasure. So what this tells us is we have another built-in mechanism just through the actual stimulation of the vaginal canal during birth or during intercourse. It could go into pain when you fear. But if we have enough safety, enough oxytocin running around in our body, it will go into pleasure. So what this tells me is I like to look at science, and I like to look at what I’ve been told about my creator. My creator did not intend us to have pain, because all these mechanisms are designed for us to have ecstatic experiences. So it doesn’t even make sense to me when I look at that, and the other thing is oxytocin grows brain cells. And there’s reason to believe that our evolution from bonobo’s. That female bonobo’s are all about sexual pleasure. They are unique in the fact that they weren’t having sex necessarily to have reproduction. But actually, to have just play and pleasure. And what has been shown is that emphasis on constantly producing oxytocin through pleasure, through sexual pleasure actually built the brain that we now have advantage of today. So it was the female body, the pleasure focus that brought us to where we are today. So when I look at all of that, I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods.
There’s even an article from some Italian doctors in the 1990’s or so in an academic journal showing a female fetus masturbating in utero. Female fetus masturbating in utero. So again, breaking down these mistruths is pleasurable. As myself growing up, there’s this instinctual to go and explore yourself and to masturbate in pleasure and stuff. But at the back of my head be like, right. And then it was only later that I’m learning some of that. And then looking at science, oh, my God, if you know the little babies in there are actually masturbating, then this is the most natural thing. Female pleasure is the most natural thing for us. And shame is something that we have learned as a society, but it’s not the way we were designed.
Debra Pascali-Bonaro: So beautiful. Oh, my goodness. You’ve taken us on your own journey, but given us so much to think about. I know that many people that are listening are probably looking at those beliefs, their own family, shame. We’ve talked a lot about, and you’ve brought into it. But now for someone who’s listening and saying, okay, I know that I need to take time and unpack my own story, family and religious beliefs. How do I activate this? And you talk about a brain genital connection. A heart genital connection. What are some of the ways you can encourage women that are listening, whether they’re planning a pregnancy, they’re pregnant, even postpartum? This is great for birth, but it’s good for life. How can they start activating that psychedelic cervix?
Dr. Jenny Martin: Absolutely. You mentioned the gentle brain connection, the heart. So one of the things to realize is, men and women are not the same when it comes to sexuality. And sometimes, women’s magazines give us a bad rap. And they say, oh, women, they take so long to orgasm. Men can be just ready on a dime. So much of this, including birth is seen through some kind of negative lens like something we were gypped by evolution or something. And it’s just not true. In fact, I would say the opposite. Yes, it does. There is a lead up that’s required. There is foreplay that’s required. There is time to say that, but why is that? Because the female body can get into such a deep state of bliss in divine union and all of that during sex and birth. One of the reasons is the vagus nerve, the major mind body pathway; it connects to a woman’s cervix and uterus, and connects to the heart. It connects to all major organs, but it doesn’t connect to the sexual organs of a man. They’ve been looking for it, but it isn’t.
So what that tells us is she doesn’t feel safe, or her yoni is not going to open right. It also tells us in unwanted sexual situations. When a woman blames herself later, why did I let that guy do that to me? Why did I let that happen? Well, because your vagus nerve is 80% afferent, so there’s a two way communication going from brain to body. 80% of the communication is actually your body telling, your brain’s stuff. And 20% is your brain dictating. That means that her body will sense if someone’s a threat and shut things down. Do a freeze response even before the brains like, hey, what’s going on? And so she won’t even eat, be able to speak because the vagus nerve innervates the throat. She won’t even be able to say, get the heck off me. Her arms will be immobilized. She won’t even be able to run. Don’t blame yourself. It’s your body’s protective mechanism. But also to realize, okay, a lot of women have had a freeze response at some time in the past. So working with the body in a way since they touch is a very important practice, which is with a partner being able to receive non erotic touch. So you’re naked, but you’re not ending up in orgasms. So there’s no performance goal, there’s no like, okay, he’s doing this. She’s doing this for me. I got it, ready to go to the next level in a few minutes. No, that’s off the table. You’re just receiving touch.
Another aspect of this is we are not just physical beings, we are run by biophotons electromagnetic energy. There is a vibrational aspect to us that actually works on the quantum level. So when you’re doing this very light touch, you’re actually activating the bio field. We can now measure with a scientific measurement called gas discharge, visualization, the bio field around the body, which you could call the aura or whatever. That field can be activated for a very light touch. And so helping a woman get back into her body, feel safe in her body. Safety is paramount for anything happening. And also realize in utero, your heart forms as the first organ. It forms you for your brain. So your heart has a big role to play in terms of your cervix. In fact, the heart and your heart actually generates as much oxytocin as your hypothalamus. So your heart is actually generating oxytocin’s as well. And the HeartMath Institute has done amazing research on the heart. And one of the things that they show, scientifically speaking, is that when we are on feelings of love, appreciation, gratitude, all of those types of emotions, we’re activating this field, this electromagnetic field of the heart. Now, connecting with your baby to that field is so important. There’s a synchronization between the heartbeats of your baby and your heart. There’s a synchronization that happens when they’re in the hospital, and there’s all the monitors on a child if they’re taken away from you and they’re monitored. I have some journal articles on that that’s actually interrupting the synchronization that’s happening. And so because we are run by electromagnetic energy, when there’s all of these devices hooked up to the baby, it’s actually overriding and interfering with the natural electromagnetic energy in the baby.
But one of the things to realize is, we actually open the cervix, connect to the cervix, the orgasmic power and all of that by first opening the heart. The heart and the cervix are absolutely connected. The cervix is shaped in a doughnut shape for a reason. It’s very important for shape and physics. It can move energy very powerfully when it is activated. So when it’s at a quantum level, we’re all vibrational energy. The cervix is so powerful, being a doughnut shape, and it’s called a torus shape in physics, so is your heart. So there’s this powerful interaction between the two of them, that then can shift this energy to your brain when the two of them during birth, or during sex are activated. So how do we, as you know, try to actually help this process that is so organically going to happen on its own? One of the things that we can do is, how are we talking to ourselves? And this is not just during birth, and it’s not just during sex, during an average day. How many times do you say, you idiot, you screwed up. You shouldn’t have done that. Or they think you’re stupid or what. How often are we berating ourselves and criticizing ourselves? So to think about your thinking, because what we know is that thoughts have vibrational power. Heart Math has shown this. So if you are stewing on resentment, frustration, or self hatred, you are actually changing the rhythmic pattern of your heart called heart rate variability.
By the way, heart rate variability is a good measure of your sexual desire in a woman. If she has low heart rate variability, not only is her mood lower. She could be depressed. She most likely won’t have sexual desire. So heart rate variability is this overall measure of our immune system, our psychological health, and sexual functioning. But guess what? What has been shown in science, we have a lot of control over that whole system just by what we’re dwelling on. So when you catch yourself beating up on yourself, when you catch yourself thinking that you screwed up or something to hoax, and then intentionally talk to yourself as if you were talking to a best friend giving them the benefit of the doubt, saying something encouraging. We can be our own best coach. We can be our own best advocate. And you’re actually shifting the energy in the body, and your baby during pregnancy is getting the benefit of that. So when you’re dysregulated, when your heart rate variability is lower, it’s going to be affecting them. If you want for the baby to feel safe for the whole thing to actually smoothly happen, you speak and soothe, yes, you can speak soothingly. Speaking and soothing waste yourself. So self compassion and giving yourself that benefit, the doubt is huge. Another thing that I talked about now, not everyone is going to jive with this, but there’s a powerful history and lineage in the goddess traditions of female sexuality. Very empowering.
See, I have no women in my personal family to look to. I want to model my sexual empowerment against this one. No, I was like, okay, I know not what to do. I know what not to do. But I was like, okay, I don’t have a template, a model. I certainly can’t look on porn to find what feels good to me. Riane Eisler wrote a book called Sacred Pleasure, which is a wonderful book. There’s a book called When God Was a Woman, different things. But when I went back and I started to, for me, it wasn’t intellectual knowledge. When I was reading some of that stuff, it woke something up viscerally for me. Visceral is I feel that I know that it feels right to me. So what have I done? What part of my journey was? I do bring this into my programs as an option for women to pick goddesses. Pick a goddess, and have a relationship with them. You have to study some scripture and some ancient texts. No, it’s like a personal relationship. I put a picture of one, which is Magdalene, as the wallpaper on my phone so I could remember, and felt like she was there. I talked to her like she was an older sister. I go from being completely sexually repressed to sexually liberated in one fell swoop? No, you know what it was? I saw in Magdalene and other people, ISIS, or you name it, there’s Native American goddesses, and there’s beautiful ones from all over the world. I saw in that representation and the embodiment of the sexual and spiritual fuse together. So, in my times of like, this doesn’t feel like I don’t know what to do next. I asked for that presence to actually come to me. Now, I don’t do that all the time. I’m gonna be myself after a while. But when I asked for celestial health, was that spiritual? Holy crap, it was there. And all of a sudden, it’s no longer me with my insecurities. There’s new scents coming into my body.
Once I had that reference experience one time, and my body knew what it felt like, I was able to go and replicate that again. So here’s the deal with this. Yes, there’s divinity within us. I 100% believe that. But why do I say accessing a goddess outside myself? Because here’s the thing. There will be times, for instance, in birth, during sex where you’re like, I’m reverting to old patterns, or I’m feeling afraid or something like that. For you to be able to say, whoever it is, please help shift my thinking. Please help me at this moment. I’m telling you, I’ve heard women time and time again. Tell me, it felt like it wasn’t one way communication. It really felt like it was two way communication. Because of these entities, there’s concentrated energy there, and there’s concentrated wisdom there. And when we’re trying to navigate back to an ancient knowing that is kind of lost in a lot of the world today. That energy, those presences are there to guide us to help shepherd us through that. They’re not there to control us, to take away our free will to do anything like that, we have to invite that presence in. But the point here is, we don’t have to be strong all the time. We don’t have to be like, I gotta fix my mind because it’s going to be a scary thought. You asked for help. I’m having a fear though, please help take this from me. I wouldn’t be here in a day if I hadn’t relied on that. There is nothing in my experience that is a residual from all of the years of abuse. Nothing.
Do I have moments like any human having an anxious thought, fearful thought, self doubt? Of course I do. I’m a normal human. There’s a checklist of symptoms for PTSD. There’s a ton of them. I’ll check every single one of them at a certain point in my life. I don’t check any of them now. I would say one of the biggest components of my reclamation was realizing that most of what we’ve been told about religion, spirituality is absolutely disempowering, and doesn’t actually show to be true. Because we were designed by a loving creator. For instance, I was told growing up that women were an afterthought. Women were secondary. Well, guess what? In utero, we’re all female until male hormones come in and make us male. That’s right. Our creator thought of the female first. It’s the opposite. So for me to go through science and realize, okay, until the male hormones come in, we’re female. We were created as an afterthought, because it exists anymore. All of this to kind of reclaim a sense of who we are, and not to say in any way disparaging masculinity or male sex, I also would not be here if I hadn’t met a divine partner. A male that just absolutely wasn’t threatened by female empowerment. Wasn’t threatened by a strong woman. But I also don’t need to be a masculine dominant person either to be powerful. And I just want to say one more thing about that. When we’re talking about surrender, surrender is important in psychedelic science, surrender is important in sex, surrender is important in birth. There’s a lot of information about their true surrender that happens when you surrender to a partner. It has to be surrendered to a partner. What I’ve come to realize, and I’m speaking about my own story here, is that everyone can choose whatever they want. That was not a healing path.
For me, what my healing path was to surrender to the Divine, to surrender to my higher self. Not that I’m less than, but humans crave a sense of surrender not to be in control all the time. You can actually have a secure attachment to the divine. When you have that secure attachment to the Divine, that you’re being cradled and held, and you can go to that state because a female body can go to such a deep bliss state where you are no longer in control of your arms and legs. You might make very loud sounds, and hopefully you do because that’s releasing the connection between the cervix, and that’s really facilitating both the birth and it’s facilitating the orgasm, because the vagus nerve connects to the throat and to the cervix. But all of that deep level of absolutely letting go requires that trust and that surrender. And I’m suggesting to you that there’s a possibility of not surrendering to a human, but surrendering to the higher self within you, and surrendering to the Divine that you also get the same results. But there’s not this dynamic where I’m having to be in some power dynamic with another human.
Debra Pascali-Bonaro: I love that. What a beautiful way to bring it all together. You gave us so much, Dr. Jenny. Oh, my goodness, for listeners here, I’m sure they want to know where they can find you, follow and take your courses. Can you share a little bit about that?
Dr. Jenny Martin: Yeah. So D-R-J-E-N-N-Y-M-A-R-T-I-N .com. So drjennymartin.com is my site. The courses are there, and there’s some free webinars that you can take on there. Educational webinars to learn more. And then unfortunately, I don’t spend a lot of time. Well, maybe actually been a good thing. Don’t spend a lot of time on social media. But long ago back in 2017, I joined Twitter. I’m not going to try to be everywhere, I’m just gonna stick with one. So I’m on Twitter.
Debra Pascali-Bonaro: Fantastic. Well, thank you. And thank you to everyone who joined us. We always love to hear from you so please shoot us a message, you can tag us. We’re on Twitter at Orgasmic Birth. So we’ll put all of our tags into the show notes. And please, let us know your thoughts, your comments, your questions for us. And we hope you’ll join us next time for our next episode of the Orgasmic Birth Podcast. Thank you so much, Dr. Jenny. I learned so much today. Just truly a pleasure and so informative.
Dr. Jenny Martin: Thank you. I really enjoyed being with you. Thank you.