Aaliyah Shaikh

Aaliyah is an Aziz Foundation Scholar (2017), who has been awarded a scholarship for a PhD in Health Psychology on trauma and is the founder of Rahmah Wellbeing, a Psychotherapeutic Counsellor and Birth Trauma Educator. She holds an MEd in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapeutic Counselling from University of Cambridge (thesis: An unconscious alchemy of the womb: How women’s (psychosocial and neurobiological) experiences and feelings regarding menstruation and birth affect their attachment relationship with their child) and an MA in Muslim Community Studies. Aaliyah worked as the youngest employed Muslim female Chaplain from the age of 24 for Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust for 6 years. She specialises in trauma, and the time in the womb as impacting later life development. She is interested in neuroscience, demedicalisation of birth, trauma, attachment, psychology of pain, and the role of patriarchy in women's health. Aaliyah feels passionately towards natural health, unschooling, natural parenting and conscious living. Her passion is in encouraging women to reclaim their bodies and choices from culture, patriarchy and medicalisation and to empower women through igniting conscious awareness of the power of the womb to restore and heal.