64. [WISE WOMAN] WITH BEC OF OM BIRTHS - HOW TO USE YOGA TO PREPARE YOUR BODY, MIND, & SPIRIT FOR BIRTH
Bec Conant is a respected figure in Boston and New England for her expertise in prenatal care and yoga instruction spanning over two decades. Through her Om Births program, she empowers expecting individuals, guiding them through childbirth and easing their transition into parenthood.
With advanced certifications in Prenatal Yoga, Pelvic Floor Yoga, Childbirth Education, HypnoBirthing®, and Spinning Babies®, Bec has supported over 300 births as a DONA International accredited birth coach.
Recognized as an E-RYT 500 and RPYT by Yoga Alliance, she has honed her skills under esteemed mentors and holds a meditation teaching certificate from Dharma Moon, enhancing her holistic approach to prenatal and birth support.
Bec is offering my listeners 10% off the Full Mama Membership as well as the day passes to the pre and postnatal recorded libraries.
Use code BIRTHADVOCATE10
Find me on instagram @birth.advocate and all of my offerings on my website www.birthadvocate.me
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11 Week Live Home Birth Mentorship
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Music The Ancients (feat. Loga Ramin Torkian) by Azam Ali
Disclaimer:
The information and resources provided by me are not intended to constitute or replace medical or midwifery advice or a Mother’s intuition. Instead, all information provided is intended for education purposes only. My advice is not to be seen as medical diagnosis or to treat any medical illness or condition of Mother or baby/fetus.
EMILY: I have decided to run an 11 week live home birth mentorship beginning July 1st.
This is for the woman who is willing and eager to do the deep work within herself to prepare body, mind and soul for the birth of not just a baby, but the mother and a family.
This is for the woman who knows she is here to break the pattern of fear, disembodiment and disempowerment within her lineage line.
This is for the woman who acknowledges that life is a sacred ceremony and that she is the one who gets to make choices that will shape her along her soul evolution.
This is for the conscious woman who has not yet conceived or is pregnant and is seeking to be witnessed and held in community.
This is for the woman who can feel the enormity of her responsibility to gestate and bring forth life and to embrace the metamorphosis that she she is destined for.
She is ready to become the mother of this child.
This is for the woman who values mentorship, sisterhood and sacred space holding. This is for she who is ready to claim her pregnancy and birth as a sacred and sovereign rite of passage and already feels that mama bear energy that will do anything in her power to gift her baby a birth imprint of complete love and safety.
This is also for all the nerds out there. We dive into the soul, but boy do we hit up the science too.
In my own pregnancy, I spent my time discerning what information would serve the highest vision for my birth. Of course I plan to birth in complete sovereignty. And sovereignty means self governing.
It does not mean totally alone or without a wise woman or community for counsel. Although if that's your vibe, this course is still for you.
As a former nurse of nearly 15 years, I was quite clear on my legal rights and how to advocate for myself. And I chose a midwife that I had an alignment with and I surrounded myself with other women planning a home birth.
I waded through that vast ocean of research and opinions and I found what.
EMILY: I was looking for.
EMILY: I walk you through, step by step, the journey from uncertainty to to confidence, from fear to self trust,
from isolation to being fully supported by a community.
The journey from uncertainty to confidence begins with her story. I believe women and men need to understand how birth became medicalized and fear mongered. We do a lot of myth busting in this course.
I believe the journey from fear to self trust lies in the deep, deeply embedded internal belief system that we have about what it means to be a woman.
We take a look at your own personal red thread, maternal lineage and your relationship to your menstrual cycle. It's all relative to birth, believe me.
We explore the intricacies of birth imprints and what a rite of passage really means. We unearth all of this prior to diving into the physiology and tangible preparation for birth and postpartum.
I did the legwork for you. Let me show you the map. All of my embodied knowledge is jam packed inside this 11 week program.
Head to the link in the show notes for a peek inside the course content.
This is everything that I cover with my in person clients packaged into 11 weeks. I will basically be your virtual doula and private birth mentor.
This is a soul journey.
This is about the birth of the mother.
Are you ready?
You will receive 11 weeks of intensive course material and you will have lifetime access.
There will be journal prompts, multimedia resources and plenty of home play Every single week for 11 weeks. We will have a live zoom where I will teach, live and also have a Q and A.
And then after that I'm granting everyone six months access to my monthly virtual village Q and A. So leading up to the birth and even in those early postpartum days, you can pop into the virtual Village monthly Q and A session and ask me anything you want.
There will also be an intimate community of deeply conscious women.
Snag my ridiculously low early early bird price before May 13th or the early bird price before June 1st.
The journey begins July 1st. I'll see you on the inside.
EMILY: Welcome to Soul Evolution. My name is Emily, also known as the Birth Advocate. I walk alongside women choosing a deeply spiritual, instinctual, physiological mother led conception, pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum experience.
I am a retired nurse, a health coach, a women's circle and ceremony facilitator, and the host of this podcast.
Here we dive deep to reclaim our rites of passage with a big dose of birth story medicine, intentionally curious conversations with embodied wisdom keepers, and a sprinkle of polarity as we will hold space for our men from time to time too.
I hope you find nourishment through your soul here.
I alone schedule, record, edit and produce this beautiful labor of love. If you're enjoying the content, please let me know by rating and reviewing or consider a donation to help cover the cost of production.
Better yet, you can purchase my amazing comprehensive course so youo Want a Home Birth? Your complete guide to an empowering physiological birth. You will walk away feeling ready, body, mind and soul, knowing that everything you need to birth your baby already exists within you.
Your questions will be answered, guaranteed. I walk you through, step by step, exactly how to prepare yourself, your partner, and your home for the most incredible experience you get to have in this lifetime.
Birth is a sacred rite of passage worthy of honoring. Do not leave it up to chance.
EMILY: And stay tuned after the show to.
EMILY: Learn all about my Beyond Adola offerings, both in person and virtual, fully worldwide. You can find me on Instagram at Birth Advocate and my website, Birth Advocate Me.
Everything will be linked in the show notes. Now let's drop in to today's episode.
EMILY: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm really honored to have you on here. I was just saying before I hit record, I haven't had someone on yet to talk about,
you know, whether it's prenatal yoga or mindfulness or just like, getting our bodies ready for labor and birth. You know, one of my greatest mentors is Dr. Rachel Reed, and she is phenomenal.
You know, she wrote the book Reclaiming Childbirth as a Rite of Passage. And like, her main message is, your body was built and designed for birth. Like you. You don't really have to do a whole lot like trust your body.
Let it happen. And then there's people, like I mentioned before,
Adelaide Meadows, she has this beautiful course, Born through Movement. I understand she was a student of yours and was. And it's like there's also biomechanics, you know, and we are, we have an epidemic of, you know, sitting is the new smoking.
Like, it's a problem. Our bodies are not as they were in, you know, quote, ancient times or whatever. So there's, there's a lot of undoing to be done. There's a lot of restrictive patterns in our bodies and ways that we move or don't move that really affect the way we carry babies,
the way we birth babies, the way we heal from birth. And it's, it's a huge topic. And I was so glad when, when your people reached out to me because, again, I haven't had anybody on yet to dive into this.
So welcome.
BEC: Thank you.
And, and, yeah, you said it. This, this is, this is such a place where there's this intersection of mindfulness and belief and confidence in our own abilities in, in our wisdom to our bodies as women with our, as you said, biomechanics, our movement, diet, what are we doing with our bodies?
And as we were talking about before we hit record here,
the female body, it was designed for the birth process. There is this wonderful, beautiful pathway that is built into our tissues, built right through our bony and fascial and muscle structure that was intended for a baby to be able to spiral through that pelvic basin, if you chose to have a baby,
of course,
and if we had managed to preserve that, if we had kept the nice biomechanical balance in our body's tissues when we got to birth, quite honestly, I'd be out of a job.
Because you wouldn't need a childbirth education class, you wouldn't need prenatal yoga, you wouldn't need spinning babies classes, you wouldn't need anything to teach you about balancing the body's connective tissue, because it would already be there.
But then, as you said, sitting's the new smoking. We're finding out just how negative this is on our body's holistic health and our longevity and all those different things. But from a birth perspective, it has a massive impact on how the different levels of the pelvis are sitting, how the different tissues around them are supporting things are.
As one of my mentors likes to talk about, we have these, the wonderful muscle of the psoas coming down from the upper, the lower rib cage and upper lumbars. And it's running down.
She says it's like these two loving hands that guide the baby down into the pelvis. And were it balanced, yes, it would be.
But if it's not balanced, if, if it's stiff, if you have a history of being a runner or you just have a desk job and you spend all day seated at a computer hunched over, well, then those two loving hands can become actual resistant, sort of restrictive hands that hold the baby back.
And then, oh, no, you can't drop or you can't rotate head down, or you can't. All kinds of implications come from that. So it always breaks my heart when I hear someone say, oh, I'm just trusting my body to birth.
And I say, are you doing anything? No, I'm just trusting my body. And I say, well,
you've got half the picture.
EMILY: It's a both and it's a both and yes.
BEC: It is absolutely a yes. And the dreaded yes and yeah situation.
EMILY: We live in a dualistic world is. It is undeniable.
So, hey, Beck, why don't you just real quick kind of tell people about, you know, who you are and your training and like, what it is that you do and then we'll, we'll dive in.
BEC: Right. I should probably introduce myself.
That's work better than.
So, yeah, I'm Beck Conant and I am a Boston area based yoga teacher. I've been teaching pre and postnatal yoga now for almost 25 years. And I got started into it actually.
Because I was a Vinyasa trained yoga teacher in New York and loved that sort of sweaty, flowy, good playlist, fun, playful asana, not heated. I was very against the heated part.
And as a newly trained yoga teacher, my first class had five pregnant women in it and three of them were in the third trimester. And I talk about this in, in the book that I, that I wrote, the Ombarts Approach, where I totally freaked out.
I absolutely had no idea what I should do. Prenatal, I mean, yoga teacher trainings, they can't really cover prenatal in depth. It's actually a restriction that Yoga alliance puts on the larger trainings because otherwise,
if you're doing more than a certain amount of hours on a particular subject, then it's not a general yoga training, it's a niche yoga training, and they won't allow you to do more than that.
So my training, it was a fabulous training. It was brilliant. But it hadn't covered prenatal in the depth that I needed.
And so I started casting around. I found a bunch of different prenatal trainings. They all contradicted each other as to whether or not you could or could not do certain things.
One of them said, just trust the pregnant woman and, and you. She will know what to do. And then the next one I went to said, don't do. And it was a list of.
I mean, you could have written a book from that one. I did write a book. I tell this. I. I tell the story in it. Because I say if this book had existed when I was a prenatal teacher, I wouldn't be.
Or when I was a yoga teacher, I wouldn't be a prenatal teacher. I wouldn't have had to go through all that study and exploration and traveling around the country, catching up with all these different teachers to get the bigger picture of what's appropriate and what's not.
And so having gotten that, I kind of say I got forced into the birth world because I had a prenatal student come up to me at the end of one of my prenatal classes and she said, I'm looking for this, this thing.
You may not know about it, but it's called a dou la.
A doula. But she didn't know how to pronounce it. And I was, I was a doula in training at the time. So she became my first client. It was eye opening to watch her yoga practice literally come into play during her birth.
Like, I watched her do the movements we did in yoga on the Hospital bed. And it was just, whoa. This stuff actually can be applied directly.
Thanks. And so from there, I mean, I went on. I teach hypnobirthing classes now. I'm a spinning babies parent educator. I have the ohm births,
what I call the full mama membership, which is that because of COVID ohm births moved up online. But that means I now have an online library that people can use at their whim to address the different aches and pains and imbalances that we have in our bodies.
And then there's a post. There's a postpartum side to it as well.
It's all this, all this stuff where really they can join a membership. We have an online meditation community for moms to support being mindful in your practice and really get that holistic picture of what does my body need, what does my mind need to prepare for my birth and the way I want to welcome this baby into the world.
I really feel that it's not unmedicated. Birth is often what people are desiring when they come to a yoga class. But it's not a given.
And just because you want an unmedicated birth doesn't mean that you shouldn't understand how your movement, how your choices can influence that experience. And if you want a medicated birth, your movements and choices can still influence that experience.
So I have students who want epidurals. I have students, one student who's actually planning a cesare, a cesarean birthday because of trauma that she'd had. And she was like, I can't.
I can't even go there.
EMILY: Yeah.
BEC: And I said, great, let's make it that you can recover.
EMILY: Yeah.
BEC: From that.
EMILY: Yeah.
EMILY: Yeah. I love that. That sounds like a very comprehensive, wonderful resource for women. And so because it's online, I imagine anyone anywhere could join in.
BEC: Absolutely.
And all the classes that we have in the library are built from an in person slash livestream hybrid style class so folks in the Boston area can come in person to the studio that I teach at.
But it's all live streamed. I actually have a lot of students who are right in the Boston area. But it was snowing, right? You don't want to get on the.
EMILY: Road, but it's Boston.
Okay. So wonderful. You know, my audience mostly are women wanting to have a home birth, maybe even a free birth. I focus a lot on sovereignty and women really, you know, taking ownership and responsibility.
So again, they are women that are highly educated when it comes to their physical health, their mental health, you know, all these things.
But there's always Room for improvement. I would love if we could kind of focus then on say, natural birth, unmedicated birth at home,
and maybe some common imbalances that you notice that you see that women could use some tips on.
BEC: Yeah, and I should say home birth was my choice. That was where I went as a, as a doula of 12 plus years, more than 300 births. I knew exactly what was going on in the Boston area hospitals and I said, no, thank you.
I would much rather birth in my own space. And then it turned out I actually had to transfer to a hospital.
Thank goodness I had an awareness of which doctor would be supportive of me no matter what. But I had to transfer because of some imbalances that I missed in my own body and, and the consequences that that had.
So, yeah, I think it's, it's really important for people to understand it's not just about having pelvic flexibility.
I think one of the things I see a lot, especially in prenatal yoga classes, there's a really strong focus on effectively external rotation in, in the postures everyone, every prenatal person seems to get their,
their, their picture taken in. It's a pose called bada konasana. Feet together, knees apart, butterfly pose. If we were going from this but wide open rotation, everyone's sitting up, they're all holding their belly, looking done.
It's like the classic yoga prenatal pose. And I love baddha konasana. It's a great pose for opening the inner thighs, helping to release and free the glutes a little bit.
But the thing that everyone seems to miss is that when you outwardly rotate your thigh bones, when you take your femur bone and you rotate it outwards,
what you are doing to the bony structure of your pelvis is you are drawing the sits bones and the tailbone towards each other and you are spreading the upper wing bones of the pelvis.
Yeah.
And if you're doing that over and over and over and over again, then the tissues in the backside of your pelvic structure are going to get accustomed to being in a shortened position.
Position.
And this is also common from our habitually seated posture. Most of us sit kind of rocked back on our sits bones, leaning on our tailbone, kind of slouching into things.
And I get why, because our back muscles are stiff and it feels better to kind of rock back that way.
But if we look at the physiology of the birth experience and what's going to ultimately need to open in order for the baby to emerge out of your body,
we need those posterior pelvic floor tissues to be able to widen and open.
And so, yes, we need that external rotation. We want that outward movement, but we also need a lot of internal movement. And for a female pelvis,
we actually probably need more internal rotation than we do external rotation,
because our pelvis is already in a wider state.
So if we think of. And folks listening, if you want to play with this at home, you know, sit down on your chair, take your knees apart for a second, and feel what happens to the bones under your butt.
And then sitting up on your chair, knock your knees together, swing your feet apart,
and feel what happens to those same bones. And when we bring the knees together, the sits bones conveniently named. I always say it would be very bad if we had named them the stands bones, because then we wouldn't know where they were.
But the bones you literally sit on get wider when we turn. Knees in,
toes out.
So if we're thinking of this. So if we're thinking about this from a yoga practice, everyone comes into yoga and says, I want to stretch my hips. And I say, well, okay, yes.
And I want you to stretch the inner and outer parts of your hips. So poses like virasana, where the knees are together, feet are apart, and you're theoretically sitting back between your feet on the ground.
Now, before anybody freaks out, most of us can't actually get our butt to the ground in that case. So you gotta raise the floor up here. I usually have students sit on one.
I have one student sits on two blocks to be able to really settle down into that. But then we're playing with, like, on hands and knees, cat, cow. Tilting the pelvis forward, tucking the tail under the tuck is something almost all of us have easily.
It's the tilt. And can we make it a tilt in the pelvis at the hip socket, rather than a tilt that's coming from thrusting the rib cage forward and kind of dumping into the lumbar spine?
Yes, in that way, which looks great. You get a lot of movement. You can see it.
But I want people to feel it in their body with that. So I think that's. That's one of the big ones. I feel like our. Our movement diet misses. We spend so much time outwardly rotating and stretching the glutes.
And then we don't do any internal rotation to get the adductors, the inner rotators, to get all of those balanced with the external.
EMILY: So let me do a little summary,
see if I got you, because. So baby has to come in through the inlet of the pelvis, which is the top of the pelvis. And so, like, squats and that external rotation, it's good for that part.
That's great. And then the baby has to do their beautiful rotation through the mid pelvis and then to actually exit the outlet of the pelvis. That's when we need that sacrum to lift.
And when you do the knees in, toes out, it opens that up.
BEC: Yes.
EMILY: And it's like the baby. I mean, it feels like the baby's coming out your butt. Let's just be real about it. Like, the perineum stretches that whole area like the. But behind the vagina, that perineum, that is like where the baby is coming out of.
And so having those tissues, being able to yield,
that's one of the biggest things, because our. Our female body and a lot of, like, traditional yogic. It's really, like, for men, you know, that tucking the tailbone. But women, our pelvis, like our pubic bone should actually be what's holding up our internal organs.
Like, we should have more of an anterior or posterior tilt and not anti. Yeah, thank you. Anterior tilt. So that. And. But it's not like you said. I loved how you said it's not about, like, flaring the ribs up and doing it from the lumbar.
It's about the hips being tilted backwards.
BEC: Right.
EMILY: Yeah. Did I. Did I get that?
BEC: Well, yes. And my word, it's my mantra in the world these days. Yes. And there are certain. If we think in birth, okay, I need these movements. But if we're waiting until labor to ask our body to do those kind of movements,
I mean, just think of that from the point of view of just a basic movement. If you've never touched your toes and one day you are expecting, your body is going to be able to touch your toes because your body was designed to touch your toes, but you've never done it before.
Why would you assume that your body has kept that sp. That pliability,
as I like to say. So when we're doing movements during pregnancy to set our body up and to prepare our body for this birth process,
we gotta be. We need to be able to talk, as you say. And that's in the. In the book. I actually gave people the cheat sheet for what do you need to do to move the baby through your pelvis?
You gotta tuck for the top.
So we need to. The tucking action will draw the top of the sacrum back, will splay the top bones of the pelvis, where I'll actually make more room at the inlet and then down in the middle.
As the baby contacts the pelvic floor, they have to make that wonderful spin, spirally rotation. Well, they're spinning in the middle. You got to go sideways for the spin.
So that's side lunge. That's being able to cross your leg over and then move it out to the side. That's. Can you get the pelvic floor to be breathing in this nice, stable, but responsive kind of way?
I always say your pelvic floor is like this internal jellyfish in the middle of your pelvic structure. And it. It's supposed to be able to spread, and then it's supposed to be able to sort of lift and swim up, and then it needs to be able to spread again.
And then as the baby sort of rotates and then extends down under that pubic arch. And I love that we have that instinctive lift your head when there's pressure on the back of your skull,
that that action then spreads the back of the pelvis, which we have to go butt out for the base.
So it's these three movements that we need to develop the ability to feel them in our bodies so that our bodies can have the option to open. Otherwise, we're showing up with this, like, locked door.
And you may have this beautiful open hallway down to a lovely veranda out into the world, but if the door from your bedroom is locked, there's no way you're getting out to the backyard.
EMILY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
EMILY: And I'd love for you to speak a little more about the psoas, because it's so important you touched on it briefly.
BEC: So important.
EMILY: So important.
BEC: So as it's so important,
it really is. And it's a muscle. It's so deep in our body that I think a lot of us don't realize if we're holding psoas tension,
because our. Our body is unbelievably smart. Our body doesn't want to have to open its tight spots. Our body's going to borrow movement from the looser places first before it goes to the stiff spots, because, well, the stiff spots are hard.
They're difficult to work with.
So you're. You're. So as. It's like this incredible draping shawl coming from your back rib cage on the front side of your spine, though. And then it's like these two curtains draping down over your pelvis and then attaching to that upper inner thigh.
And of course, there's like, a muscle from the inside of the pelvis. The iliacus that it's coming down and dovetailing into. That's why sometimes you'll hear it called the iliopsoas muscle.
But it's a problem with podcasting. You can't see, but it. It's. It, it. If people imagine this kind of like a big, beautiful punch bowl and then you laid two.
I don't know, what do we want to say? You wouldn't really lay straps over the punch bowl, but let's just go with it here for a moment. If we're laying two kind of yoga straps over the sides of the punch bowl, that's going to narrow the amount of space that the punch bowl has at the top.
And if you're then trying to pour something right into the center of the bowl,
how tight those yoga straps are on either side is going to influence then how much room and how precise do you have to get that line to get the liquid or the.
In this case, the baby. Baby's not liquid. But we know the deal to pour down into that basin and the psoas, because the bottom ends on your thighs, but because the top end,
it's connected back of your rib cage. The other thing that's connected around the inside of your rib cage is your diaphragm.
And your diaphragm is tied into your nervous system, because our breathing is the physical expression of the nervous system.
And so if the dia. If you're. If your body's very anxious and very stressed and. Or you've just spent a lot of time contracted forward,
taking that deep, full breath can actually be restricted by those two lines coming down the front side of your spine, it actually yanks the diaphragm down.
And that gets interconnected not only with how the inlet's opening, but since the diaphragm is the second jellyfish in your body, we've got the pelvic jellyfish going up and down.
Then we've got the diaphragm jellyfish, which, if we're in good alignment,
then those two jellyfish are basically floating one on top of each other. And you got the space in the middle. And the two of them should be ideally moving in tandem.
That's why I say the pelvic floor is responsive to changes in the pressure inside your abdomen. So when you're diaphragm, you take a deep, full breath and your diaphragm pushes down, your pelvic floor should be able to release under that.
And then as the abdominal diaphragm domes back up and creates that vacuum Then that would draw the pelvic floor back up. So when I'm. When I'm teaching pelvic floor toning, and I usually actually don't teach it in isolation, but we talk about that.
The inhale is a release of the pelvic floor. The exhale is the engaging, lifting doming. As you inhale, the pelvic floor is spreading opening. As you exhale,
the pelvic floor is floating upwards.
It's really difficult to parse those out. We get caught up in inhale,
engage, exhale. No, inhale, really exhale. And that's why I like to get people back into feeling in their bodies, feeling it happen. Because it's an instinctive response. It will naturally occur if you're breathing well.
Right, but then are we breathing well?
EMILY: Exactly.
BEC: And that's where we get back into the psoas. Can we free that deep psoas line?
And I mean movements that can free it. If we're looking to stretch it, then these are things like lunges,
back bends, bridge pose.
Bridge pose. Support your hips on a low block. Bring one knee into your chest, extend the other leg out on the mat.
EMILY: Love that one.
BEC: And then breathe. Love that one. Oh, it's so.
But the other thing is we don't. We can't just yank on it since it's. Since your psoas is tied to your diaphragm and your diaphragm is tied to your nervous system.
If your psoas is in a lockdown,
really, you have to show your nervous system that you are safe.
EMILY: Yeah.
BEC: You are held. That you are seen before. Your psoas can actually unwind.
So it's. The actual pose that I like to have people start in is actually called constructive rest, which is for somebody in early pregnancy. You're actually lying flat on your back and you have your knees bent and you've taken the toes in, heels out.
So we're in that internal rotation. That's going to slacken the front side of the body a little bit more and it's gonna spread the back side.
And then just breathe. Let the knees knock together. So there's no action in the inner thighs. There's no action from the quads or the hip flexors.
And just let yourself breathe. Feel the belly move, feel the groin soften.
And I see if I can get em. 5, 10 minutes.
If someone's in later pregnancy, we're not going to lie flat,
but we might prop up lots of pillows, 45 degree angle, and then just knock together and hang out and Once we've unwound,
then we might go into sliding a leg out, drawing back in, just sort of dynamic, active psoas release.
And then once that's done, maybe then we go to that delicious.
Float your hips up on a block and then draw one knee in and go to the more active release side. And I do love it when we do those three in tandem.
And then people sit up and you can hear it. The whole room just, oh, takes this immense sigh because suddenly your ribs move. Suddenly you actually have diaphragmatic action as opposed to this kind of taking a deep breath in, but it's kind of up against a wall still.
EMILY: Yeah, I love how you wove that part.
EMILY: It's so crucial.
EMILY: The psoas muscle can hold so much, and of course, it is, you know, connected to the diaphragm and our whole vagus nerve. That's that entire line that goes. Ends in our cervix.
I mean, it's also connected. But there's a lot of em. Stuff that can be held in the psoas. There's just.
EMILY: There's so, so, so much.
EMILY: So I love how this is a big part of your teaching and your practice is this surrender, this act of I'm safe creating safety within the body. This is such important preparation for not just pregnancy and the birth, but postpartum, because, you know, babies regulate off of us inside the womb and outside the womb for,
I mean, I'm saying two years plus. Like, babies are very much a part of the mother's nervous system. And so this is crucial, crucial, crucial. Prep. I say yoga nidra is like, a mandate for all of my pregnant mamas.
Like, you must begin this as soon as possible.
BEC: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yoga nidra,
conscious relaxation.
At the very least.
We need a good Shavasana at the end. Yeah, You. You. We need more. I mean, this in the world in general, we need more Shavasana.
EMILY: Yeah.
EMILY: I mean, when we are.
When we are pregnant, I can speak from my embodied experience. I called it like a vortex of divine, like, feminine energy, like the surrender and the receive. And, you know, most of us women, we have been operating in a very masculine world, and, you know, we're pretty revved up and like.
Like, my body just commanded me to surrender and to rest and to soften and, like, to get all buttery and melting. And it was going against everything that I, you know, my whole life.
But it was a command, and I leaned into it and, you know, thank God I did. Like, it's. It's a crucial part of yeah, I.
BEC: Was gonna say so, so good that you, that you heard that and that you leaned into it. There are so many of us out and because as you say, home birth community, we're, you're well educated.
This is not something you choose on a whim to do. You understand it. Which often means that we've been pretty driven in our life. We're probably high achievers. We're probably,
you know, the we. We would be the CEOs of our own companies and of our own careers and our own lives. I have a lot of students intending unmedicated birth, some intending home birth who have these very high powered level jobs.
And it is a little bit of a mismatch that we need to be willing to soften. We need to be willing to do less,
to be a human being, not a human doing as people like to say in the yoga world. And it's,
it flies against some of the identities that we might have had. The, the self sort of actualization, the, the ways that we have defined me over the course of our life.
I know this was, this was very true for me when I was pregnant and I very much wanted to lean into this feeling of oh, being able to roll around on the floor and just explore where I was at and do yoga.
Nidra. But I was also running a yoga studio at the time and that holding that space and checking the marketing sides and watching, you know, what was. Were the blog posts coming out.
Was I doing all of this? I admit I did not take as much time as I wanted to to really slow myself down and just be with my pregnancy and with what was happening and allow for that possibility of, I don't know,
to be okay.
So I wish I had because for me it was. There was a soaz lockdown going on that I was unaware of until it forced my, my son into a non optimal position.
He went.
I never liked the phrase sunny side up. And it always sounds like there should be something sunny about that experience. And there ain't nothing sunny about birthing a baby that's fac forward rather than backwards.
EMILY: Did he actually come out looking at you or did he rotate completely?
BEC: Well, he ended up being an unplanned surgical birth because of additional complications that we had as it. As we found out later,
my psoas and hip flexors were so stiff that they had actually dragged the back of my sacrum forward. They closed the inlet and the poor little guy's head got ground into my pubic bone for many, many, many, many hours.
And that in and of itself was very uncomfortable. But wasn't actually what led to the surgical birth. What led to the surgical birth was that as he was grinding into my pubic bone, his head deflect.
EMILY: Oh, no.
BEC: And pinched off the ureters from my kidneys to my bladder.
EMILY: Oh, Lord.
BEC: So by the time we actually transferred to the hospital, because my body was showing some not so good signs, we discovered that I was in kidney failure.
EMILY: Yeah.
BEC: By that point. And Goddess bless the doctor,
because she gave me another four hours with some interventions to see if we could get to that 10 centimeter fully opened and just push. She said if, if you get to 10 to, if you get to 10 centimeters, we'll push and we'll have this kid.
I, I'm, I'm fine with it. And I never quite got there.
So it was a little bit of recognition, hindsight. I mean, I'd say it's always 20, 20. Who knows? If I had done the psoas release, if I had dropped really into being, would my body have been open?
Who knows? Very hard to tell. But I can say that looking back on it,
I can almost track to the minute in my labor what was going on with his position.
And looking at where my body is stiff and where I know it's stiff now, having done deeper work, I can say,
yeah, that could have had something to do with it.
EMILY: What, what a gift in the way that it. Now you have this embodied experience and you're able to teach this to women.
BEC: It completely flipped the way that I teach pre and post natal yoga because that was the other thing that I would never have thought going into my own home birth experience.
I assumed if you have a home birth and you transfer and you need a cesarean, that that's trauma that you're, that you're going to be facing years of therapy after that.
And I can say without irony and without any sort of dissemblance,
I had a positive birth experience that was actually a positive birth, even though that was 180 degrees from what I wanted from it,
but I was able to be present in it.
And some of it has to do with the work I did ahead of time to set up the support around me so that I had the ability to be heard and be seen and feel that I was making the choice,
not somebody was making it for me.
EMILY: Yeah, that's the key.
BEC: And also I was able to say, all right, I've made this choice. This is what's right. This is what is right for me at this moment.
EMILY: Yep, that's Beautiful. That is such great medicine to share with women about ready to give birth or have had an experience that didn't go, you know, the way that they wanted, you know, and it is, that's.
That's what they say, you know, one in three women having birth trauma and their report is, I wasn't seen, I wasn't heard. I felt like I didn't have a choice.
Nobody listened to me. That's what creates a traumatic birth experience. It's not necessarily whether you were medicated or not, whether it was surgical or not. It's. Did. Was I the one in control?
Because we want mothers emerging,
feeling like they are empowered. We don't want them to feel, you know, disempowered.
BEC: Exactly. Because it's your birth, it's your baby. You're the one who will experience this. You're the one who will remember this. You're the one who will be changed by this.
EMILY: Right.
BEC: And if there are providers listening, even if you can just. I know you're freaking out about what might be going on. I get it.
The doctor I was with, I looked at her face when we talked about surgical birth and I recognized that expression. I'd seen it as a doula. It was not an expression that she put on her face unless there was a life threatening medical complication going on.
And I thought,
shoot, she doesn't look like that normally. I know what this means.
She then took 90 more minutes to walk through how we make the surgical birth acceptable. For me now, baby doesn't have any complications. So we did. We weren't worried about baby's health at that moment, but most of the time we're not actually worried about baby's health.
Most of the time it's a timeline thing. Most of the time it's. There are some uncertainties going on and the medical profession says this is too dangerous to keep going.
And then it's like we bypass mom's ability to say,
but what do you want? What is your choice? How do you feel at this moment? It's so important.
EMILY: It is.
EMILY: You know, it's. I'm a broken record on this. You know, I am so grateful. I'm so grateful for our advanced medical system. You know, I spent a long time working in it and there, you know, it's full of people with beautiful intentions.
And doctors jobs are really to give us statistical evidence and facts in that way and not really their opinion unless we ask for it. And it really is the mother's job to determine what risks she's fine with.
Accepting it's not about the policies and procedures. That's that deem, you know, what risks are not acceptable if the mother is the one that gets to say, I'm comfortable with that risk, I'm not comfortable with that risk.
You know, she gets the choice in the matter. And so that's kind of where the rub is a lot of times with coming up against the medical system. But we are so grateful for them because, you know, in that percentage of births, you know, 10%, 15% of births there,
it's necessary.
BEC: It's necessary. And thank God we have safe surgical birth available when it is needed.
EMILY: So let's talk about this other side of your business that you have here. This. You know, I did the,
I heard you mention it in another podcast I was listening to in prep for this. What was it? I forget exactly. Stress reduction.
BEC: Eight week mindfulness based stress reduction.
EMILY: Mindfulness based stress reduction. It was like an eight week meditation experience that I did. It was about, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago. And it actually was completely life changing for me.
It, it completely shifted a lot for me. And it's not about sitting down and meditating for 20 minutes a day. It's, it's like the momentary, like, am I present in my body?
Like, how does my body feel? What is happening now?
EMILY: What is happening now?
EMILY: What is happening now? And just that practice of mindfulness.
BEC: Yeah.
EMILY: Has. It's completely life changing. And so again, like yoga, Nidra breath,
mindfulness meditation. Like, these are my three top labor preparation, motherhood preparation tips that I give people.
But you know, of course it comes into play when things don't go according to plan. And also birth,
postpartum, motherhood initiation, nothing goes according to plan. Everything's changing all of the time. It's an insane experience. And so having that flexibility within yourself and the awareness and the ability to have, you know, the higher perspective instead of being like in it.
And like, this is wrong, this is bad. You know. Yeah, it's just, it's, it's a crucial skill set to have. And I've been in births where a mother has a very strong meditation practice.
And I mean, she, like, they rock it. They literally do. They, it, it is such a helpful tool to have in your pocket when you are in that intensity of that experience.
And you know, I've seen women who don't have a meditation practice and they are, they spin out a lot of times. They, they're, they're consumed and overwhelmed and yeah. So I'd love to hear some of Your expertise around this mindfulness meditation and the importance of it.
BEC: Well, I will first of all say I am by no means the expert on mindfulness. I've been a meditator now for,
oh God, 25 plus years at this point. And any seasoned meditator will tell you that they are a perpetual beginner. Yeah, it's, you're always starting over, we're always coming back.
It never feels like you've really got it. And I will say, if a teacher ever says, I've got it, you should run fast from that teacher because they are caught up in their own ego and they, they missed the point from it.
But it's, it's, it is such an incredibly powerful tool in this sense of, I mean, people. Mindfulness has become a bit of a buzzword. There's a lot of people, oh, mindful, be mindful of all these things.
What does that actually mean? I love Kabat Zinn's description and definition of mindfulness. It's paying attention on purpose,
without judgment to the comings and goings of everyday life.
And it's,
I think I have a lot of students who, when we, when they hear that we're going to start with some meditation, they get this like, big deer in the headlights looks of like, oh, God, what am I going to do?
Meditation is just the process of familiarizing and making friends with your natural state of mind,
with the busyness that we have that's really always going on in the background. It, it's, we all come into this world to people who have busy minds. And as we're growing up, our parents kind of unintentionally, but inevitably they install this kind of internal mental monologue script that's going in the back of our mind.
This is good. This is not good. This is who I am. All those identities that, that come up from that, this is acceptable. This is not acceptable.
And by the time,
really, by the time we get to be 10,
you've got a sense of who you are. Your personality is starting to gel.
And within that,
there's a voice in your head at that point that is starting to get going. And then we go forward. If you're like me, you go forward all the way until you are about 25, 25, 35.
How old am I now?
And at that point, somebody introduces meditation to you and, and you sit down and you think. And if you've been miss, if you've misunderstood meditation, then you think it's. You're clearing your mind of thoughts, right?
And you sit down and you Fail utterly at having a quiet mind. It, it is quite frankly an impossible task to stop your mind from thinking.
EMILY: The mind secretes thoughts. That's, that's what it does.
BEC: What it does.
Heart beats, the stomach digests.
The mind creates thoughts. That, that's, that's its job. If your mind is not creating thoughts, you are brain dead and you probably don't need to be meditating anymore.
The thing is those thoughts are there whether we're aware of them or not.
And so we might as well become aware of them because they're influencing our physiology. Now we get back,
get back to the psoas. It's all tied into the nervous system, but your thoughts and this is, I mean hypnobirthing is based on this. All the sort of natural childbirth classes are really based on this idea of getting a hold of your nervous system so that you can unwind that dorsal vagal response,
that fight, flight, freeze response that our body would have in a life threatening situation.
EMILY: Yes.
BEC: And we can wind our way back into sometimes called ventral vagal or the safe and social qualities of things. Because if we're going into a situation and we haven't noticed that we have a real horror stories picture in our mind that we are trying to run from as fast as we can manage it.
People go in and this is, I've seen people choose home birth for this reason, which great,
but we need to do something about it. People say, I heard this horrors, I had this absolute horror birth at the hospital. And so now I'm going all the way to the other side.
Okay, I applaud the choice of recognizing you had a horror birth in the hospital and not just going to that same hospital and hoping for something different.
EMILY: Right.
BEC: That's the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
But if we don't look at the fact that there's a lot of baggage around the birth experience,
then we're showing up. And this is where I say, yeah, you, you could do all the wonderful body balancing connection, get all your tissues perfectly opened and yes, that will help.
But if on the moment, in the moment that you have a strong contraction and you have the pressure of the baby moving into your butt and it feels like you're going to have the largest bowel movement you, you've ever had in your life,
if at that moment your mind pops up a picture of a fourth degree tear in somebody's body because you watched a video on YouTube of something about that to find out about something your whole body doesn't Matter how pliable your tissues are, your whole body is going to recoil from that.
And so when we're, when we're doing meditative practice,
in a lot of ways we're getting to know the storyline that's in the back of our mind. We're getting to watch. How do your thoughts wander? When we teach in Mommy Sangha, we always do a 10 minute meditation and it's basic mindfulness practice.
Sit down, be aware of your body,
feel your breathing.
And when your mind wanders off, not if, when your mind wanders off, notice, oh,
I seem to have wandered off. And don't beat yourself up for having had a couple of thoughts. That's again the nature of the mind.
But just recognize, ah, I am no longer feeling my breath. I am now over here,
let me practice. And this is the. My teacher used to say that mindfulness is mental weightlifting. Yes, we are seeing,
oh,
I'm on a storyline. I've gone all the way down this huge train of thought. I am in Tahiti in my mind right now.
And when I'm teaching, I say, okay, so you've noticed that you're on a train. Get off the train,
get off the train, go back to the station, sit down on the bench,
start over.
EMILY: Yes.
BEC: And we get to know you get familiar with your own habitual mental patterns. Where do you usually go? How does it feel? And then as you start to build that,
we might start to get into the.
Okay, your mind just went to that video of the fourth degree tear.
Okay, how does it feel to touch that thought? How does it feel to get close to that fear, to that pattern, to that anxiety that usually because we don't like it, usually we run from it, usually we react, we do anything and everything we possibly can to get away from that feeling.
And kind of a Thelma and Louise moment, you don't really notice that you've hit the gas and you're driving off the cliff as opposed to you needed to just change, change your direction slightly.
So it's, it's tricky and we're never quite going to solve every fear.
But it's not, it's not, you don't have to get rid of every single fear. You have to be willing to work with what's coming up. Can you work with that intensity?
When I teach,
we, we do some very strong,
intense yoga poses and you know, people say, oh, it's like you're doing, you're doing a mock contraction. I say, well, technically, no,
you know,
ankle to knee deep, hip opener posture isn't What a contraction feels like.
EMILY: This is it.
BEC: It does not feel like you're. You're stretching your glutes or doing a wall sit, like chair pose, sitting in it for 60 seconds.
Contraction usually doesn't feel like your thighs are burning,
but that is a sensation that's usually pretty uncomfortable. It usually brings up some feelings. It usually starts to get the mental thought process spiraling.
And that's an opportunity in a safe environment where, you know, okay, I know she's not gonna have me hold goddess squat for a full 30 minutes.
I can come out of this anytime I want to. Okay, so how close can I get to that moment? How can I check in with my breathing? How can I use my breathing to get connected back to my nervous system so I can learn?
How do I down regulate? How do I go to that sigh of relaxation in my body?
So it's.
And then I've. I've seen so many people in Shavasana, like, I call them the Shavasana twitchers,
where you. You put them in yoga nidra. And we start to go. And you see people almost like. It's like they're having a small epileptic fit about not doing something.
I should be doing something. Something else should be happening here. This is. This is boring. This is lazy. This is all the judgments come up and to look at it and then to be compassionate to ourselves and to see, wow,
wow. Are you. Do you. Are you beating yourself up about having this particular type of birth experience? Are you beating yourself up about whether or not your kid is sleeping through the night yet,
or about feeding your child and the choices you're having to make? And I mean, as you mentioned,
birth is. I always say birth is one day.
It's an intense day.
EMILY: Blip on the map. Yeah.
BEC: It's a momentous day, absolutely. And we should prepare for it with full excitement and joy and purpose.
But it's one day, and then you have a baby.
And as my husband and I both said to each other as we left the hospital with our son in the backseat in his car seat, I think we got about three blocks away from the hospital, and I looked at him and I said, honey,
there's a baby in the backseat of this car,
they let us leave with a baby.
I feel like we should have had to take a test or something to leave with a baby.
Like, they didn't even ask us if we know what we're doing.
And he said,
do you want to. Do you want to go get a hot chocolate? I said, yes. And we pulled into the hot. Into the cafe parking lot. And I said, wait, sweetie,
only one of us can go in. There's a baby in the back of the car.
EMILY: Oh, my gosh.
BEC: It is. It's such a gear change.
EMILY: Yeah.
BEC: And there are. I mean, maybe good. We live in a time of myriads of parenting books and advice and Instagram influencers who can tell us about things and ideas and research about infant and toddler and child and teenager development.
Sort of like all those prenatal yoga trainings that I took. They all contradict each other.
They all will. They say, you should do this thing. And it's like, great. How do you do that? When you're triggered by the fact that your toddler is doing the very thing you swore you would never, ever do,
and you're reacting to it because that internal monologue that you got downloaded to you when you were five is still playing in the background.
Right.
The best. My husband always says it. The best we could do, if we're trying to cycle break for our family patterns, best we can hope for is that you nudge the needle.
Yeah. You nudge it a little bit, you're not going to completely change the storyline,
but we can be compassionate to ourselves about the fact that we're on a record that is going around and around and around and around over and over again.
EMILY: Yeah, yeah.
EMILY: It's really. It's a call to action.
It's a. It's a call. It's. It's. You know, women, you. You have the greatest responsibility on this planet to gestate, birth and nourish and raise the next generation. Like, you need to do your absolute best and with compassion, with a side of compassion.
But, like, you need to do your absolute best. And this simple practice of becoming aware of what's happening in your mind and doing the work that's required and necessary. It's.
It's your job. It's. You get to do this,
and it's. It's a great responsibility. And if you're going to be, you know, becoming pregnant or if you are pregnant, I hope that you see that and that you hear this and that you take it seriously because it's.
It's big.
BEC: Yes. And we also have to watch out for what a friend of mine calls patriarchal motherhood.
Because our role as women is not just to take care and raise these babies and birth these babies.
Our role as women is.
Is in part to get to embody ourselves, to be fully embodied in our identity as it is. And some people that's going to mean that mothering doesn't seem to come naturally, that it feels very awkward and very uncomfortable, and you don't feel like you're doing it well.
And that's okay.
That's not. That doesn't mean that you've failed somehow.
That our. Our worth as women is not based on how polite and calm and connected our children are.
That we have. We. We are bigger than that,
and we can be bigger than that and we can recognize.
Yes, I want my child to be a compassionate, loving, well suited, resilient,
wonderful person.
And he already is.
It's that. It's.
It's actually a principle in meditation practice we talk about called. We call it basic goodness.
That we were born with it.
Your baby was born. There is no evil baby. There is no baby that is born in. In that is born with an evil personality. Your. Your baby may be challenging,
but they were born basically good. They are fundamentally worthy of love and respect and being heard. And we never lose that.
All people,
everybody listening. You are basically good at your core.
You are a basically good person.
There are times we have hard times.
We can do hard things and sometimes we don't feel like we're doing them well.
But that doesn't mean that we lose that basic goodness.
EMILY: Yeah, it's an amazing experience. It's an amazing journey getting to have a baby and going through all of their developmental leaps with them. And just like there's so much inner work and so much reflecting and so.
EMILY: Much mirroring that gets to come up.
EMILY: For us as parents. It's.
It's such a fun experience. And I really hope too, that people have surrounded themselves with a beautiful community because that is crucial. The village is so crucial,
people to support you through this experience and to be able to, you know, sit in circle with other women.
Like you said, you have your community.
It's so crucial because it's so big and you know, you can't just talk like you said about your movement, nutrition, or your, you know, your physical, you know, the food you eat or the mindfulness.
It's like it's all of it together.
It all is connected.
BEC: Yeah. This is a holistic experience and, and multi dimensional. I mean, absolutely.
So many dimensions. I will. I often say, Sawyer, my, my son, he is my greatest teacher. No, he is my meditation teacher. And 100 is completely humbling me every other day because every time I think I got it, he turns around and says something and I'm like, whoa,
okay. And how do I relate to that? How do I work with this?
EMILY: Yeah.
BEC: In that moment. Yep.
EMILY: Beginner's mind forever and always.
Oh, my gosh, Beck, this was a lovely conversation. This was so helpful.
Yeah. I would love if you wanted to share about your book and maybe just you. You mentioned at the beginning of the podcast about your offerings, but if you want to just shoot off where people can find you, that would be great.
BEC: Yeah. So, I mean, if you wanna find me. Ombirths. Com is the website. It's, as I said, online pre and postnatal yoga program.
The book om Births Approach. It came out last year and it was. I basically designed it to help any pregnant mama who has a yoga practice or just wants to have a yoga practice and really wants to use that yoga practice to prepare for the birth experience.
So there's a section in it, all about anatomy that talks about, this is a whole thing on the psoas. There's a whole thing on the pelvic floor on fascia and the interconnectedness in our body and how that all kind of intersects with the actual physiology of the birth experience.
And then there's a whole middle section that's about practice. And you mentioned that, like, tucking the pelvis is great for the male body. And so there's a lot of things there about taking the classic yoga poses and adapting the instructions for.
For a female body. Because most of the alignments that we hear classically thrown out in general population yoga classes, those alignments were designed on a male body,
and that's great for a male body, but there was no male yoga teacher who was ever pregnant.
And so there are. And there are some things specifically that I really feel that the female body needs more of, like internal rotation, also not squaring the pelvis either to the side or the front.
I. Nowhere in the female body is square anywhere, especially pregnant. Everything's round pregnancy. One time I loved being pregnant because I got to be round. I didn't have to be flat for once.
And so there's a whole section on, like, what if you are adapting your practice for a female body that is pregnant? What are the hormonal differences that we need to be aware of?
What are the postural differences that are happening because of that pregnant belly growing those increased breasts, where what does that do to the postural structure to the spinal alignment?
And then the last section was basically childbirth education, because I feel that if you're gonna be using a yoga practice to get your body ready, you might as well look at what's actually happening in the birth process.
And how do these two shake hands? So there's a meditation component in there. There's a literal chapter about childbirth specifically. That's where the tuck for the top, sideways for the spin, butt out for the base comes in.
And then there's a whole chapter that's about postpartum and how do we work our way back. And that probably could have been a whole nother book, but I had to cut it down so that it wasn't a full textbook.
EMILY: Well, maybe I could have you back on and we could just dive into putting the body back together postpartum because.
BEC: I'd love to talk that because it's.
EMILY: That's a journey.
BEC: Yes. As I often say, the. The moves in pregnancy, pregnancy moves set up the baby groove grooves.
But the truth is that if it sets up the baby grooves, it will set you up for the returning back afterwards.
EMILY: Yeah. Yeah.
BEC: So important. So yeah. So people can get that on. They can get the book on the website. It is available on Amazon as well. Awesome. And all the. All the offerings are are on the website or talked about on Instagram and all the.
All the social medias as as we do.
EMILY: Where do we find you on social media?
BEC: Ome births on Instagram and Facebook.
EMILY: Awesome.
EMILY: Thank you so much, Beck. I appreciate your time and wisdom and knowledge. Bombs dropped here today.
BEC: I do like to talk about this as long as I possibly can. I know I'm obsessed too,
but thank you, Emily. It's so lovely to be able to have a conversation with someone who also likes to dive deep into this. This topic because as we said,
the cocktail parties people run when you start talking about the birth experience.
So it's nice to be able to actually share and commiserate.
EMILY: Yeah. Yes.
EMILY: Thank you so much.
BEC: You.
EMILY: Hey guys. I just wanted to let you know.
EMILY: That Beck is offering all of my.
EMILY: Listeners 10% off the full mama membership as as the day passes to the pre and postnatal recorded libraries.
How amazing is that? For the first 100 people who use the code birth advocate 10 that's B I R T H A D V O c a t e 10.
EMILY: Thank you for listening through to the end. I do hope you found good medicine in today's episode and that it encourages your own soul evolution. I have a few new offers, both in person and virtual that I'd like to tell you about.
Beginning in January, I will host a free in person perinatal women's circle for anyone trying to conceive pregnant or postpartum, seeking community and support. There will be a focus on preparing for natural birth and healing from birth trauma children are welcome.
You can sign up via my website.
I also now offer a monthly online virtual village circle for families seeking an empowering physiological conception, pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum. It's just $10 a month or free when you purchase my online course.
So you want a home birth? You can gain access by signing up via my website.
As always, I host Women's circles once a month at my home in Southern Maine. All women are welcome. For details, go to my website.
I have 20 years of experience in the medicalized system. I let my nursing license expire in 2023 and now I walk with women seeking a physiological, instinctual and deeply spiritual conception, pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum journey.
I help prepare and repair for the most expansive rite of passage that women get to experience in this lifetime. It is my greatest honor and sole mission to hold sacred space and witness women as they claim their own inner authority and power.
EMILY: I am a fierce advocate and guardian.
EMILY: Of natural birth using the culmination of my life's experiences including my own embodied wisdom when it comes to being a home birthing mother, nearly two decades of experience in our healthcare system and a year long sacred birth worker mentorship with Anna the Spiritual Midwich.
I support births with or without a licensed provider present at home birth centers and the hospital.
I offer birth debriefing and integration sessions for women, their families and birth workers. I I offer therapeutic one to one sessions, individually tailored mother blessings, closing of the bones and fear and trauma release ceremonies.
If any or all of this resonates, I offer a free 30 minute discovery call if you have a birth story to share or if you're an embodied wise woman, witch healer, medicine woman.
I am also interested in sharing your.
EMILY: Contribution to our soul evolution.
EMILY: You can book in via the link in the show notes. Thank you so much for your love and support everyone. Until next time, take really good care.
