41. SEASON 3! INTRODUCING MY COURSE: SO YOU WANT A HOME BIRTH? + BONUS: Module 1 Lesson 1: The Herstory of Birth; Why doesn’t every healthy mom-to-be have a home birth?
It has been a deeply transformational and rich break between seasons here on Soul Evolution. I am delighted to now offer to you a COMPLETE guide to an empowering, physiological birth: So You Want a Home Birth?
Use discount code IWANTAHOMEBIRTH until 1/31/25 to save over 70$ at www.birthadvocate.me/course
A few new offerings I have include:
A monthly Virtual Village Circle for families seeking a natural, instinctual and deeply spiritual conception, pregnancy, birth & postpartum experience. This is just 10$/month or FREE when you purchase my online course, So You Want a Home Birth?
A FREE in-person monthly Perinatal Women's Circle for anyone trying to conceive, pregnant, or postpartum. There will be a focus on preparing for a natural birth and healing from birth trauma. Children are welcome!
As always, I host an in-person monthly Women's Circle. All women are welcome.
I have included Module 1 Lesson 1 of my course 'So You Want a Home Birth?' in this episode.
As always I hope you get a lot of value out of this and that it encourages your own Soul Evolution!
Coming up in Season 3 I am bringing you embodied wise women covering topics like spirit babies, tending to your spiritual health, the power of slowing down, the science and soul of our DNA, sound and frequency, sacred sexuality, fertility, grief, real for for pregnancy, and of course rebelling against the system!
I have birth stories coming at you- VBAC, home birth, free birth, and of course a few dad's versions.
Soul Evolution is evolving just as I predicted! Thank you for being a part of this journey with me.
Please reach out and let me know what you think.
You can email me connect@birthadvocate.me
DM me on Instagram @birth.advocate
Leave me a review on iTunes or Spotify or Facebook
For all of your FREE resources click HERE.
To book a FREE discovery call, to interview on the show, or to join my Women’s Circle click here.
To find out more about The Sacred Birth Worker Mentorship by Anna, The Spiritual Midwitch and for a special discount on her offerings use code EMILY here.
Music The Ancients (feat. Loga Ramin Torkian) by Azam Ali
Enjoy the full transcript below
Note that there may be spelling or grammatical error or incorrect words as this was AI generated.
Welcome to Soul Evolution.
My name is Emily and I am
The Birth Advocate, a retired nurse, a health coach, a women's circle and ceremony facilitator, and the host of this podcast.
This is a space where we will 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 hear from our men.
From time to time too.
I hope you find nourishment for your soul here. Please let me know what you think by rating and reviewing on Spotify and itunes. Please share it, find me on Instagram at Birth Advocate and stay tuned after the show for details on all of my offerings.
And we're back. Welcome to season three everyone.
Oh my goodness. What a portal of transformation we've all been through since September.
I trust that you are tending to your precious hearts, your self care rituals and gathering with your like minded supportive community.
You know, besides being a mommy to an amazing and incredible two year old, I have been so busy. I've been to several births, I've hosted numerous women's circles, I've been attending to women with birth integration sessions and creating my course.
Oh my gosh.
Finally.
I am so stoked to release this into the world today.
It's been a long time coming.
I have poured my heart, my soul, my body, my mind into every single lesson in this course. 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. This is a guarantee your fears will be quelled.
I walk you through, step by step, exactly how you are to prepare yourself, your partner and your home for the most incredible experience you get to have in this lifetime.
The course is called.
So you want to have a home birth?
Maybe you've whispered it to your bestie. Or it's been a lifelong dream and now is your time to shine. You're going to have a baby.
But wait.
It's dangerous. Are you sure? You must be crazy. You don't get a medal and the noise from society closes in. And I understand your pause, mama.
I am obsessed with natural, spontaneous, physiological, mother led, instinctual, undisturbed birth.
When it comes to a healthy mom, I have a huge big fat bias that I wear unabashedly on my sleeve.
I do not have enough evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, to support the notion that a physiological birth can happen in a hospital.
Sure there are the one off stories out there, but were they really undisturbed? How about that car ride in.
Sorry, I'm not buying it.
I am so biased because I have personally experienced the magic. I get to witness it regularly and the evidence supports it.
So why on earth doesn't every healthy mom to be start with a home birth?
In the first module I dive deep into the her story of birth and I explain how and when it became medicalized.
This is not to demonize our medical system, it is absolutely brilliant when needed.
In this course I dispel 26 common myths about childbirth and give evidence based facts to educate you on what supports physiological birth and what disturbs it.
Most importantly, I will walk you through variations of normal and how to navigate them with understanding and confidence.
The fact of the matter is when a mother is healthy and prepared, mind, body, soul birth works most of the time without a single intervention.
Throughout this course I'm going to build up your self trust and encourage your intuition to guide you. And not in some frou frou woo woo way, but a deeply anchored and grounded and sound way.
You are being invited to take full ownership of your life, your pregnancy, birth, postpartum and your baby.
Women were born to give birth.
Eight billion people didn't hop out of a petri dish.
I will teach you all about the divine chemistry of birth, your magical womb, the perfectly designed labor process that prepares a baby to take its first breath, how your body will open and yield, how to filter out the noise and lean into the sensations and intensity so that you may emerge bold, victorious and powerful in your own right.
And so that your baby may have a life long lasting imprint of peace and love and safety on their nervous systems right from the start.
Is this course for you? It is for anyone seeking a spontaneous and undisturbed natural birth. It is geared towards home birth, but it could be used for women anywhere along the spectrum of hospital to free birth.
It also has a lesson for conscious conception and fertility.
It has been designed for the entire birth team to participate in. I highly encourage anyone attending your birth to take this course and what qualifies me to teach this course?
As I have mentioned, I've had my own beautiful natural birth at home. I study and I witness physiological birth.
I'm a retired nurse of nearly 15 years and a health coach. I trust women, I trust birth, I look at their research and sometimes more importantly, what has not been studied.
My life is completely immersed in the world of spontaneous labor.
After a year long mentorship with Anna the Spiritual Midwich, I joined Dr. Rachel Reed's online collective, started this podcast and began interviewing mothers and wise women on this topic, I sit with women and their families in the birth portal for a living.
Now. I coach and I educate and I hold ceremony and birth debriefs. As I said, I am obsessed obsessed with reclaiming childbirth as a sacred rite of passage and preserving the integrity of our children's birth imprint.
In this course I present to you a complete guide to physiological birth at home.
So when you purchase this course you will receive nine modules, 19 lessons, a free complimentary 30 minute one to one session with me 10% off of all of my other offerings.
You will know how to choose your birth team, your legal rights, what supplies you actually need to gather for your birth postpartum and so much more.
You will have access to a monthly virtual village circle where we share birth story, medicine and a Q and A session.
You will have clarity on your why birth is a sacred rite of passage worthy of honoring birth imprints matter. I will teach you exactly what a rite of passage really means and what a birth imprint is.
You will walk away from this course fully understanding the physiology of birth and know you do not need a medical degree. I make it very easy with digestible storytelling and examples.
Every Boots on the Ground preparation tactic I know of has been packed into this course. You will feel ready mind, body and soul at the end of this course.
Module 1 is all about understanding the why. We dive deep into her story and and talk about rites of passage and birth imprints.
Module 2 is where I dispel 26 myths and give you evidence based facts about birth in their place.
Module 3 is a beautiful story I wrote about a woman named Mary and her undisturbed birth of Jordan.
Module 4 talks all about physiological birth, what supports it and what disturbs it.
Module 5 this is the Boots on the ground how do I stack the conditions in my favor and prepare for natural birth Module. There are eight lessons.
First lesson is my partner is not on board so this is all about dad not being on board and what can you do? Is also has a bonus resource lesson where he can go in and dive a little deeper into what it means to become a a father.
There's a lesson on fertility, feminine sexuality and conscious conception.
A lesson on mom's health and baby's health. A lesson on deprogramming your subconscious mind and embracing fear.
The next one is mental, emotional and spiritual preparation and then choosing my birth team and then tangible preparation, birth plans and essential items to secure for labor and postpartum.
And the last lesson in this module is all about the law and finding good research.
Module 6. How to prepare for the what ifs in Labor Normalize Variations of Normal I talk in detail about all of the different things that you might see most commonly for the variations of normal and all the stages, quote unquote stages of labor.
And then I have a full lesson dedicated to the birth of the placenta and the transition of the newborn baby, as these are essential.
Module 7 is your postpartum guide. I dive deeply into the first 40 days and talk at length about the integration process of becoming either a mother for the first time or a mother to more than one.
Module 8 is called Practical Helpers and I talk about all the different herbs and remedies and practitioners and ways to afford these throughout pregnancy and into your postpartum and Module nine.
I take all of your resources and put them in one place because within each lesson and module I have linked out to YouTube videos, other podcast interviews, articles, you name it.
I have given you so many extra resources to go down more rabbit holes should your heart desire that. I felt that I should put them all in one place. And that is what Module nine is all about.
So again, this course went live today, December 18th. You can go get it now, but please don't forget your discount code. I am giving everyone listening to this episode a a $70 discount until January 31st.
All you have to use is discount code. All one word. I want a home birth and you will save over $70.
I really would love to hear from you. I want to know what you think about the course. Did it help you? Any feedback is incredibly helpful to me. I am here to serve and I want to make sure that I am giving you the best product available now.
Coming up for you in season three I have an amazing lineup of embodied wise women covering topics like spirit babies, tending to our spiritual health, the power of slowing down, the science and soul of our DNA, sound and frequency, sacred sexuality, fertility, grief, real food for fertility, pregnancy, and of course rebelling against the system.
I have birth stories for you. VBAC Stories, home birth stories, free birth stories, and of course a couple of dad's versions.
I have a very special episode for the men out there coming as well with a endearing old soul. Cannot wait for that one to come out.
As always, please Share this Rate this Review this It only takes a second. It really helps spread the good word. I would love to hear from you. Connect with me on Instagram at Birth Advocate or email me.
Connectirthadvocate Me sending you so much love. This is a really big day for me. I'm so thrilled to have this course birthed into the world and I'm just sitting here feeling so much gratitude.
You know, kind of like Snoop Dogg said.
Like I want to thank me and I really do.
This has been quite the experience balancing co parenting, mothering and running my business. It's. It's quite a thing.
I am offering you guys a little sneak peek into the course I'm going to attach here. Lesson 1 from Module 1 All About Her Story Module 1 Lesson 1 the Her Story of Birth why doesn't Every Healthy mom to be have a Home Birth?
Much of our cultural beliefs around birth not being safe stem from the time prior to antibiotics and hand washing practices.
It's true. Childbed fever was a leading cause of death. Nutrition and hygiene were particularly lacking, and women had many babies one right after the other.
This was a recipe for disaster.
Many people were living in true survival mode and this is a stark contrast to our modern times.
Birth has been women's business for thousands of years. Midwives and family births were the norm. Birth was witnessed and normalized in every household.
Think about that. In contrast to today, birth is hidden away in hospital rooms for 95 plus percent of women.
To break down the historical genocide of women and the art of midwifery would take an entire course of its own. I will link ample sources at the end of this module if you have a desire to go further down the rabbit hole of her story.
For those that are new to the term her story, it is the same as history, only told from the perspective of women. So her story in short. For hundreds of years, women, like midwives, were persecuted and this was known as the Burning Times.
That went on from 1450 to 1750.
Eventually, this led to only men being allowed to legally attend college and medical school. It wasn't until the mid-1800s that women could attend college. In the 1700s, society put a status symbol on having a male midwife or a barber surgeon with their newly invented forceps attend their births.
Many women were still birthing at home, but conditions remained suboptimal.
Hygiene and malnutrition were rampant. Problems even in hospital.
Women that could afford to give birth in a hospital would have a male doctor that had just completed an autopsy come in and quote, catch the baby with his dirty hand.
Maybe you're familiar with this story. It was the origin of us learning about hand washing practices.
Twilight sleep was a horrendous practice introduced in the early 1900s. Women were promised to be free of childbearing pains. It was sold to the feminist movement who petitioned for pain relief options.
Little did they know that this was a huge step back for womankind.
Because of this practice, birth was moved almost entirely into the hospital.
Twilight sleep was a combination of the drugs morphine and scopolamine, Morphine to reduce pain, and scopolamine to cause amnesia.
Women were tied down and put under and subjected to total and complete medical management of their birth.
Twilight sleep caused women to hallucinate. They would put the screaming, thrashing women in leather restraints for their safety and the safety of the staff.
Nurses were tasked with dosing the medications, leading to many overdose errors.
Twilight sleep was associated with many recognized and unrecognized disadvantages, including increased use of forceps during delivery, prolonged labor, an increased risk of infant suffocation, and a horrifying ripple effect of poor breastfeeding and bonding with babies.
After such a traumatic rite of passage into motherhood and traumatic birth imprints for the babies, the atrocities were finally leaked by nurses, and the public began to bear witness to what was happening within the OR walls.
Physicians stopped using morphine and scopolamine to prevent pain during childbirth due to these disadvantages.
As I said, it was sold to women under the guise that women shouldn't have to suffer and endure the pain of childbirth. I get it.
Many women, your grandmothers, unknowingly submitted to this torturous act. Thankfully, it was stopped. But the premise that birth was best managed in a hospital, that is Women can't handle birth sensations.
Birth is risky, Babies need to be pulled out of vaginas, et cetera, et cetera, stuck fast. This was a big turning point in the medicalization of birth.
You see, we're only about three generations removed from home. Birth being the everyday norm, our red thread, maternal lineage sets up an example in both our conscious and our subconscious mind.
If your grandmother birthed your mother in a hospital, likely under twilight sleep, your mother was more likely to have a hospital birth, possibly an induction or an augmentation with an epidural episiotomy and forceps.
Twilight sleep may have been stopped, but medical management of birth found new ways to seduce women.
The media only portrays medical births and makes them out to be emergencies.
Birth is not even a medical event. It is a normal, natural physiological process. Just like your digestive tract moves food through your gut and eventually out your anus, women in comas will have a natural birth.
You have everything already within you that you need to birth your baby.
Development of new forms of anesthesia, Caesarean section, safe blood transfusions, and penicillin in 1929 accounts for a drastic reduction in mortality. But this didn't come without a cost.
Birth was not considered a medical event for most of our great great grandmothers. Physicians were only called in if there was a problem the midwives could not handle.
Now monitoring, managing and intervening in childbirth is commonplace. For what should have been utilized as a last resort, women are groomed into compliance and stripped of their self trust and intuition.
Their power is handed over to the authority figure, the medical industrial complex.
Monetizing birth is a brilliant plan. Why not? We all have to be born today. Healthy mothers everywhere are on a prenatal care assembly line that does nothing but devalue and degrade the self trust and intuition of the individual woman.
Every mom gets an ultrasound to confirm pregnancy. Blood tests, glucose tests, GBS tests, more ultrasounds to monitor baby's growth and anatomy, amniotic fluid levels, placenta efficiency, and the list goes on and on.
Whoops.
Your baby's too big, you're too old. Insert reason here. We better induce you.
Whoops, baby doesn't seem to like these medically provoked contractions. We better head to the OR and save your baby.
One in three women will have a cesarean section.
This is not normal.
Women still hire surgeons to monitor their pregnancies and deliver their babies every day.
The induction and cesarean rates are simply out of control. It's an epidemic.
We don't leave room for nuance for emotional, mental and spiritual trauma inflicted by these practices and policies.
One in three women report birth trauma.
This is not normal.
In 1929, we did have a drastic reduction in mortality for the reasons I previously stated.
However, the rate of fetal maternal mortality has not improved relative to the shockingly high increase in intervention rates over time.
We intervene more today, but at what cost?
One could read the evidence to say that the increased rate of intervention is leading to increased rates of cesarean section and instrumental birth.
Many midwives are also rather medically minded, meaning that they seek out pathology instead of honoring physiology.
They err on the side of caution, meaning they don't allow for variations of normal.
They bring in their own past trauma or biases, and they want to preserve their relationships with hospitals and obs.
They do have to protect their licensure and reputation.
They serve a system that fundamentally does not believe in women's ability to give birth.
Now there are unicorns out there. And in a future lesson, I will teach you how to interview your midwife to see if she supports true physiological birth and about your rights and what is legal.
This lesson is dismal I must say I hope it gave you pause to consider the root cause of how and when birth became a medical event.
From my vantage point, we need a complete shift in the paradigm. Women are incredible miraculous beings born to give birth. This course is going to teach you about physiology, but honestly, you don't need that information to birth your baby.
It helps to calm the mind and give a sense of control. But the truth is you are wholly able to birth your baby exactly as you are right here and now.
I believe healthy women should begin planning for a home birth and I will take you through exactly why I believe this so strongly.
The evidence supports the notion and I will teach you how to be fully prepared in the medical system. If a woman is risked out of a home birth, then they need to be informed of the evidence that supports this notion and given the opportunity to ascertain if they agree or not.
Risk can be replaced with the word chance. For example, a VBAC mom has about a 0.5% risk of uterine rupture.
She has about a 99.5% chance of success.
I'm also an advocate for wild pregnancies and free birth. When healthy parents are willing and able to take full responsibility for their birth and the outcomes, choosing this alternative path should be a very deliberate, conscious choice.
Free birthing parents are some of the most well versed and educated people out there. It is important to be honest about the origin of this decision. Is it coming from a place of trust or fear, scarcity or abundance to avoid the medical system at all costs or a belief that they can't afford support?
I encourage you to lean in and suss out your why when choosing where and with whom to birth.
Those are the two most important decisions you can ever make.
This course is designed to educate anyone wanting a natural and therefore physiological birth. It could be with or without a licensed provider present.
Now that you have some baseline knowledge about the hearth story of birth, let's dive into why this really matters. Let's talk about rites of passage and.
Birth imprints in Module 1.
Lesson 2.
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 nurses 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.
I am a fierce advocate and guardian.
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 health care system and a year long sacred birth worker mentorship with Anna the Spiritual Midwitch.
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 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 a embodied wise woman, witch healer, medicine woman. I am also interested in sharing your contribution to our soul evolution.
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.
