birthawakening - for sovereign women

Sleep, fitness, and nutrition are foundational aspects of living well, and that doesn't change when you're expecting. To optimize your prenatal health, do these three things: Take care to move your body every day, prioritize your rest and sleep, and eat real food. Want a 4th? Listen to your intuition.

A long time ago, I didn’t understand the point of birth stories. I thought once the baby was here, the birth was more or less incidental. After all, "the only thing that matters is that you have a healthy baby," right? Uh, no. I take major issue with that statement. Having a healthy baby is obviously very important--but the mother’s experience of birth is far from incidental. Birth involves both you and your baby--it’s a cooperative act between your body and his/hers. Really, there’s no such thing as a baby. There’s a baby AND ITS MOTHER. This is called the mother-baby dyad, or the 4th trimester works, too.

Be aware (beware!) of the “cascade of interventions”. Why is it so necessary to be a thorn in your care provider’s side when it comes to refusing procedures or tests? Why rock the boat? Why not just go along with the routine procedures? How can an extra blood test, or refusing a vaginal exam now, make a difference in my birth experience later? Enter the cascade of interventions:

Ask questions, and don't just accept the answers blindly. There’s not really any such thing as a “routine” procedure, except for what's part of your care provider’s typically-preferred routine. It’s all Optional. Recommended. Suggested. Commonly practiced.  If your care provider tells you to get a test or procedure done, ask what it’s for, and whether it’s medically necessary. Is this just something he or she likes to do to fill in a blank on a chart somewhere, or is this procedure actually highly beneficial for YOU and your baby, in your unique situation? Read this as an article on my Substack Check out my homebirth courses at RethinkBirth.com

Are you committed to having a better birth? Do your own research! Don't rely on your health care professional to tell you everything you need to know, because they won't. Not because they're a jerk or anything of the sort. It's just that they don’t have the time to spend telling you things that aren’t medically necessary for you to know. The medical community, on the whole, is trained to look for and deal with pathology - which a normal pregnancy and labor do not fall under. Your OB might give you some handouts to read, or even give you a book to take home - but those information sources are going to be woefully incomplete. Pregnancy is not a disease, and our babies do not need to be rescued from our bodies. Trust birth. Read the rest of this as an article on my Substack. Check out my Navigating Birth in the System course.

Why do we need empowered childbirth? How would we even cultivate such a thing? Women often experience fear throughout pregnancy in our culture--and tend to look toward modern obstetric care to “deliver them” from the unknown experience of birth. We have become disconnected from the true nature and ability of our bodies. The intense, primal, transformational experience of an unfettered birth is something that far too many women today miss out on. Being aware of the fact that you have choices is one of the first key steps to having a calm and confident birth experience. You always retain the power of CHOICE - whether you're planning a homebirth, a surgical birth, or anything in between. Read the article to go with this episode on my Substack: KrystalTrammell.com Explore my courses at RethinkBirth.com Watch this on YouTube instead

Welcome to the RELAUNCH of my podcast, now with a video component on YouTube. In this episode, I talk about my reluctant path of becoming a doula, supporting Cesarean births, and how I slowly realized that I didn't quite fit into the typical world of birth pros! Watch this on YouTube instead: https://youtu.be/PPuSKHM_Sn4 Read my Birth articles on Substack: https://www.krystaltrammell.com/s/birth Enroll in my courses and download a bunch of free offerings on my website: https://www.rethinkbirth.com/

Why doulas are trained to distrust birth  Ancestral wisdom whispers, and fear drowns it out Freebirth doens't need to mean ALONE How to balance professional liability with trust in birthing women Freebirth isn't radical, it's simply a response to how the system treats women

Does religion inform your beliefs, or do your beliefs come first? My grandma was Catholic, but not the normal kind. Am I a 2nd generation "new ager"? How the concept of oneness is getting co-opted by hate

Who's REALLY sexualizing your child? Fashion and makeup as art  Teaching discernment Releasing victim mentality Internalized shame is not protection