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Medicine Stories

48. Matriarchy in Action & Ancestor Assisted Birth - Emilee Saldaya

Medicine Stories

Amber M Hill

Herbs, Health & Fitness, Ancestry, Alternativemedicine, Herbalism, Alternative Health, Dreams, Healing, Society & Culture, Psychedelics

4.81.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2019

⏱️ 101 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Birth has been systemically taken from us by the powers that be, but each birthing body holds deep knowledge of how to bring forth life. This conversation is part of a much larger cultural remembering of what our ancestors instinctively knew about giving birth and nurturing our babies.

IN THE INTRO:

  • If we're not changing our minds, we're not growing
  • Mammalian birth [mama & mammal & mammary are etymologically related, and there's a reason for that]
  • How the Taoist medicine perspective of how energy moves through the female body explains why everyone wants to be around women

IN THE INTERVIEW:

  • How Emilee’s radical teenage years led to her work now.

  • Supporting mother’s instincts so that the mother-baby conversation can happen.

  • Birth story: Dolphins(!), their potent medicine, and telepathic connection to birth (I cry).

  • The spectrum of birth experience from beautiful and respectful, to dark and scary.

  • How Emilee’s first hospital birth helped align her with her dharma.

  • Our special likeness to all mammals through hormonal sequencing and our need to birth in a safe, familiar space (the choice of birth location changes the hormones flowing through the body during birth).

  • Ultrasound technology safety and what affects our choices to use it.

  • We are culturally trained to fear birth, and be terrified of death.

  • How Patriarchy & Christianity disempowered birthing women.

  • Fear- allying ourselves with it, rather than struggling to “overcome” it.

  • Holding space for all individual birth experiences while still rejecting The System.

  • Surrogacy, the primal wound, the commodification of bodies, and our bodily sovereignty as women.

  • Staying open and nuanced in complex conversations.

  • Meeting your divinity through birth, and the sacred spirituality of pregnancy.

  • We birth the way we live.

  • We are all descendants of women who birthed at home (like 99.999999999% of our female ancestors). Birth is in our bones.

  • Creating a matriarchal household/family.

  • A freebirth is a birth unhindered, undisturbed, in the support of loved ones, and outside the system that oppresses women and especially women of color.

  • When we align with truth, in our power, we are unshakable.

LINKS:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

We are afraid of birth because that is everything we've been told birth has been taken from us has been stolen from us for a very very long time and

0:09.6

We have you know burned, and jailed the medicine women, you know, the

0:15.6

witches and the midwives and the healers and the herbalists and all of the women who supported

0:20.0

women and who held, the knowers, right, the knowers have all been mostly wiped out.

0:26.4

It's a real struggle to stay alive if you are a knower that walks with women.

0:34.0

So that was very systematically and successfully done

0:38.0

over the past many thousands of years,

0:40.0

as I'm sure you know.

0:42.0

You know, we're afraid of birth today because why wouldn't we be?

0:48.0

There's nothing injected into our lives as girls that tells us, that normalizes it,

0:55.4

that allies us to it.

0:57.4

Hello friends and welcome to Medicine Stories where we are remembering what it is to be

1:08.2

human upon the earth. I am your host Amber Magnolia Hill and this is episode 48. Today I'm sharing my interview with

1:18.2

Emily Celdea of the Free Birth Society. I was interviewed on Emily's Free Birth Society podcast a couple months ago.

1:28.0

You can listen there. I talk about my two daughters, very different birth stories the first was a free birth or as I now

1:38.1

conceive of it after listening after interviewing Emily my ancestor assisted birth in 2006, and I mean it truly was as I believe all of our births are because birth is in your bones if you are a woman.

1:56.0

And the second birth, a midwife and ancestor

2:01.0

assisted birth in 2016, So one really fell outside the dominant medical paradigm

2:08.3

and one fell under the midwifery model of care and they were both wonderful and I love birth and I love birth stories and as I tell

2:19.6

Emily I can't believe it's taking me this long to actually talk about birth on the

2:23.0

podcast because I always intended to and as I shared in the very first episode

2:29.3

episode number one I have been I had been wanting to start a podcast since 2006 when my oldest was

...

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