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Medicine Stories

61. Revillaging: Maternal, Cultural, and Planetary Wellness are One - Rachelle Garcia Seliga

Medicine Stories

Amber M Hill

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

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2020

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We cannot talk about collective health, planetary health, or the health of future generations, without talking about the health of mothers. As Rachelle says, “The dysfunction and disharmony within our human environments is manifesting through the vulnerable bodies of postpartum women. In fact it is through the bodies of mothers that humanity is being alerted to the urgency of our collective need for change.”

IN THE INTRO:

  • The reaction to my previous episode on parenting without a village

IN THE INTERVIEW:

  • Our culture is set up to fail new families/parents, and pathologizing the postpartum period overlooks the fact that it’s our social structures that are the cause of the immense emotional and psychological pain most postpartum mothers feel
  • Mama- it’s not your fault
  • New moms lose up to 700 hours of sleep during the first postpartum year
  • The baseline of normal is that human babies need care 24/7 (your baby is not “high needs”), what’s not normal is living in isolated nuclear families
  • Postpartum care cannot happen without community, and community is the one thing we are all lacking
  • Why it’s so hard, when it’s what we all deeply crave, to recreate the community living of our ancestors/how the colonial mindset keeps us mired in separation and distrust
  • The pelvis as the seat of trauma for most every woman, and how we can begin to heal that
  • How we feel in our pelvis is how we feel in our life- the connection between mental and pelvic health
  • Intergenerational trauma and clearing the “bad medicine” that was embedded in the bodies of our female ancestors and passed down to us
  • Anchoring in what we actually believe about ourselves, our bodies, this life
  • Women are, and deeply feel, unsafe in our culture
  • The incredible responsibility of raising girls (and boys tho!) in this culture, and how Rachelle and I navigate talking to them about the realities of patriarchy in an age appropriate way
  • Teaching our kids to respect their inner authority first and foremost
  • Reproductive and environmental justice are one and the same
  • It’s time to grow up and do the work- our primary responsibility as adults on this planet at this time is to caretake life
  • One simple way we can create community and support the parents of little ones
  • If we can’t be resourced horizontally (by the folks around us), we can be resourced vertically (by our well ancestors) and by the land
  • The sacrifices we make as mothers are a holy offering to life itself

LINKS:

Mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

And there's actually nothing wrong with us.

0:03.3

You know, to me, postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety,

0:07.2

what gets clumped into and labeled as perinatal mood disorders

0:11.4

is a normal and healthy response to a dysfunctional way of life. So it's

0:17.6

normal and healthy and functioning that we would feel depressed to be home

0:21.3

alone with our children eight hours a day, five days a week or more.

0:25.4

You know, it's normal to feel anxiety when we don't have any support outside of our nuclear

0:30.8

family.

0:31.8

Hello. of our nuclear family. Hello friends and welcome to the Medicine Stories Podcast, where we are remembering

0:41.0

what it is to be human upon the earth. I'm your host Amber Magnolia Hill and

0:46.6

this is episode 61. Today I'm sharing my interview with Rochelle Garcia Saliga. I am having a hard time

0:59.6

finding the words to express how profound I find this conversation not just between the two of us, but this

1:09.1

larger cultural conversation about mothers, children, babies, postpartum, birth, the wellness of all these things in relationship to the wellness of the entire culture, the entire human family,

1:27.6

human village, if we can even call it that, and the wellness of the earth.

1:34.7

So I'm really honored to have spoken to Rochelle

1:38.4

and to share this with you today.

1:40.7

I would personally request that you listen to the end.

1:45.9

I think it just gets really powerful at the end.

1:49.3

And yeah, as I was re-listening to it, I just was like, gosh, I hope people make it all the way because this is really where it all comes together and where like the most profound statements are being made and just what comes up is what I think about every day and really the whole purpose of this podcast.

2:10.0

So if you feel in alignment with this podcast, which you clearly do if you're here, I think that you will feel glad that you listened until the end.

2:21.5

And I want to define postpartum here, the postpartum period. I do ask Rochelle this at the very end, but just to make clear from the very beginning, there's no end point to postpartum.

2:35.0

If you are raising a child and even if you're not, as Rochelle defines it even larger than raising a child, which you'll hear in the beginning

...

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