The following podcast is a deer media production.

Hi friends and welcome to the papaya podcast. I'm your hostess,

Trine Hermosta, Sarah Nicole, and each week I'm going to be dishing out some sweetness mixed

in with some seeds of wisdom or something like that. So get ready to get inspired,

get candid, get real because we are all in this digital space together.

Brandy, welcome to the show. You are the host of deer doula.

And can you just maybe start with helping us understand what a doula is?

Because I honestly only learned in the last year what a doula's role even is,

maybe in the last two years. And I think because it felt so like woo woo and

out there for so long and I maybe lacked an understanding, I would love to kind of hear

what a doula is and basically how you got into making a podcast about it.

I know. So so many things. So there are different types of doules. I will start there. So

most people may think about doulas. They think about someone coming to your birth. That is a birth

doula. And so usually they're meeting with you when you're pregnant, doing a couple of sessions

with you then to help you and your partner. If you have one, to just learn about the process

of giving birth to kind of understand what you are looking to have, the kind of birth

you're looking to have, what's important to you to help you understand the choices that you have.

And then they actually accompany you at your birth to help you with managing pain and discomfort,

you know, giving your partner some tips and kind of helping them to help you. And also kind of

being an advocate for you to kind of have the kind of space that you want during your birth.

I mostly at this point, literally for the past 15 years, have been a postpartum doula,

meaning I work with people after they have the baby. I did start off with

...