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Birthing Rites with Eleanor Young
945 Plays5 months ago
What's the story with free birthing, wild birthing, orgasmic births and births that don't go to plan?
Here to deliver answers to all our laborious questions is the wise and erudite Eleanor Young, researcher, permaculturalist, writer and midwife.
Even if you're not some born-again birthing evangelist, you'll find lots to love in this gentle and soulful exploration of human propagation. Because there is so much overlap between how we treat birth and how we treat the earth; between reclaiming our mammalian birthing blueprint and remembering how to live within nature’s lore and loamy bosom.
I love that Eleanor integrates permaculture principles and midwifery. I love that she walks between worlds, the clinical and the feral. And you’ll love this episode if you’re yearning to learn about undisturbed birth, the current state of midwifery, polyvagal theory, healing birth trauma and why permaculture principles and birthing are natural bedfellows.
LINKY POOS 🧙🏼♀️
Eleanor’s substack ~ Inhabiting the Edge
Donut Economics ~ Kate Raworth
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Rascilians Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
race yeah Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned into Rascilians, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't. These waveforms are rippling to you from Jara country, central Victoria, where it's waddle and magpie time in the Jara seasonal calendar. The days are still short and cold, but there's spring life stirring with sticks in the beaks of nesting birds and sprays of golden wattle.
The Value of Darkness
00:00:37
Speaker
But before true spring arrives and the world turns warm and bright and extroverted, I'm spending some quality time with the dark.
00:00:46
Speaker
The dark isn't a place many of us are naturally drawn to, filled as it is with fictional demons and actual danger, especially if you're a woman. And yet darkness itself is endangered, because every single light bulb in our illuminated ant hill is out to get it. Darkness is yin, my acupuncturist tells me. Darkness is the womb, the soil, the rest, the digesting, the underworld. Darkness, I realized during a night alone in the bush on a tarp, is also an excellent shelter. Once your eyes adjust to the dim light and your senses sharpen, there's no way anything or anyone can creep up on you. You have the home-ground advantage. You are the monster in the shadows. So I'm here to give a plug for the darkness, a nudge to trudge in the night fudge, even if it's just around your backyard.
Experiencing Nature at Night
00:01:40
Speaker
Last week, for example, I did a workout in the dark. It wasn't something I planned in advance. It's just that I had a long day of travel, arrived home late and needed to expend some energy. Our driveway is kind of long and steep and makes a great athletics track. And on that dark moon weeknight, I thought it would be fun to run up and down it without a torch. Putting one foot in front of the other suddenly became a whole new ballgame because I couldn't see the ground, just a faint beige glow from the gravel. Without the usual reference points, my steps were deliberate and exaggerated, like a cat wearing socks.
00:02:18
Speaker
I also did some squats, lunges and balancing poses too, basic movements made brilliant by subtracting light. It was one of my more memorable workouts. That same week, Jordan and I took a walk after dinner in our neighbourhood, along quiet country roads, across rabbit-popped paddocks, into the freezing winter blackness. Every now and then we'd stop to look up into space, massive and sparkling and indigo, which gave me vertigo, like peering over the rim of a bottomless sinkhole. Even though there are some pretty shadowy and rough sections of the road, we decided to walk home in the dark without our head torches. And as we stumbled back down our driveway, crunching over the gravel, I saw a shooting star under Jordan's shoe.
00:03:08
Speaker
I squealed and told George to check it out as I crouched down, scratched around for a couple of pieces of quartz and smashed them together. Quartz is Earth's most ubiquitous mineral made of silica. Most of us could probably go outside and find some right now. Hitting two pieces of quartz together will produce a cool effect called triboluminescence, which is a flash of light released by friction and also an excellent party trick. In crunching and smushing the quartz, George's shoes made triboluminescent fireworks. And if we weren't in the dark, we wouldn't have seen the sparks. I think that goes for a lot of things.
Living in Harmony with Nature and Birth Practices
00:03:50
Speaker
I've been relatively in the dark about birthing, not having kids of my own and being parenthood agnostic. But quite a few listeners have reached out about a resculiant take on the underworld journey of procreation. So this episode is for you. because really there is so much overlap between how we treat birth and how we treat the earth, between reclaiming our mammalian birthing blueprint and remembering how to live a little closer to the ground, nestled within nature's loamy bosom. It just so happened that I recently became Instagram friends with the wise and erudite Eleanor Young, who then popped up on Artist as Families podcast and sold me on the poetics of pushing out a kid.
00:04:34
Speaker
Eleanor is a researcher, permaculturist, writer and registered midwife who sparks conversations about rewilding childbirth without the puritanical overlay that can be so off-putting. I love that Eleanor is integrating permaculture principles and midwifery. I love that she walks between worlds, the clinical and the feral. And I love that she provides not so much a counterpoint, but a complement to the last episode with Annie Raiser Rowland on voluntary extinction, pouring yet another perspective into the bubbling stew of resculience that grows more complex and flavoursome by the week.
Eleanor Young: Midwifery and Permaculture
00:05:12
Speaker
You'll love this episode if you're yearning to learn about undisturbed birth, the current state of midwifery, polyvagal theory, healing birth trauma, and why permaculture principles and birthing are natural bedfellows. Eleanor is a brilliant, brilliant writer. She has a substack called Inhabiting the Edge that I'll link below if you want to push further into the midwifery wilds, and is alive and kicking on Instagram too. Eleanor is also a supporter of the podcast, which is very kind indeed, and I'm loving having her presence and input behind the scenes on Patreon. In fact, I'm loving Patreon full stop, bringing engagement and collaboration to this one directional podcasting medium. My patrons can pitch ideas for upcoming guests, chat about the themes of each episode and participate in per episode quests as set by our guests, which is a whole lot of fun.
00:06:03
Speaker
You can become a reskillience patron for the price of an overpriced brownie each month. And the way I see it is supporting each other's creative endeavors on a community level in a circular way makes us resilient in a way that centralized sources of income don't. So thank you to all of my beautiful patrons and big love to new patrons, Laura B, Kim Day, Sam Davies, and Elizabeth, who have jumped on board this month. You can find us all at patreon dot.com slash Riskilience. And there's always the option of leaving a Spotify or iTunes review to support the show if you'd like to reserve your disposable income for gluten-free brownies, which I totally understand. Here's Eleanor Young, and stick around after our convo to hear who's up next episode.
00:06:52
Speaker
I recently spent the weekend with Susie Muir, um who has been on the podcast and who is a very dear friend. And as you might know, and as people might know, she's on a loan at the moment and the finale is next week, although it'll probably have already been by the time we release this conversation. But when Susie was here, um we were peppering her with questions, right? Because we got past that like sensitivity of, oh, we shouldn't Broke your subject and then we just kind of went on a full frontal like questioning assault But she would say bananas about things that she just couldn't speak about so there were things she could share and then they were just bananas and I had this feeling with you Eleanor of like I know that I you are in this really precious position between worlds, bridging worlds. And I don't know if there are any topics that are like bananas for you. um I kind of want to get a sense of how you're working, you know, as a midwife in the system, but also as a wild birthing, free birth, kind of rogue entity in a way. What aren't you able to do because you've chosen to still have those strings attached to the system?
00:08:00
Speaker
Well, I think it depends on where you're thinking. like If you're thinking about your professional registrations and your you know your actual requirements, your professional standards, those kinds of things, there are things that you can't speak to, you know unfortunately. um but I think there are ways in which we can sort of, we need to be able to have conversations around that kind of stuff too. So I think often um midwives will think that they can't do certain things or they can't support certain things. and
00:08:34
Speaker
I mean, it may or may not be true, but um I think we need to start looking, really unpacking what that means in my work and the way that I've, I'm looking at like, yes, free birthing and wild birthing, but in the end, it comes back down to undisturbed birth. And that's, that can be in any context. It just depends on how we support it. So. I'm always trying to look at that as a blueprint and then go, okay, well, how does that translate into these very big structures in which women birth, which are mostly hospitals really for most of us. So how do midwives kind of break free of what they think in terms of policies and guidelines and all these kinds of things and come back to. How do I support physiological birth? How do I stand with women? Like how do I be that, you know? Because you actually can go much further than you think with that. um Because it's actually up to the woman to make her choices and then you are with her in that. But it's stuff that we don't.
00:09:34
Speaker
look at a lot. We don't kind of really explore it as to, you know, if we're supporting women um and we're providing good care and good information and helping them kind of look at all of their decision making and this kind of thing, then what she decides is her decision and then we are with her. We're supporting that. I kind of weave around on that level. I mean, that's still within the whole scope of the midwife and the definition of what a midwife is. I suppose my maybe the the question really underneath for me and as a basic primer is what's the state what's the state of things in midwifery and birthing because all I hear from my friends and not having gone through that initiation myself is how bloody hard it is to find someone to even offer information, let alone kind of support and and witnessing of that process. And then also from the midwife's point of view, I just feel like there's this really
00:10:30
Speaker
big separation between, you know, the midwives I know who are just like, I can't even touch that, that whole like home birthing free birthing world. And then the women I know who are like, ah, who can help me? And is this legal? Yeah. Yeah. Like what are the legalities and realities of that at the moment? Women can choose whatever they want to choose. like that's That's up to them. Do you know what I mean? like There's no legality around birthing. It's not illegal to birth at home. It's not illegal to free birth. you know um As a midwife, it's not something I should be saying, oh yeah, everyone should free birth. That's really safe. like
00:11:05
Speaker
Because how could you? Like everybody's completely unique and individual, their health status is different, their emotional well-being and psychology is different, every woman is different. So that's part of the issue here is we need to have um support for difference and the individual nature of the woman and her family and her body and baby. um So the lay of the land at the moment is, so it's changing a lot like even in this last couple of weeks. We've seen, you know, the government pledged to um make home births like intrapartum care be covered by Medicare. So that's a huge jump
Challenges in Midwifery and Birth Options
00:11:43
Speaker
in accessibility. So that will that may alter things in terms of midwives and private practice too. But in terms of looking at the birth field in an ecosystem way or like the whole picture,
00:11:58
Speaker
I think it's very fractured um like you you can have this kind of like um us and them you know like I work in home I work in hospital I work in core I work in MGP which is midwifery group practice supporting continuity of care so it's kind of bizarre, whereas my kind of positioning is we're all, if we're midwives, we're all midwives and we should be able to just go across settings in a way, you know, like that's how it should be. But it is a little bit, um I think it's just in a great deal of transition right now. And I suppose for the women who are at the very heart of it all, yeah, they are finding it more difficult to access the support
00:12:44
Speaker
that they want, you know, the support that um sort of holds them up as individuals and will go in for that kind of experience. And um I don't know, I don't know what the answer is in those kinds of things, but I'm seeing so a range of like cultural shifts in that we do have more free birth, like that's going all the way up. We have more um birth attendants like in um that world, you know, um like attending women. um They could be whatever they want to call themselves, could be doula, could be birth keeper, you know, there is a little bit of vagueness in like that kind of title and the skill set of those people too. um So you can see it's pretty muddy, Katie, like,
00:13:29
Speaker
But in the spirit of Patrick Jones, everything belongs, hey? So like we have to kind of go, right, all right, what's going on here and why? um But also in the end, it's women's choice, you know, regardless of motivations and rationale and decisions and these kinds of things. Thank you so much for really reminding us of that inherent agency that we all have and especially in medical settings and I saw this as a naturopath and I see this in myself of a deference to authority that that does feel like a legal framework in some way like the doctor said this so I have to do that you know to take that prescription not flipping it and feeling like hey this person is is an interpreter is ah is a wise counsel for me
00:14:18
Speaker
with a certain body of expertise that I can then choose to you knowic participate in or not. And I constantly have to give that reminder to myself. And yeah, I see that with so many people I know having medical interventions, not really through their own choosing. it's like um this was kind of bestowed onto me and you're so right um and it's so wonderful to hear that straight from you like women as women will have we always have that choice as people we always have the choice what to do with our bodies although I will say in recent times it felt like maybe we didn't yeah but ah anyway thank you for that reminder I don't want to get too far into this amazing
00:15:01
Speaker
muck and Maya and mud which I do want to squelch through with you without first asking what did you have for breakfast this morning Eleanor?
Alternative Lifestyles and Upbringing
00:15:08
Speaker
really week breakfast I breakfast.
00:15:13
Speaker
Sorry. It's always the way, isn't it isn'st it? I wish I could say something conventional, but i um I actually had chicken soup. Like I had broth and rice and chicken soup and a whole lot of kaffir lime leaf and chili. Yeah, there's a little bit of a lurgy going on in my house. So I was just like, okay, let's get into it. And I've had the foresight to put on a um a meat stock yesterday. So I was like, okay, this is what I'm having as soon as I get up. Yeah, so that was my breakfast. But yeah, that's the funny thing is that, again, yeah, my when I get up, I'm kind of like thinking about all the things like what needs soaking, what needs defrosting.
00:15:56
Speaker
what needs you know prepping, all that kind of thing. So breakfast was that. And I had to shape a few couple of sourdough loaves and have a look at the ferments. And yeah. Are you growing a lot of food? um We try not so much at the moment because, and I have to be like, and this is my openness in not being puritanical around permaculture is you just have to use what you have. And um so at the moment, I'm busy rebuilding our um soil because when we had some big floods, we lost a lot of real goodness and my site is incredibly challenging. It's um on a slope or in the kind of funnel of a valley.
00:16:37
Speaker
And so we just had such extraordinary rainfall in the last few months um and it's just washed heaps away. So yeah, the things are the things that that are growing are the yeah the ones that can really stick it out. So yeah, but even so that's the whole thing of like, okay, what is growing and how do we use it now? And how do we yeah put it put it by to be used later in winter? Because we do have a bit of a winter up where I live. um in that because we are are off the grid and in a valley it's cold it's getting colder. Not your cold but yeah colder. Yeah we're about whereabouts are you? We're on in the Sunshine Coast on Gubby Gubby Gubby country um so I'm out the back in a ecological community at the back of um yeah the Sunshine Coast. yeah o red um How long have you been there?
00:17:29
Speaker
um but about 10 years now yeah yeah yeah it's beautiful it's um rough and ready but it's it's wonderful and yeah that's very much that is like my grounding i think in life is coming home you know to that place and um having to do the yeah the work of living being connected to that land yeah yeah i only um learned the real definition of economics. When I was listening to a conversation with Kate Rayworth last night, Donut Economics Woman, and um I didn't realise that the original definition of economics is like the art of managing the home.
00:18:14
Speaker
yeah so yeah I just really how else changed my perspective on economics is such an alienating term. and I think for people like me, it's just um repellent because it feels like everything I'm not really into. But then to flip it and say, well, something's wrong with how we've done economics, because actually it is about the management of the home. and Like you're saying, that work that is the everyday shaping of the dough, the look, the tending to the ferments, the growing of the food, like how we work in that system. It's a revelation. Totally. And it is, it's the home economy. Like, and that's not a new concept in permaculture. Like you probably hear heaps of it where you are, but that's the reality for some of us is like, this is how
00:18:58
Speaker
This is what matters. It's not hugely um money driven on any level really, um but but that's how we keep going, you know? Yeah, my days are kind of involved in that and also just the fact that we have um three kids, well, teenagers now who um have always been unschooled. So, or well, I wouldn't even call it unschooled, you know, living life without the institution of schooling. And so a lot of our day is sort of all our morning is spent kind of checking in with them and seeing where they're at and what they're, how they're going to spend their day um and what's, you know, priority for them to in their little life and how they're learning and what projects they're working on and things like that. Yeah. So like our morning, yeah, it's chicken soup, but it's also like coffee with my partner and my 19 year old daughter and where she's at with her art because she's um finishing up her diploma of arts, a visual arts diploma really soon after moving from being unschooled into like an actual education system. So it's just been really interesting. and So I spend a lot of the morning hanging out and chatting and philosophizing and all of those kinds of things. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. eleanor Well, just just to make you feel a little bit better, I had fish head stock and rice for breakfast.
00:20:19
Speaker
yeah ah heard about chicken soup for breakfast And also, did you grow up in there in a context like that where you had a an ability to philosophise with your parents, or have you tracked pretty far from your original template? um Yeah, I did. i I had a really alternative upbringing. um but which was yeah very it's interesting amazingness and dysfunction like you have to be you know honest about it um but yeah just full hum back to the land hippies really who you know had their ideals and and flaws but also at the heart of it was always love you know um but
00:21:00
Speaker
Yeah, I came came from a family where we brew things and my mother was a social worker, my father was a musician. So there was a lot of um debate and discussion about society and issues in the world and how to live and these kinds of things yeah it was quite interesting um yeah and there was all it was all quite bohemian and yeah kind of quite free really yeah so i haven't really i haven't come from like a conservative background um i've definitely come through that and the way in which i've worked with birth has obviously been informed by that because i come from a home birth like i i was home birthed i saw my brother being born
00:21:45
Speaker
You know, it was kind of part of our story, you know, um my mother, you know, she's from the UK and she was like, well, of course you have your babies at home. Like, I'm not sick. So, you know, why would I go into a hospital? So it was always this really different um story that informed things. So I've kind of just taken that, I think, and just yeah somehow moved it into my own parenting and life. And yeah, yeah. ah What a gift. to have that in life. Did you ever rebel against that? Oh yeah, for sure. Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. but Yeah, I wanted like a lot of boundaries, I think, you know, so i sort of made myself, I don't know, get into work that was more boundaried, like I became a librarian, things like that. So yeah, very structured. I don't think I've gone too far from it, though. Really? And how did you go about if this is true, which I
00:22:41
Speaker
Have a hunch it is but how did you go about finding a partner who is values aligned and on the same page as you? Yeah, that was that was just a stroke of luck. I think yeah, cuz he's he's a musician as well and a stand-up comedian, which is ah interesting and very yeah he's he's a performer he's unpacked Interesting Well, you know, it's fairly recent kind of thing. So he's been in music for as long as I've known him. And he's always made lots of instruments. He makes instruments from, you know, gas bottles and all these different things. He's very much a creative. And then just recently he moved into stand up comedian ship. So we're constantly listening to jokes and saying, yeah, no, like that's funny. Yeah, so yeah, finding him. He's very different to me in terms of his um
00:23:35
Speaker
He's not academic, he's not interested in that sort of stuff, but he's so anchored and grounded and kind and good to people and he loves, you know, just connecting with all manner of people, like from all walks of life. you know, real salt of the earth from the country type vibes. So yeah, it was just luck. And as we went along kind of having babies, you know, we never talked. I know a lot of people talk about how their parenting will go. We never did that. We kind of just happened having babies. And then we talked a lot about, you know, how we wanted to relate to them and how we wanted to parent them. I don't know. We've just grown up together, all of us.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah. Oh that's such a beautiful summary. Have any of the kids ever wanted to go to school? and Yeah ah I think there's a little bit of a zone around maybe 11 or 12 that like right before puberty perhaps or just starting where two the girls were a bit kind of like oh you know you might want to try it out you know the social but it was only ever an ah idea like it It was about like we talk about it and we'd have a look at some of these schools around and then like give it a month or two and they've jumped into something else that's just got all the passion. You revisit it and they say, no, I don't, I wouldn't have as much time to do, you know, this or this or this. So I won't, I won't go.
00:25:00
Speaker
Yeah, so they've never actually gone, but they have entertained it and it's always been an option for them. Like I've never been done dogmatic about that. It's a real lifestyle. I think, you know, it's really, yeah, like birth and and women and all of that work, it's really individual and each homeschool law, unschooling families is different to the next, you know? So circling back to birth work, how did you come to be a midwife? Was that always something that you felt deeply was your calling, or could you have become like an elite level librarian? ah Yeah, oh gosh, we like to look at midwifery as a calling, like it's this like, oh, kind of, you know, it called me, but at the same time, um I'm not sure I think that it didn't, it wouldn't let me go. So at least that that is something in that
00:25:50
Speaker
Once it came about, it was like, I can't not do this. Like I can't nod. I can't stop thinking about it. And I think that's always a beautiful thing to follow is like that. I can't. I can't not do this. So yeah, I think after being a like like a library worker and um having my own babies, I think that like most midwives, their birth experiences do sort of um bring that flame alight, perhaps. So yeah, midwifery was really
00:26:24
Speaker
Well, actually it wasn't just midwifery, it was birth work first. They're different in that I spent a good while, maybe a decade outside of the system. So I learned from home birth midwives um for ages before I went in and got my actual ticket and my registration. So. Yeah, that was a different process too, you know, in that I've done it in the reverse um to most midwives. fascinating So what was the inspiration to move closer to the system? I i went through a really big experience with a really dear woman who's become a beautiful friend.
00:27:02
Speaker
And um yeah, she had a baby that didn't live and i we went into the hospital to be, um you know, supported and it was so beautifully supported. um And I think I saw the difference that different practitioners can make in that field. And um I was kind of, I think I was really stirred in the simple application of just being kind and compassionate and how people doing those simple acts can make a difference. So I felt like oh and I want to learn more, I want to and also like that's a conflict too of like you know not everybody can access birth outside the system or pay for birth
00:27:51
Speaker
and the cost of like perhaps a home birth or a privately practicing midwife and so I kind of wanted to go in there and understand that system more too and I wanted to I wanted to get more skill like you know to be honest it's sort of like you don't know what you don't know until you you're in it you know and then your whole world opens up to a different level of perhaps medicalised birth or yeah just a different space.
Instinctual vs. Professional Midwifery Care
00:28:17
Speaker
We speak a lot about, especially as health practitioners, feeling um like imposters, but then there's this other piece of, well, actually there is a huge body of knowledge and years and years of experience that we, I think, truly do need to invest you know with our time and attention and
00:28:36
Speaker
and acquire in a way to be able to offer, you know, it's never going to be this 100% safe space for people. But there is a degree of of expertise that we do need in that realm. So I wonder if it's, yeah, we're so ready to kind of jump on that imposter syndrome wagon and kind of like champion each other to do whatever we want. But I love this idea of recognizing where you do need to flesh out your understanding or what other um inputs, you know, how you can build yourself in that way to be even more, yeah, strong and compassionate for the women that you're standing with. ah Yeah, for sure. I think, I think that's, yeah, that's the deep work of it is and it's sort of like apprenticing all manner of birth and all manner of women's experiences and stories, you know, because in the end, I mean, at the risk of sounding, I don't know, a bit kind of inflammatory.
00:29:28
Speaker
I think that birth isn't always rose essential oil and beautiful Sanskrit hymns on the you know playing. it It can be pretty hardcore at times when there is pathology or there is an emergency. yeah so um But we we can't start there is what I'm saying. like We can't make everything an emergency and all of the these kinds of things. um But gosh, I'm really happy to have those skills to be able to stabilize um a woman and baby If I need to, I guess the real kind of importance is not using those skills where they're not needed, you know, like being tasty about it, like coming back and sitting back a little bit and knowing your foundation first. Yeah.
00:30:14
Speaker
Yeah and that foundation is possibly around my question to do with mammalian birth and you do evoke that animal creaturely body of ours ah frequently um in your shares and I wanted to hear your kind of description or articulation of what a mammalian birth is. like That's a foundational piece of understanding. And then also, what are the reasons to go to hospital? or like What are the legitimate reasons we've almost come away from that free and wild and, like you said, potentially hardcore experience?
00:30:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think, um well, I talk about like, you know, mammalian birth, but I mean, in the end, it's just the physiological blueprint of things, you know, it's just knowing that really well and knowing what we need as mammals, as, you know, social creatures, what we need um to have a physiological labor and birth. You know, and we're not so different to any other mammal, you know, so we need those kinds of, you know, environments that support the same environments that support making love. We need forgiving birth. It's, it's pretty clear, you know, so we need dark and we need warmth and we need a felt sense of safety. We need potentially, we may need the presence of others that make us feel and enhance.
00:31:39
Speaker
that felt sense of safety. And we need those environments and those people to be able to support not just the physiological unfolding of that hormonal dance of labor and birth, but the, yeah, the psychological unfolding too, because you're between worlds. You wanna be with people who make you feel really safe and supported. That may be medical people, it may not. From my research, I found that women can get that from a variety of different support I think it's really just returning to that as our blueprint and then everything that comes from there, you know, is its own wonderful story to unpack. I feel like we were going so far off the realm of physiological labors and births. Like I'm talking about like the onset of labor all the way to potentially physiological breastfeeding. Like, you know, the establishment of that as a fairly undisturbed event.
00:32:37
Speaker
not many women can say that that's happening for them like that that's not really how it kind of can't sometimes in some institutions because it's you know built off like arbitrary time limits and and these kinds of processes and guidelines that can't support how those that event can be quite individual you know like labors can slow and they can intensify and they can back off None of that fits into a timeline, you know, that may be in a hospital. So we sort of need to come back to how do we support individuality and um women's unique way in labour and birth and beyond in all settings. Yeah.
00:33:19
Speaker
And what about in the hospital setting? Are there, is there scope to create that den that you described? I think there is. I think there is, but it just takes a little, not a little, it takes a lot of work actually, you know, just because. really depends on the culture of the um institution that you're working with and in. It depends on how you relate as a midwife because that's generally who's setting the scene and making the den or the partner. um How you are kind of standing with and for that woman perhaps and her wishes. Yeah, so there's a lot of really good work to be done in that in terms of like midwives understanding how they can do that.
00:34:00
Speaker
and how they can back themselves too in what they know about how to support. physiological labour and birth. When you said the woman and her wishes, I heard the woman and her witches, and it made me feel like the woman surrounded by those those intimate and loving and supportive pillars. And i I wanted to explore this idea with you that I think relates to kind of everything, but those those energies and those nervous systems and those entanglements that we share with other people in our orbit,
00:34:32
Speaker
like how they come into their own in and through and during birth and then also how you how you see that applying like in your own life and everyday relationships like it's I guess a new a new thing for me to think about um how we influence each other in a nervous system sense and like a true physiological sense that is also invisible.
Safety and Nervous Systems in Childbirth
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's magic, isn't it? Like, i the more I learn about the nervous system, and for me, it's been an application of polyvagal theory. I don't know if you know much about that one. Not really, and I'd love you to eliminate that. A little bit complicated, but the way in which, like when I did my research, I basically, I have to kind of go all the way back there to make it make sense for you.
00:35:17
Speaker
um And the listener is that basically um my post-grad research was on women's experience of the transition phase in physiological labor during free birth. And the reason why we chose free birth was because we really needed a physiological blueprint and they were the women having the most undisturbed birth. So it made sense to go to them um in this current culture of fairly medicalised birth experiences. um And so in the transition phase, it's often seen as, um you know, a place where women really lose control, you know, and they might want to quit and they're just over it and they may fall apart, like psychologically just unraveling.
00:36:00
Speaker
you're in like Yeah, during labour and fairly close to the active um pushing out of the baby. So it's this kind of juncture um where it's almost like I would say it's the um peak or a zenith of labour where the body is going through this really interesting shift. And that's how the women describe it too, like a shift into less about dilatation and more about expulsion. Like the baby is really coming down now and there's this sense of like, Oh, I'm not, you know, and then everything kind of can apparently fall apart. So I was really interested in this little spot because everything that we knew about that was coming from this external gaze and this external view, much like the body of research in midwifery and um birth.
00:36:47
Speaker
It's very external. We don't know a whole lot from the women themselves. So I wanted to know more like, art what are you feeling when you're feeling this? You know, cause it seemed like this very mysterious place, you know? And it couldn't be, I don't know, talk, like women just would say, I hit transition and it was really, really hard. And like, okay, well, what's really, really hard, you know? It's often when a lot of women will be like, I i really need pain relief or, these kinds of things, you know, like they've just hit this point. um So anyway, back to um interviewing and hearing a whole lot of birth stories from women who had had undisturbed births, and they weren't actually talking about losing it. They weren't talking about transition in the same way.
00:37:34
Speaker
So then we were like, why why not? You know, they didn't feel huge amounts of fear or this ability, like this inability to continue. And then we started unpacking all of the kinds of um themes that were coming through. And a lot of it was around safety, like their sense of safety and that they just felt that they didn't have to reach out and like ask for external help because it was already in them. So they felt very deeply connected to their body and their baby and they felt that the people were there um had them as well. And that was reinforcing that felt sense of safety.
00:38:13
Speaker
So then we ended up going, all right, well, what is this sense of safety about? and And how does it work? And came upon this whole polyvagal theory, which is all about basically that autonomic nervous system having the two different branches that the vagus nerve travels. um So yeah, that's like the um dorsal vagal and the ventral vagal. And so this is gonna get a bit nerdy, but the ventral vagal is basically where our um sociality comes in. our connection to others um and it happens when we're in the parasympathetic you know like we're in rest and digest and we're in feelings of connection and love and warmth so we were seeing that
00:38:55
Speaker
women who were kind of in this sense of, you know, ventral, vagal um connection with the people and with their body and with the baby were having this higher sense of, I guess, felt sense safety during their labour. and And when you start looking at that, you realise that Not just the woman is feeling these sense of things, but everybody there, everyone in the birth field is co-regulating or dis-regulating potentially with each other because our clever nervous systems know what to do, you know. So it just makes me come back to the fact that you know birth is a, so for most people, it's a social event. It's a psychosocial event.
00:39:37
Speaker
And now that we know a little bit more about the nervous system and the way the hormones feed into that too, we can look at it kind of like a neuroendocrinology event as well. So it's sort of like, what do the feel like how can we support women to feel you know that level of connection connection and sense of safety in themselves? Well we have to support them to have that optimum hormone flow. We need oxytocin to be in the mix and that comes back to that whole connection with the the ventral vagal and the social nervous system, that social engagement with each other. Yeah. yeah Thank you so much for explaining that, telling that story because when I listened to your interview with Patrick, I was extremely, I was fascinated by that idea of transition. But I really feel the clarity of your description just now because hearing that
00:40:27
Speaker
that observation that you made between women who um were kind of coming up against that wall and then you know the undisturbed birds that had a completely different experience. I think that's a really, really fascinating story to share. Yeah. And it does make me think about maybe like a trope in the free birthing space at this point is the orgasmic birth. Oh, yeah. And like how how common is that, Eleanor? Gosh, who knows really? But if you sit with enough women, you can hear a lot of stories about pleasure. Yeah, loads. So
00:41:08
Speaker
i I personally haven't seen it happen much in a hospital setting, but I think that's kind of, you know, most of the time, if there's no continuity of care, you're walking into an environment um who to potentially have this very vulnerable experience with someone that you've never met before. So I think if we think about like social nervous system and stuff, it's really important to spend time with um the people you're going to birth with. Because it's all about like you know being with each other, mammal to mammal, face-to face to face, these kinds of things. um So I think maybe the orgasmic birth comes about from those really heightened levels of sense like sense of safety and these kinds of things. But I guess the women that I interviewed
00:41:53
Speaker
who did talk about having an actual orgasm in labor, there I think there are a few, which is pretty big deal if you're just looking at a smaller data set for qualitative research, that that was a thing that pleasure and um pain were a very fine line, I suppose. and so they would talk about it like like ah within the well they' arere in an altered state of consciousness. So that's what happens um when you've got the most beautiful, incredible cocktail of oxytocin and and you know endorphins and all of these things coming through your body like higher than they're ever going to be in your life. um you know you yeah You can go into a totally different altered state and that's quite incredible. It's like a peak experience. so
00:42:38
Speaker
Maybe orgasmic is not quite the right terminology, um but it is certainly an altered state experience. And lots of women across research um talk about that too, being in a different world in a labor land and another zone. Those kinds of spatial contexts are really common actually in labor because you're out of your neocortex and you're deeply in the body and you're in the so somatic experience of birth. So I'm not sure how totally common like full orgasmic birth is, but I think there's a blueprint for it. I really do. I think that that's, it's about maybe to perception of pain and, you know, how you relate to that and whether you're looking at the body having a physiological pain process rather than it's, Oh, it's a pathology. Like I've cut my leg. It's not the same, you know?
00:43:26
Speaker
this this intensity or this pain, which most women that I've spoken to don't call it pain, they call it um an intense sensation, really intense sensations. um It sort of could be about how you relate to that too, like they're actually what it is, it's functional pain, it's doing something that's bringing me closer to my baby, you know, um and they're in lines that when you can meet intensity, perhaps you've got the ability to go up into this. you know, beautiful space of, yeah, orgasmic birth. At the same time, it doesn't have to be. Like, you know, we can just have babies and not have to think about having this ideal
00:44:08
Speaker
birth, there's no such thing as perfection in giving birth. Like there can't be, you know, it just, you know, it it can't be. That would and alienate too many women, you know, to think, oh gosh, I didn't have it, this and that and the other thing. And so therefore all all birth is important. All ways that babies get born and the right of pathogen that women go through to do that is, you know, excellent and important and valid. And yeah, we need to tell with all the stories. yeah Yeah, thank you for those very kind words and i I am thinking about my friends who've had expectations around their birth, have had best case scenarios and um a couple of them I can bring to mind who've
00:44:52
Speaker
left that experience or segwayed out of that experience with a great sense of trauma and things falling apart and the the worst possible case scenario has transpired and they felt completely helpless and disempowered and they ended up you know having a c-section or being in you know immense amounts of pain and I wonder if your work And you' um yeah, your practice extends into that that healing space, like a postpartum, um tending to the things that haven't gone the way that we wanted them to go. And you know, like what you can share from your perspective about healing those imperfect, air quote, experiences. There's so much wrapped it up in it, I think, you know, like when things don't go how we would like. And I think that um
00:45:40
Speaker
For me, I think we need to kind of think about how there's always like there's always opportunity. Hopefully, I feel like there always is, even if you can't quite see it immediately. um Options for repair, you know um for re-establishing bonding, for telling the story until it doesn't sting anymore. you know Being with people who aren't going to try and fix you who are just gonna listen, you know um To bring in that permaculture principle of integration not segregation of those stories or Those stories or experiences in yourself, you know, they're part of you now like whatever you've been through the part of the baby they're part of you um and You know, I think they're often the little things in that post natal period are often very small gentle things I think. Like basically gentle is a lovely word actually to employ because it's really about just putting the pieces back together again very slowly and the way in which is right for that woman um who's gone through you know an experience that wasn't what she wanted or there might be trauma.
00:46:50
Speaker
I think it's really important if there is like you know significant trauma to access some support. I think that you know everybody on the internet now seems to know about trauma resolution and hacking your nervous system. And that's cool, but there's people with really good skill around that too. like you really ah can hold that and i think sometimes that's really good to access um and it can always be your partner and your friends too and particularly partner because your partner goes through their own experience of that sometimes too and has that
Postpartum Support and Community Involvement
00:47:25
Speaker
so yeah but coming back to the immediate postpartum i think like you know it's just it's a beautiful thing to
00:47:33
Speaker
Say there's been, um, I don't know, a rupture in the labor, like it's kind of like bringing the baby back to again, mammalian birth stuff. So skin to skin. you know, warm baths, soft, everything soft, everything gentle, everything, you know, as as quiet as it can be, you know, with the people that make you feel again, really safe to just let everything, you know, to cry and to express all the things as they need. And then people that will come and bring you the basics of life, I eat food and do your washing and just, you know, like those kinds of really just quiet,
00:48:13
Speaker
Little interventions, you know, just, it's so important to be gentle on yourself. Like regardless of what happens, you're becoming a mother and that's a whole new ball game. You know, you're a new person and that's not going to, you can't just be integrated overnight. It's slow and that's okay. We can slow everything down. We can titrate the actual integration of trauma. We can sort of be with the story in pieces, you know. don't have to go headlong into it and just mine it all up instantly. like Just concentrate on being with your baby. While we're on this this topic in your community, in your your broader
00:48:49
Speaker
ecosystem and neighbors feel like, do you have people supporting women postpartum? Like, is there kind of a community culture around meal trains? Or I just have this, this, and I know a lot of people do have that vision of a woman being able to just be in bed for many, many weeks. But that actually requires a bit of effort um from the people around her. So are you part of things like that? Yeah well I have been in the past at the moment I'm not so much but I definitely know that it's out there and I think that that's a really good point Katie in that you have to set it up like you have to scaffold it and have those sorts of plans in place I think. Nowadays it's actually really common well it's becoming more common for women to really think into that and maybe if they're having a hospital birth they might get a postnatal doula or birth support for afterwards to come in and do beautiful things and
00:49:41
Speaker
And that's really good. Like those roles are pretty big in my community. There's lots of birth workers, midwives do that work too. I really need to still put that forward that midwives, they they see women up until six weeks of um birth, labor post-birth. And you know, that's some of the most beautiful points of the journey is post-natal. Like it's lovely to be with um women and babies then. But yeah, meal trains are huge, women kind of pre-preparing Food for that period of time afterwards calling in the people that they need to be around them and also sort of understanding who may not be super good to be around in that gentle time where you're learning how to be a mother and a parent and parents together and that kind of thing like your you know your whole family culture is changing.
00:50:30
Speaker
Sometimes, you know, growing from being a couple together to a having a family and then building more if it's like subsequent children. I think this stuff is really important and it's part of bringing birth back to community. Like in that, you know, that's where it began and that's kind of where we need to go. We need to bring it back into being part of our, you know, culture of place. and how we relate with each other on where we are. The the thought now that's like drifting across my my mind is like fuck we need to have time to support each other in these ways and this is the whole the quest I suppose that I'm on and I think we're all like so many of us again it's like
00:51:11
Speaker
How do we integrate everything into the home into so ah you know a sane and gentle way of living where we can take time out to cook meals for our dear friends and and not have to drop everything and have the whole show kind of fall apart that have. space and spaciousness and flexibility and yeah that orientation towards each other that is just part of our every day. That feels like a really core inquiry for me and like ah a tragedy of our modern ways of living that we can't be there for each other with ease in those times.
00:51:47
Speaker
What just came to mind for me too is to just acknowledge that, you know, being able to do that is a really privileged position. Like, a lot of women will not be able to hire a doula for five, six thousand dollars to follow them through, a you know, a process or even private midwifery care, although that might change now with some of the things that are happening. um We have to, for me, I feel like, yeah, that's some of the conflicts too, is I'm talking about like, creme de la creme continuity of care here, but For most women that's not happening right now and so like how do we how do we mend that is my kind of thinking it comes into those ethics isn't doesn't it like with people care and fair share it's like well how do we make you know really good um care accessible equitable all of these kinds of things you know across across the continuum of like you know pregnancy labor and birth and beyond yeah
00:52:42
Speaker
Yes. And meanwhile, were we're literally born into a kind of debt system where we have to buy our way back to that freedom. Yeah. and or like Really, really strategic about how to meet those basic needs that, you know, we have a spectrum of abilities to To strategize around it is quite a sophisticated thing and I know that I so struggle just to like meet those basic tenants that are gonna then allow the ethics and principles and and Communitarianism to flourish. Yeah, and that's it and I think it's like it's a huge brain change to go. Well, how do I what am I? I
00:53:21
Speaker
priorities in my life to afford certain things like this. For some people it means, yes yeah, going without other things because this is not going to happen again or may only happen a couple of times in their life, you know, those kinds of putting weight on it as an experience, as a threshold that's really important, you know? um Yeah, I kind of think that, you know, if we kind of hold that threshold really beautifully and we do death back in the community beautifully too, and maybe the middle might be a little bit easier, I don't know, but I think that a lot of it needs to come back to community. Yeah.
00:53:57
Speaker
Oh yeah yeah and birth and death I mean what are your thoughts around those probably like pretty similar portals? Having sat with that like so humbly and so generous like the women having had me be there with them such a fine line I think like you just see that potential you know it's it's such a It's a very bizarre and mysterious and magical place to be at, I think, to kind of be able to see where humans come in to here, Earthside. And um yeah, I don't, words actually fail me on that one. It's just like too tricky to, um
00:54:45
Speaker
fully encompass that, you know, and and give it the weight that it requires. I have good friends who work in the palliative care space and I ah can see that, you know, the yeah being with with their people in very much the same way that midwives and birth workers are with women, you know, seeing people into the world. Well, I don't want to leave this conversation without without doing my due permaculture diligence being here at Meliodora because I have been really fascinated to see that overlay and your incredible thought processes around how permaculture principles, you're relating those to your birth work. So I wonder if there are some examples that are top of mind, Eleanor, that you can share with us that really forge that connection.
Permaculture Principles in Birth
00:55:39
Speaker
Yes, okay. Well, for me, it starts with looking at birth as part of nature, or whether that is involved in you know physiological occurrence or pathology, because nature also goes off track to what we think as well. So if we can look at birth as part of nature, um then that's my kind of starting point. And I think for me permaculture came about maybe a decade ago. um I did like my Diploma of Permaculture with Beck Lowe actually, which is really funny, like to see all of the connections happening. But um yeah, and then I started teaching but permaculture just to women, you know, um who were in that space of childbearing.
00:56:22
Speaker
And um because I noticed that it was a really, it started to resonate with women who are pregnant because they were putting, you know, food into their bodies. They were thinking about how they were building their baby, you know, on the inside and then afterwards too, you know, like for breastfeeding and, you know, growing healthy children and and they get more connected to their body and then they seem to get more connected to the earth. So it's really lovely little, occurrence that I can see happening. But as for applying like the principles of permaculture, um
00:56:55
Speaker
I had actually started through parenting, so I was sort of looking at some of those principles as I was relating to my kids. You know, they're also a force of nature at times. um Yeah, so the big one is always going to be um like observe and interact. That is the like the potential to revolutionise birth work, I think is observe and interact. like in the way in which we can like quieten down and just have presence and sort of like if I'm to apply it to a labour it would be coming in and not just going straight in to the woman like taking a B like pausing
00:57:38
Speaker
surveying the landscape, reading the landscape of the birth field. It's like it's this suspending your judgment and what you think you know about that woman and that labour and birth and just quietly watching for a while. and then interacting and then coming in with what, you know, it could be a nice change if required or not at all. Like it's just this whole way of, I guess that's how I kind of apply it to my midwifery practice has always been a bit, a bit about being more quiet in the place, you know, and just spending time
00:58:16
Speaker
to observe. And that again, that not fixing things, just sort of waiting to see how the labour um unfolds and sort of reveals itself to us all. I think also maybe um applying self-regulation and accepting feedback can be a really big one. um Particularly I often think about it in a weird way, like maybe it's about kind of the ego there and sort of standing back and going, okay, like I've got all this skill set and all this knowledge and all this kinds of, you know, great birth work chops, but I can, you know, pull back and just be with what is. And um and then, you know, in times of,
00:59:01
Speaker
I don't know, tension. I need to be able to be with that woman and accept feedback from her, accept feedback from the labour as ah as its own force of nature. you know, and integrate that in how I am with the birth process and how it's going to go. And then I guess integrate and not segregate is huge. That's a huge one. That's kind of flowing through our whole conversation, really. It's kind of about that whole, yeah, I love Patrick Jones's cause that whole everything belongs cosmology. Cause I feel like that brings in that whole integration aspect into this way of being with birth. It's like, how do we weave the story?
00:59:36
Speaker
men mend ruptures, how do we basically support a woman through a labour and birth and then into life with that child, you know, how do we integrate that whole thing and not have it all parceled off. Not even have it parceled off as like this was a rite of passage but rather here we go, let's take it with us because we often prepare for labour and birth and all of that, but we don't think about the mothering and the parenting and how you've got a human being now for a long, long time. So how do we integrate it beautifully? So it really supports us into parenting and bringing in these new incredible human beings who are coming through onto this planet at this time.
01:00:16
Speaker
yeah Yeah, I love those examples. Yeah, well, this this conversation is definitely one of those conversations that helps kind of suture my head back onto my shoulders because it often shuns my physical, my corporeal self. And I have felt that um thread of just yeah being in our bodies our entangled nervous systems, the the joys and the the sensory delights of yeah being Earth's side. And I wonder for anyone who isn't pregnant, isn't going through birth right at this point in time for people like me, for people like you, like how how do you stay in touch with your your body and this the the mother country, the Earth? Like what are some things that you do, if you do each day or periodically just to stay
01:01:06
Speaker
you know, feeling, feeling yourself and inhabiting the senses and not just in the head space. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you said that actually, because I think, you know, we've talked a lot about the nervous system and the body and integration and all that, but yeah, integrating like the head and you know, there's no split really, but it is very dualistic at times, isn't it? That whole mind and body split. And I think we have to, in this day and age, we have to work harder than ever really to like make it all come together. Yeah. And I think that's part of it too, of like coming into what we've been talking about with pregnancy and labor and birth, these things, they relate to everybody in that, you know, we can't ask women to just be like so super connected to their baby and their body and know what they want and be able to advocate if we haven't cultivated some of this connection quite like early on. So for me, I think.
01:02:02
Speaker
I think it's really important to enhance that body connection. Like I think that's really important and that's simple stuff. Like again, everything I'm talking about seems really obvious and boring and simple, but it is really like coming back to those signals that your body's giving you of like, Oh, I'm sore. How do I readjust my body to be in comfort? You know, um and I need to eat or I need to drink, you know, like really basic stuff being with the animal body again, you know, I think that's really important. Like really thinking about.
01:02:37
Speaker
coming out of the head maybe getting off screens and thinking and social media and really thinking about what your physical um body needs in moment to moment and it's so individual and that's why I think maybe social media is not the best place to get those kinds of um tips and tricks because everyone's different you know there's no quick hacks to working with a nervous system or um One's body, you have to work with your structure and your physicality and your stories and emotion. So yeah, coming back to that body gives you that ability to have greater agency and and powerful transformative experiences in in life.
Self-Care and Connection to Nature
01:03:18
Speaker
in general, knowing yourself really, really well. And then the more you know yourself, I think you can kind of relate more to, well, you can understand more your relationships with power and authority and you can critically analyze things and look at information in a different way. But I think that grounding in the body is really, really important. the way i do it is you know i'm not perfect for sure i'm very heady i love thinking so sometimes i definitely fall into the trap of being like a head in a jar but yeah for me it is it's being with the earth it's being doing stuff with my hands it's being in the dirt
01:03:55
Speaker
like it's just that's what does it for me it is literally just getting my hands in the dirt even if i can't do big stints of gardening work just getting out there and co-regulating with nature because that's the other thing is like i think we forget that you don't have to just co-regulate with other humans you can do it with nature you know you can do it with animals you can do it with trees you can do it with air you know, sky. um So that's big. Resourcing yourself I think a bit in the natural world is always great and grounded.
01:04:28
Speaker
and enlivening, feeding myself really well outside the the realms of diet culture and who says what, you know, and um having a lot of laughs and joy. I think we need to lighten up, you know, need to seek we need to seek pleasure um in order to be with all this heavy stuff and all these decisions and all this constant information you know you need to play and connect yeah so that's some some of my little things i think yeah yeah that is a glorious picture to paint and those belly laughs laughs i understand actually activate the vegas nerve exactly
01:05:05
Speaker
If we want to bring the kind of nervous system hacking into the conversation, they shouldn't be able to go together, that that kind of terminology, that horrific kind of slicing and violence of expression. yeah yeah Well, that's a compartmentalizing, I think, of everything. It's like, like oh we want to know about the nervous system, but in the end, all the good things for Being you know more in your animal are all the good things that support all of this working. you know It's really just getting back to basics, you know having some common sense about it all. yeah well Yeah, I so appreciate your ability to pull things apart with me, but ultimately see them.
01:05:44
Speaker
all together and hold them all together. And that's just, yeah, it's been such a ah beautiful journey in the last yeah hour with you, Ellie. And i yeah, just really, really love the work that you're doing and connecting with you in this way. And yeah. Likewise. So much. I'm so happy to have made the connection with you, Katie. It's been beautiful. Yeah.
01:06:10
Speaker
Huge thanks to Eleanor Young for fielding my questions with grace and being such an open-hearted presence in the birthing space. I really hope you can take the time to connect with Eleanor and her writings. All right, so next episode is one I'm very excited to share, and I have been sitting on it for a while. My guest is Dylan Graves, a permy and biochar enthusiast in Aotearoa, New Zealand, who I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of before, but I'm now absolutely stoked to have connected with. He's kind of like the barefoot investor if the barefoot investor was into permaculture ethics and degrowth, because Dylan was exceptionally forthcoming in sharing about his household finances, how he and his partner practice a kind of radical trust in the flow of gifts, and, unlike any guest previously, puts actual figures and strategies around the land access piece
01:07:02
Speaker
for people who are just getting started. It's not every day you meet someone so candid and transparent, so I really hope you can join me for that conversation next week. Thank you so much for bringing your listening ears and precious attention to reskillience, which is no small thing in this scrolly, shouty world. I really appreciate you being here. Catch you soon.