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Welcome friend. Today’s topic is a heavy one. I want to take a moment to have you pause and check in with your own heart before we charge into this topic and story. I’m going to be sharing my miscarriage story, raw and real and vulnerable. If this isn’t something your heart needs right now, feel free to move onto another episode! So, if you haven’t listened to the last episode, the recap of my last few months, I encourage you to pause, jump back and listen and come back, because it will help fill in a few gaps for you. Let’s get into it.

Hello friends! It’s been quite a few months since I took my hiatus from this podcast, and I wanted to give you a quick update before diving into some deep content over the next few episodes. The last episode was aired in August of 2020, crazy right? It’s amazing how quickly and slowly time goes at the same time. Well, where I live, has been and still is in pretty restrictive lockdown, so most of my updates are of a personal nature, but it definitely bleeds into my business, because what I offer comes from my heart. August was a big month for me, because we found out we were pregnant! Then in November, at 17 weeks, I miscarried....

Hello fellow birth workers! Today's episode is a little different. Here's some background before I explain. Life has been a lot, for all of us. Personally, I'm quite sensitive to being overwhelmed and overstimulated. I've cut way back on my own podcast consumption and really being very mindful of what I read, watch and listen too.  This mindfulness as helped support my mental and emotional health over the last few months.  I've had to reassess how I serve in my business with all these transitions. Being in a house and isolated from my community has been rough, and so I'm having to make adjustments. One of those adjustments is putting the Thriving Birth Worker Podcast on hiatus. I always want my work to be an authentic reflection of who I am, and right now, I'm not able to put more noise out into this noisy world authentically....

Hello friends! I’m so excited to share this interview with you today! I had the chance to talk to Sarah and Charli from Hearth and Home Midwifery who serve here in the Willamette Valley here in the PNW in Oregon, making them a couple of my local colleagues! Today they offered so much wisdom to all us birth workers as they share their process of entering into the birth world and how they navigate the on call life, serving clients, working together as a team and so much more. They drop so many bits of wisdom in this interview you’ll be grateful and possibly interested in taking notes! I’m so happy to introduce you to Charli and Sarah of Hearth and Home Midwifery.  

Hello fellow birth workers! I’m really excited for today’s conversation! This is going to be our second mentor session on the podcast. What is a mentor session? Well, I’m so glad you asked. It’s basically, if you could sit down with someone who has been in the birth working field for years and listen to their wisdom, experience and knowledge and soak it up. Many of us want a mentor, but after our trainings it can seem like we’re on our own. Yet, we’re designed for mentorship. One of the points that was covered in today’s podcast was our deep need for someone more experienced to help guide us on our journey, and that it is not a negative reflection on what we know or don’t know, but simply how us humans are wired. I’m so excited that we got to chat with Darcy Sauers today!

Hello fellow birth workers. Today I’m excited to get pretty vulnerable with you all about my own story with functional movement. How I started out as an athlete, became a couch potato for the sake of motherhood and transitioned into finding my balance and rhythm. When I share that I’m a functional Movement Specialist, I get a lot of questions, it’s not your average title. I get that if I said I was a personal training most people would get it. But also most people would probably assume they know what I do when what I do is quite different, so functional movement specialist it is!   Why does my story matter, well stories are powerful, but mostly I want to take you on my own journey of feeling like I was never doing enough, never strong enough and always feeling like I was behind and how my relationship with functional movement changed me. In reality it was a huge tool in my own healing journey, and not just physically. The peace and strength I feel in my own skin at 36 is so drastically different from what I felt in my body at 26, and every year it keeps getting better. That’s a pretty different narrative than what we generally hear culturally. We’re told you need to be young and thin and athletic to feel that way. Then it’s easy to believe that it’s in accessible to us simply because of our age, body structure and so on. I want to help combat that narrative for you, and the best way I know how is to tell you my story.

Hello fellow birth workers! We’re a week into July fo 2020. Everything has been crazy this whole year! Do you remember the Australia fires that started this year? That seems like 5 years ago instead of 5-6 months ago when that kicked off our year. It’s gotten more intense ever since. 2020 has impacted our families, our communities, our ability to BE with our clients, our ability to provide for our families. It’s challenged our own personal beliefs, challenged us to really assess if our values line up with our actions. We’re also doing all this work physically separated from our support systems. To say 2020 has been a lot would be a gross understatement. Today I want to chat about the power of self care, what barriers come between us and actually practicing self care, and why necessary for world change. This is a topic that is near to my heart. I deeply love supporting the birth worker community. I see birth workers as a vital piece to the puzzle of a balance and supported culture and community. Birth is such a vulnerable time, and being supported, seen, heard and valued during that experience is incredible.

I’m so glad you’re here today, because today’s episode is GOLD! Now it’s about a topic many of us might find overwhelming or unapproachable or we have told ourselves is just quite frankly out of our league. Websites! Did you cringe? Did your groan a little? That’s ok and very normal, and also, that means today’s episode is perfect for you! Over the last few months, we’ve seen a transition into the online world on a level that is off the charts. Many of us are navigating bringing our work online, even if it wasn’t our first choice, because we have to  to safely serve our clients. It has been overwhelming and scary for many of us. This episode will feel like a doula taking your hand and providing the calm and clarity we all need right now as we navigate all the tech stuff!

Hello! Welcome to todays podcast! I’m excited to connect with you today! I’ve been processing today’s podcast for a while now, and getting lots of personal opportunities to experience this topic in my own life, and I’m excited to share what I’ve been learning and practicing and to offer an perspective that is in my opinion needed now more than ever! The art of doula-ing yourself! Evidence Based Birth Article on the Effectiveness of Doulas:  https://evidencebasedbirth.com/the-evidence-for-doulas/ What I cover in today's episode: Cover what doulas do and how impactful they are Imagining what it would be like to have your own personal life doula Importance of community How to offer physical support to yourself How to offer emotional support to yourself How to offer informational support to yourself How to advocate for yourself And more!

Occupational Therapists are quite literally the best. Today I get the chance to chat with the amazing Lisa Westhrope. She's the fabulous woman behind Nurture Occupational Therapy and I basically fell in love with her over the brief time I’ve known her and over the course of this interview! If you’re not positive you know exactly what an occupational therapist is, no worries, she explains it to us! A bit about Lisa! She is a masters-level qualified occupational therapist and mama of two who has a passion for supporting women during their motherhood journey. Lisa became interested in women's health after her own experiences of pregnancy and early motherhood. She has a particular interest in supporting birth choices, educating parents-to-be on the fourth trimester, suggesting ergonomic modifications for everyday parenting tasks and promoting a safe return to exercise.

I’m also excited to have you meet today’s guest if you haven’t already! Many of us working in the birth worker field are pretty entrepreneurial. We may not have realized it in the beginning, but as we dove into this work, we realized that we had to advocate for, market for and promote ourselves on a new level to get connected to and serving our community. It’s not easy. This is where business coaching comes into the picture. I myself have received SO many breakthroughs via a business coach. Now many of us also don’t have loads of extra cash lying around to pay for one on one business coaching. That’s where today’s guest comes into the picture. Rebecca Bakker is a Business Strategist that runs an incredible community over at the Doula Toolbox that specializes in supporting doulas (and really all birth workers can benefit from her wisdom). She saw this need, for additional business support, covering everything from social media to website development to all other areas of running your own business successfully in her community, at an accessible price point! It was exciting to talk other about ALL the things! Rebecca is the real deal my friends. She’s powerful and passionate and doing an incredible work. Our visions for supporting birth workers are so aligned that I felt like I was chatting with an old friend!

Hello friends! 2020 has been and continues to be quite the ride. I want to acknowledge how the world is right now so I’m going to read a social media post I wrote up today. I want to share about how physical movement can lead into all other types of change and why it matters. I don’t normally do super straight talk on my social media. I’m all about encouraging you and supporting you and not being another voice that adds pressure or shame or feeling less than....  

In this episode we get to talk about a topic that impacts ALL of us, yet we don’t often discuss how it influences us. Clothing! As a birth worker, this topic comes up quite a bit. What to wear to a birth? What do you wear with clients during a meeting pre or post birth? What is professional enough/vs too much?  There are several things that we get to consider: ease of movement, is it water resistant? Do I look too much like the hospital staff? Do I look professional enough? Are there enough pockets? Does your clothing help identify the role you’re playing? Can it get dirty?

Are you able to use social media to connect with your people? How does social media make you feel? Is it overwhelming? Is it confusing? Are you not sure where to start, or are you feeling confident and effective? I brought in a social media strategies to talk to us about this very topic. I know for many of us, it can feel like a lot and we’re not sure where to start or if what we’re doing is simply a waste of time because it feels like no-one is seeing what we’re posting. Many of us are trying to dial in how we can connect with our clients via any virtual means, and while social media might not have been on our radar several months ago, it probably is now. Katie Edwards Corbin and I dig into all of this and more in today’s episode. She’s built her own businesses from the ground up and understands the entrepreneurs journey! Katie holds a Bachelors in Professional Studies of Life Sciences and a Masters of Science in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. She has over 100,000 hours of professional and business training whether it be in traditional institutions or mentoring with the leaders of their industries.   She continues to grow and master her craft.  Katie is naturally drawn to technology, marketing, and the psychology of advertising.  The combined approach of leadership, management, self development, and being tech savvy makes her a powerhouse to the companies she works with.

This weeks episode I got the opportunity to connect with the amazing Kimberly Kimble. Kimberly is a wife, mother of 3, photographer and trained birth & postpartum doula in the greater Portland Metro area. After many years taking any photo job available, she narrowed her focus to bumps, births and babies two years ago and her business took off. She's been internationally published and awarded for her work. As a trained doula, she has a deep respect for the birth space and the birthing process as a whole. She aims to authentically document your birth story as it unfolds.

Hello! I’ll be honest. I feel quite emotionally drained right now. On one hand, it’s spring, I’ve planted a garden which I love, we’re getting more sun and walking which is my love language is so very lovely in the sun, spring feels new and clean, and then there’s this world wide pandemic where everything feels wrong and bad. I have so many loved ones going through legitimately hard and heavy and painful things, I feel emotionally exhausted most of the time. One of the ways emotional exhaustion and tension comes up in our bodies is through our pelvic floor. The pelvis is central to who we are, and tells a story so very well, often trauma and pain and tension reveal it self there. Have you or any of your clients had any pelvic floor symptoms creep up in the last few weeks?

Hey friends! Today I’m digging into a topic we covered last week with the AMAZING Nicole Jardim ( if you haven’t had a chance to listen, jump on over to that episode after this one, as it’s a perfect complement to this one) but from my angle of the movement perspective. We’re going to get all science-y, understand biologically how a period works, and what movement has to do with any of it! Then we’ll discuss why blood flow through movement in the pelvis can have a dramatic positive effect!

I’m really excited about today’s podcast. Nothing get’s me more passionate than talking about things that deeply impact women’s health and their lives that are often misunderstood, or even worse, have shame so deeply engrained into our psyche that we don’t even feel comfortable talking about them. Well, today, I talk to a major myth buster and knowledge sharer- Nicole Jardim. We dive deep into myths, hormones, the postpartum period, painful/heavy/irregular periods, how to find support for these issues and more!

Have you ever wondered why movement modalities and soft tissue therapies seems to be categorized in separate spaces? The woman I got to talk to in today’s podcast does an amazing job and integrating both of these modalities together for a  powerfully healing combination for her patients! We got to cover so much ground in todays episode, from understanding the postpartum period, scar tissue release work, diastasis recti, how to support your clients emotionally without getting drained or burned out, balancing how we educate ourselves and how we educate our clients and knowing what is appropriate. Really we got into it all.

Coronavirus and breastfeeding. Today we dig into all the nitty gritty details with an amazing professional, Mercedes Thomas. There are few things happening around here on my side of the mic, I’ve created 2 free lymphatic flow classes. The lymphatic system doesn’t have its own pump, and it is moved by movement. I’ve created 2 quick classes to support our immune systems by encouraging lymphatic flow. These can be found under the show notes, and can be passed on to your clients as well, if they are wanting to support their immune systems through movement at home during this time!