Have you ever wished for a mentor in your life? Someone with years of experience and success and the ability to be real and honest, funny and raw and talk about it all? Maybe you have that, which if you do – hold on to those amazing folks in your life! I’m calling today’s episode a mentor session – because that’s exactly what it is!
Kristen is a professional midwife dedicated to serving families in the Pacific Northwest. Over the last two decades she has devoted her knowledge, experience, and practical understanding in helping to guide mothers and their families during the prenatal, birth, and postpartum phase of their lives. She enjoys working closely with her clients and sharing the many different styles, techniques, and skills adapted while working alongside some of the most reputable midwives in Oregon. Her immense understanding of childbirth and parenting allows her to find the most specialized approach for each one of her clients.
Hello friends! How are you? If you’re listening to this episode later, it’s airing end of March 2020, right in the middle of this COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic.
I live in Oregon where we are currently under a stay at home order, but we’ve been self quarantined for a couple of weeks already with plenty more ahead of us. Life feels turned upside down, and yet we’re healthy and have a comfortable home and food and toilet paper and feel blessed while still in the middle of dealing with everything. It is currently manifesting in my body by tension in my jaw and neck. I’m a jaw clencher when stress is looking for a physical way to manifest it self, so I’m working on paying attention to those areas of my body.
How is your body? How is your mind? How is your business?
We’re in the middle of a thriving business series on the podcast, and I feel mixed emotions about that timing of it. I plan out, and record these episodes often months in advance. I’m a planner and I like to have my little pile of prerecorded episodes so I don’t feel extra pressure or feel like I’m trying to beat a deadline. Because of that, this episode and several other episodes were recorded before this virus hit, so we don’t acknowledge this crazy real factor in the episode because it hadn’t been a reality yet.
I’m continuing with these episodes because of several reasons. We still have businesses, even amidst the craziness that is our lives right now. We still need to pay our bills and attempt to to serve our clients which now seems so very complicated. I would say that we need business coaching, encouragement and community more than ever.
We are moving into a Thriving Business Series on the podcast. I love a good theme and the next few interviews are going to be just that! Many of us find that after our training we are released into this business world feeling ill-equipped and overwhelmed. Wait, not only do I need to know how to serve my clients as a birth worker, but now I need to be an expert in marketing, finances, taxes, social media, web development and more. It’s enough to make someone throw in the towel from overwhelm. This series is digging into different aspects of business, talking to professionals who not only have made it successfully but also share their deep wisdom and experience with us. It’s been a fun series of interviews and I’m thrilled to share it with you.
Hello! Welcome to Episode 17 and I’m thrilled to share with you today’s conversation! I had the opportunity to talk with Katy Bowman of Nutritious Movement. If you haven’t heard of her, you’re in for a treat!
I originally found Katy’s work about 8-9 years ago. I found her through one of her blog posts about squatting. The way she approached movement in a big picture way really resonated with me. But I didn’t think a lot of it, it was back when everyone was blogging and I was reading lots of different blogs. I came back to her work a couple of years later when I was feeling very stuck with my own diastasis recti and pelvic organ prolapse, and I couldn’t find answers that made sense to me and what was happening to my body.
Hello Friends! Today I’m excited to discuss part two of how movement can be used as a tool for healing and emotional stability when it comes to stress and trauma. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to part 1, I recommend you pause this episode, listen to the last one, and then resume, it lays a solid foundation what I’m going to be sharing today.
What’s in your trauma and stress tool box? I would love for people to have all the options available to them to access, in no way do I think one tool should be elevated to be more important than another, but I have found that utilizing movement for healing is a tool that often is left out of the equation, so I love highlighting it as something that many people don’t realize is an option.
Today I’m super excited because I get to talk to you about one of the things I love most in the whole world, movement for stress reduction! That’s right! Most of the time when we talk about exercise, most people associate it with a list of ‘shoulds’, something on their list they’re not doing and feel like they should be, something they’re not doing enough of or any of, something that doesn’t fit into their lives and because of that they are somehow failing. I love flipping this narrative on it’s head!
Mirra Nerenberg started attending births as a labor doula in 2006 while she started her formal midwifery education at Birthingway College of Midwifery. During midwifery school, she started working at Alma Midwifery as a postpartum doula and office staff. She completed her apprenticeship; and after graduating from Birthingway with a Bachelor of Science in Midwifery in 2010, she continued working as a midwife at Alma where she was fortunate to be a part of so many wonderful families stories. In the fall of 2014, she decided it was time to start my own midwifery business to offer families in Portland a small, compassionate home birth practice. By collaborating with her community, Portland Natural Birth Midwifery was brought to fruition!
Jane is a mindful strength and movement coach, a trauma informed embodied resilience expert and a Jungian Analyst in training.
Her bio states:
“You would probably agree with me that we’re all healing from some past hurt or loss. That doesn’t mean we’re broken. In fact, our past struggles, traumas or health issues don’t have to be a life sentence. I believe we have the power, with enough support and resourcing, to free ourselves from the shackles that limit our recovery process and our potential for more happiness and joy. While it is widely accepted that mindfulness is necessary to shape the body, I assert that the body and movement is one of the most powerful alchemic tools for shaping the mind. After all, how can we harness our intuition and resilience if we only use our heads?
In today’s episode I get to interview the amazing Lisa Hendrickson-Jack about a a subject that’s discussed less often and highly misunderstood and is a a highly charged subject for women’s reproductive health. We discuss using fertility awareness for either preventing pregnancy or using it to get pregnant! There are SO many different misunderstandings and so much empowering science to back up this strategy, I don’t want to give too much away, but I love diving into the topics and questioning the assumption that we really aren’t capable of being the experts of our own bodies.
My journey towards healing and moving from surviving to thriving actually started in my mind. Perceived authorities and assumptions can strongly affect our beliefs and our views of reality. Over time we can become confined and limited by our unquestioned and subtle beliefs. It’s so important that we take the time to slow down to analyze and question them by looking at the “story I tell myself” about various parts of life. Join me as a share insights and anecdotes from my own journey along with wisdom from some trusted guides I’ve come across along the way!
