Verana is the owner of Embody Your Birth in the San Francisco Bay Area. She serves as a full-spectrum doula, childbirth educator, Archetypical Astrologer, and creativity ally. She is also a poet, dancer, songwriter, and traveler of the globe. Her work as a doula and astrologer are deeply interconnected. Guided in her work by the collective dream for whole and healthy relationships in our families, communities and with our Mother Earth, she is committed to walking beside her clients and students, whether in the labor room, classroom or exploring the natal chart to create safe and brave places where empowerment, capacity and deep inner trust can emerge.

Website: https://www.veranafaye.com or follow her on Instagram @verana_faye

Highlights:

• How Verana was introduced to the practice of ceremony at a young age in connecting with her Jewish heritage.
• All our ancestors lived in ritual; the importance of bringing ceremony and ritual to birthing womxn. Hear how ceremony transformed her and strengthened her commitment to her path with birth after a very impactful birth in Brazil.
• Learn how her travels and exploration with plant medicine in Latin America have informed her work.
• Verana shares her unique relationship to the Cosmos through Archetypical Astrology, and how these energies inform both birthing mother and baby.

Britt Fohrman is a doula, embodiment coach, birth educator and photographer. For more than two decades she has been holding space for women standing at the threshold of life’s most profound transitions: becoming a mother; healing from illness, injury or loss; stepping into sexual power and opening to new beginnings.

She weaves her training as a VITA Method Sex, Love and Relationship coach with her extensive training and experience in yoga, meditation, Hypnobirthing, Buddhism, Tantra, Shamanism, plant medicine, dance, and holistic healing to guide her clients to live aligned with their desires, inner knowing and authentic values. Her premier online course, Preparing Your Vagina for Birth offers a transformative and feminist approach to the childbearing time.

Highlights:

Having given birth recently at the age of 49, Britt shares insights of her phenomenal journey to motherhood.

Learn how ceremony is the reason she is well and joyful even while moving through much adversity. Ceremony supports her capacity to traverse life’s big portals and rites of passage. Britt shares how ceremony is her way of praying, her language of healing.

How her Jewish upbringing introduced her to the experience of stepping into holy space and feeling a connection to her ancestors.

Britt’s choice to work with Ayahuasca; how it facilitated her connecting with healing energies, helped her find her power and recover from a decade of debilitating Lyme disease.

Yoni Shakti, the Power of the Circle, and getting what you need.

Website: https://www.brittfohrman.com

Instagram: @thejuicyladies

Maritday Rodriguez is a Doula, Maven, Ceremonialist, and Keeper of Ancient Ways, she walks the path of her Taino ancestors, embracing their indigenous heritage and practices.

For over 25 years, She has immersed herself in teachings and practices related to women’s empowerment, nutrition, energy and herbal medicine, holistic skincare, natural health, and reproductive wellness, specializing in Life Cycle Doula services covering Fertility, Ante-Partum, Prenatal, Birth & Post-Partum aspects.

I had the pleasure of meeting Maritday and experiencing her wisdom and love of life when she attended my Birth Spirituality and Healing Coach Certification training in NY. She lives in New Paltz, New York in the beautiful Catskill Mountains. Her websites are www.amaritday.com and www.mhvdoula.info.

Maritday’s interview:

• Inspires us to trust and use our intuition to support the family dynamic’s health in perinatal couples with her amazing stories
• Recognizes how land and ancestors affect our perinatal experiences and their need for recognition
• Shares ways of applying spiritual Armor and protection to keep ourselves renewed

Ariela Sharon is a spiritual childbirth coach and ritualist, living in Jerusalem. She brings a deep understanding of the divine feminine and Judaic spiritual wisdom to her birth work. This interview contains many nuggets of practical ways to integrate spirituality and ceremony in our birth work and lives. Each of us, podcast hosts, has a Jewish blood lineage and it was very precious to learn more about the jewels in our history. At the time of this interview, Ariela was 6 weeks postpartum from a beautiful home birth.

The following are some of the nuggets of this Interview:

• Birth is Ceremony and we can infuse it with ritual
• We need birthworkers like Lael who is spiritual and loves women. Spirituality is touching our souls with our bodies
• In the Jewish traditions, the number one quality of women who support birth was faith
• How to pray: you don’t care how you look when you pray or when you birth. It doesn’t matter if you are crying or screaming, your prayer is yours, different than tradition, it is another type of prayer, a spontaneous prayer.
• Birth knowing is a woman’s world. we can’t make rituals for them, it’s the woman who knows best. It the woman needs to break shabbat to give birth, she can, she can do whatever she wants. it’s a duty for her to know about it,, it’s not ok to hand it over, she has the responsibility, she has to know about her body, physiology, emotionally, a lot of women haven’t been socialized to take responsibility.
• How can you connect what you are feeling in your body with what you are feeling in your spirit. What’s connecting me to the creator universe for me?! Not someone else’s prayer
• I bless all the women listening to this to have someone in their lives can hold space for them. When someone really has faith in you, there is a total shift in the birth.

Website: https://www.arielasharon.com/

In this interview with Elizabeth Theriault, ASW, MPH and perinatal ceremonialist from Petaluma, California, we discuss how the enormity of growing a life and the grief of not being met or supported by our culture called her to the inner connections and community that ceremonies offer. She describes how her husband who was a ritualist designed a blessing ceremony for her and the power the altar that was created by her friends had in their lives up to 2 years after the birth. We also discuss the kinds of ceremonies we can do with our children and how open they are to this.

The following are more of the nuggets we discuss:

• Deciding to become a mother and feeling the enormity of growing a life in her, the grief of there not being a lot of holding or container to hold, meet the feelings I was holding inside about this. The mismatch and isolation between the culture and our own inner experience as moms.
• Pregnancy/ Birth Blessing ritual and altar, her husband a ritualist and her 16 women friends wove for her and the power of it for her and them during birth and after for years.
• She had low milk supply, reached out on fb and 25 other moms immediately responded forming a support community for all of them and experiencing being witnessed.
• The ceremonies and need for community to witness us during the transitions from pregnancy ~ beginning change to developing pregnancy ~ between the old and new self forms to after birth ~ completely new and transformed and needing to be seen in all these stages and welcomed back after the birth experience. Being recognized for how far we traveled.
• Sitting in the ceremonies and circles with honoring the sacredness allows the women to align with what they actually experience!
• Elements of Ceremonies, the glow after ceremonies, easy ways to practice ceremony with your children and so much more!

Website: https://ritesofpassagepostpartum.com/

In this conversation with Gena McCarthy, RN, Perinatal Psychotherapist, Certified EMDR provider, community organizer and developer of integrative health programs and networks for nearly 40 years, we explore the importance of spiritual and psychological preparation to move powerfully through the transformative initiatory experiences that pregnancy and birth and motherhood offer. Gena shares compassionate practices and insights that honor our sacred feminine power, connect us with the Great Mother, and support healing from a difficult or traumatic pregnancy, birth or postpartum.

Some highlights:

How she was able to move ‘under the radar’ as an L&D Nurse and offer guided visualization for women on bedrest in the hospital with challenging health complications, and frequently saw symptoms subside.

The influence of several books and teachers in informing her growth personally and professionally; The Tibetan Art of Parenting by Anne Maiden Brown, the writings of Sobonfu Some, respected teacher of African spirituality, and Angeles Arrien, cultural anthropologist.

How her birthing experience informs her work and community ceremonial practices, The experience that brought her into knowing that we are capable of experiencing enlightenment and pleasure in birth.

The importance of safety in ceremony for overcoming fear and healing trauma. Gena shares several EMDR tools and practices for grounding, what to do if you are triggered, and healing trauma without having to feel the trauma.

For information on Gena’s workshops and sessions: www.birthspiritualityandhealing.com

Sandra Lloyd is a Shamanic Hypnotherapist, birth worker, and ceremonialist. She received expert training in Depth Hypnosis, Shamanism, Buddhist Psychology, Energy Medicine and Hypnotherapy at The Foundation of the Sacred Stream in Berkeley, CA. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and Sociology.

Sandra's path of healing service has been informed by two separate diagnoses and recoveries from cancer, as well her work since 2004 providing hands-on, unconditional support and advocacy for pregnant and birthing women navigating the complexities of the initiation of birth and passage into motherhood. Energetically "holding space" in the birth environment, and grounded in her connection with spiritual allies, she has been privileged to assist the safe and empowering passages of hundreds of new lives into this world.

We take a powerful journey starting off with the story of how ceremony came into Sandra's life. Meeting her first shamanic teacher and how she began her shamanic practice. Sandra also shares insights p but into weaving the work of being a birth worker and a ceremonialist, creating a power filled and protected energetic field for the birthing mother and the sacred practice of connecting to the Great Mother. Plus so much more!

To find out more about Sandra and her powerful work you can go to her website https://www.sandralloyd.net/ or follow her on Instagram @lloydlibra.

This Podcast shares stories of practice and wisdom from perinatal ceremonialists living in our communities and all over our earth. These stories are of women returning to an understanding and honoring of their own power. They help us welcome our babies as the unique precious beings they are and support them to be ready to continue the weaving of our future world. They promote safe passages for birthing families in these times of disconnection.

Gena McCarthy

www.birthspiritualityandhealing.com

Sandra Lloyd

www.sandralloyd.net

Elizabeth Theriault

www.ritesofpassagepostpartum.com