FREEBIRTHING TWINS – TRANSCRIPT
In today’s episode I’m speaking with Emma Johnston, co-founder of The Reconnected.
Emma reached out to me a year ago after the birth of her 4th and 5th children, and told me how she’d taken WFW earlier that year.
She shared with me that she’d just birthed her twin boy and girl at home, on her own, with her partner, and three other children present.
No one else.
Her entire pregnancy was wild and free, meaning she didn’t consult with any witch doctors or meddling wives, or use any machines to tell her what was happening in her womb.
Instead, she listened to her own body and intuition to guide her through.
While I get that not everyone may be in that place, and feel confident to do something like that, I believe this truly is the way.
My work in the Sexy Mama realm is to help women shed the fear and the programming they’ve taken in, that reinforces their helplessness in the pregnancy and birth process, and the idea that they NEED an outside source or a machine to tell them the truth of their own bodies.
My work is to help them restore their own inner knowing and confidence.
Every animal innately has this—including us.
We’ve just been convinced that we don’t.
One of the big reasons why I’m so passionate about this, is so women—and couples—can have the most powerfully transformative and self-actualizing experiences of their lives.
Women birthing in their own power get this.
Women who give their power away to an external authority during birth, don’t.
Instead, they walk away traumatized, confused and grief-stricken.
The opportunity to rebirth themselves at the deepest level, into their most profound and wisest power, has slipped through their fingers.
To be clear, I’m not shaming or blaming any women who have fallen victim to the propaganda and lies of the allopathic system.
I am definitely blaming anyone who perpetuates those lies.
And the reality is, healing can only happen when we acknowledge that trauma has even happened.
Emma touches on so many amazing points in her conversation with me which reflect the core essence of my philosophy, like:
- The Anami Guarantee: Everyone can. Everyone has these abilities.
- If you aren’t realizing them, that’s because something is in the way. Trauma, beliefs, conditioning—these are the elements to remove, so we can get back to all of the innate, birthright knowing and wisdom we ALL have.
- Once that stuff is out of they way, we see our intuition and connection to our bodies deepest wisdom and that of the divine, functioning as they ought to.
A great example of the programming we all get, vs, the truth of what our bodies are designed to do, is the idea of PUSHING in birth.
Name one fictional movie or television depiction of birth that doesn’t include a crazed bleacher filled crowd of people yelling at a woman to PUSH PUSH her baby out???
Pushing is one of the worst things you can do in birth.
It’s the antithesis if surrender, of letting the body do what it does.
When we do surrender and open, the body takes over and something called the Fetal Ejection Reflex happens, where the body gives a great heave and CATAPULTS the baby out.
Yes, indeed.
The body pushes itself.
When women push—and you see the great metaphor here of not letting go of control and refusing to surrender—they often end up tearing their vaginas and creating prolapse scenarios that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
But when she just surrenders and opens, the body can get to work and do what it does beautifully and gracefully.
In Emma’s birth story, she shares what happened when the Fetal Ejection Reflex kicked in a her babies literally SHOT out of her.
Emma also talks about following her own inner guidance, when there was a potentially tricky moment during the birth, and where that led her.
So many great themes in this conversation!
** WELL-F**KED ALL STAR EMMA **
KIM: Hello, Emma! It’s great to have you here.
EMMA: Thanks so much for having me. I love your podcast. I love how diverse it is, and I listened to quite a lot of it just before I had my twins. I went on a deep dive into the podcast.
KIM: Diverse in what way?
EMMA: Just about sex and babies and relationships and homeschooling and all the things that I’m into.
KIM: Love it. Well, you’re into something that I’m very into, which is the whole freebirthing idea, which you’ve done on a whole other level, so please, share your story.
EMMA: Well, it’s almost coming up to a year, which just blows my mind. I was pregnant last year, due to give birth in October, I thought. I had a pretty amazing pregnancy. I actually signed up for your Well-F**ked Woman course just before I fell pregnant. My partner and I were just kind of rebuilding intimacy. We had no plans to have another child.
KIM: And you had how many so far?
EMMA: We had three then. And I had home births with all three older ones.
KIM: Were they also freebirths?
EMMA: They were home births, but my midwife, Melanie Jackson, has her PhD in freebirth, so she’s very hands-off. I’ve never had any checks or dilation checks. Everything is very hands-off and just being with yourself and having her there.
But I started doing that course, and then my partner and I started to open up and be with each other more deeply and intimately. This energy just came in, and I knew there was another child. I heard the name, actually. I heard the name Fadra and I said, “I’m pretty sure there’s a girl around and I think she’s coming in.” And my partner said, “Are you crazy? Do we need another kid? That just sounds a bit nuts.” But he also felt it, and I think he really couldn’t say no to the energy.
We just kind of went with it, and I had this really strong sense that we were about to invite a girl into the family. We had started to open up intimately, and life was running really smoothly. I was thinking, “It’s actually okay if we have another baby because we’re in our house, we’re sorted, everything’s smooth and comfortable,” when it hadn’t been for the other three. It had kind of been a bit of a whirlwind financially. It was never really the right time, but this time, I thought, no, we’re sorted, we’re grounded, it’s all good. Everything will be fine.
Then, the next week, we had a massive environmental disaster where we lived. We had floods, landslides, and my family—my partner, my three kids, and I—were trapped behind a landslide for seven days.
KIM: Wow.
EMMA: No food or clean water or anything. There was lots of water but not clean. And I just kind of knew. I said, “Oh my God, I know that I’m pregnant.” I didn’t have a test or anything, but I knew it. And we’d just lost our house. We’d lost everything. And not only did we lose the place where we lived, but everyone in my area did. It was like 100,000 homeless people.
I said, “What is this? I cannot believe it. Have we made the craziest decision?” But by the blessing of whatever is out there, we were guided the whole way and supported so beautifully by the community and ended up landing in a really beautiful place to rest and my business was going really well.
I was just in my pregnancy. I didn’t have to work, didn’t have to do much else, and I couldn’t because I was so sick. I was so, so violently ill. I thought I’d actually been water poisoned because we were siphoning water out of our tank for seven days while trapped by the landslide.
I’d never been so sick before. A lot of people were really ill from all the dirty water. But mine just never went away. I was just constantly, violently sick, and I was taking all the herbs and remedies.
And then it finally ended, and I was probably two months pregnant at the time. I hadn’t really put two and two together yet. I thought I’d just gone through this massive bug while pregnant and I had fears about the baby being okay. That was a pretty traumatic entrance into conception. Was everything cool?
But I ended up having a really beautiful pregnancy, and I just decided to do it on my own with my partner. We had a bit of a brief discussion—what does it look like? Are we going to get a doula? Nothing felt really aligned. My midwife lives a lot further away. She wouldn’t have been able to join us. I didn’t want to meet anyone else. I had this feeling of secrecy. The baby felt really secretive. I had the feeling that it was a girl. But anytime I’d think maybe I should talk to someone about my pregnancy, I just got this full-body, “No, you’re okay. You’re fine.”
I just went through my pregnancy. I actually had a really nice time. We spent so much time at the beach connecting and being together.
Then I went way over. I thought my baby would have been due on the 16th of October. That’s when I’d kind of mapped it out. And I knew the longest it was going to stay in was my daughter’s birthday on the 28th of October, because there’s a bit of a pattern in our family of being born on the same day.
We got to my daughter’s birthday, and the baby was a no-show. I said, “Okay, this baby is sticking around way longer.” I didn’t have a lot of movement, so I was kind of in the process of thinking, “Who is this baby? They feel so secretive. There’s not a lot of movement.” My friends would be mapping me all the time. Feeling where the bum and the head were.
We would kind of joke, “Imagine if there are two in there … That would be so funny.” Because I felt so big, but nobody could feel two. We could always kind of get a bum and a head, and they always tended to be flipping in each direction. But there were never two kicks or two hiccups or anything that would have led me to think there were really two in there.
And then we went way over my daughter’s birthday. On the 5th of November—so I think I would’ve been 43 weeks—I went into labor in the morning. We set up the pool in my house, and my partner and my kids were there. It started in the morning, and it was pretty non-eventful, quite peaceful. And I just went into this kind of deep, meditative zone.
Thankfully, I’d given birth three times, so I knew to really hand myself over to the experience and allow myself to just be with everything that was coming. And I’m so glad I’d had those three births before because this one was unlike any of them, and it was a real pull to surrender. I felt really bizarre in my body. The labor sensations were so epic. They were right in my back, which I hadn’t really had before, so none of the movements that I thought would work would actually work. Just moving my hips and getting into these interesting patterns in my body.
I was having this real entanglement in the moment, thinking, “Wow, I’ve actually made the decision to do this completely on my own, so this actually all lands with me.” And I was just kind of moving through this mental peeling and unraveling around things. “I am doing this totally sovereignly. I’m doing this totally on my own. I’m going to be with this. Okay, there’s no one to really reach out to.”
I said to my partner at one stage, “I think the baby is stuck. I have this feeling the baby is not moving. I’m not sure what’s going on.” But thank goodness he is so trusting that he just held space for that feeling and helped me to have an emotional purge around it. He was tracking where the labor was going. He thought, “We’ve got ages. This is going to take a lot longer. It’s all good. I’ll just sit here and massage her.”
Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, my body just opened. I just felt this whole breath of my body, and I had a fetal ejection reflex. My daughter was flung out and made a little wave into the pool. We all picked her up. My kids were there, and we were saying, “Oh my God, it’s Fadra. It’s the girl, it’s the girl.” We thought, wow, she was so present and expressive with who she was way back at conception that we’d always felt she was there.
We were all really excited, and she was screaming. She was so pink, so available. And as I had her on my chest, I looked down at my belly, and I could see my stomach had collapsed over the top of the other baby, so there was a very obvious baby there.
And I just looked at my partner and said, “I think there’s another one in there.” And he just said, “Okay.” And as soon as he said that, my body just opened up again. I can’t describe it. It’s like I had no control over the fetal reflex. It was like my body just opened and out shot legs.
KIM: [Laughs]
EMMA: Yeah. The funny thing is, I had said to my partner the whole pregnancy, “Whatever you do, just make sure you get the birth time,” because I love astrology and human design. So I said, “Your one job is just getting the birth time.” And he did that. He got her birth time. He took a little bit of video footage of us with her. It was all very exciting, and it’s so funny looking back on the video, because you can fully see Halo in my womb.
So we took the video and then he put his phone down. We don’t know what happened in that moment, who took Fadra—we don’t know where she went. We can’t remember. But the baby’s legs came out, and I just remember Ryan was there, and my instinct was to say, “Don’t touch him. He’ll be fine.” And my partner said, “Okay.”
And then the next wave came, my body opened up, and he came out. And he came out completely blue, gray, not there at all. He was so floppy. This primal instinct came over me and in very quick succession, I just grabbed him and sucked whatever was in his mouth out with my mouth. I flipped him over and rubbed him on the back, and we called his name.
And it was so interesting that we did this, because we didn’t have a name for a boy. We just knew it was Fadra and we’d actually decided, if it’s a boy, it’s Fadra, if it’s a girl, it’s Fadra, because the name was so present.
And Ryan had heard the song “Halo” come over my birth playlist. And he just started saying, “Come on, Halo. Come on, Halo. You’re here, you’re here, you’re with us. We’re with you,” and Halo came to and started to breathe and was there and available.
Then we just had these two babies. We were just sitting in the pool, and my kids and my partner and I were all in shock. I don’t remember what happened from there. My partner said he’d already been thinking at the beginning, “How am I going to get her from the pool to the mattress over there with one baby?” And then he said, “I was just there with two babies, two cords.” [Laughs] He was just thinking, “My goodness, what do we do?”
But I was so blessed because they were both so radiantly healthy. After Halo landed and came into his body, he was just so awake and they were just so present and fully cooked, because they were 43 weeks.
KIM: Wow. That’s amazing.
I love the references you made to your instinct of what to do in those moments, and I especially love hearing about when the fetal ejection reflex just takes over and does what it’s meant to do. If we were not interfered with, I believe that’s what would happen with everybody.
But it’s amazing to hear that, the way you describe it—your body just opens and you don’t even do anything.
EMMA: My body just absolutely opened. I was reflecting afterward. I was in a really trancelike, psychedelic state. Before that happened, I was absolutely gone in my own mind. And I had this vision that I was walking two kids over a light spectrum when I was in that deep part of labor, but because I wasn’t in my conscious mind, I didn’t think anything about two kids. I just said, “Oh, I’m walking kids over a light spectrum.” I didn’t think, “Oh, it’s twins.” I was just in this really psychedelic state and that’s when my body just opened. There was no conscious thought about it, zero pushing. That baby was going to come out. It was the most unique sensation of absolute freedom and then they just came out. I didn’t feel anything. It was just like “vroom.” Eject. It was just wild.
KIM: What do you think prepared you for being able to be really open and to allow that to come through you and surrender in those moments?
EMMA: Well, I am a rebirthing breath worker and I have done so much work around being with discomfort, whether that’s emotional, physical, or mental. Then also, being with many thousands of people’s discomfort—I think that’s given me a really good foundation for being with what arises and moving into the pain.
I have been around a lot of women who really trust birth. I had to reclaim that because I didn’t come from a family or a paradigm growing up where birth or womanhood or just being a natural human being was ever talked about.
When I fell pregnant with my first son, I’d never met anyone who’d had a home birth. I hadn’t started breathwork then, but I knew that I wanted to do it at home. It was just the weirdest thing to me to think that we’d go to a hospital.
Then, because I had that spark of thought, I landed in a random conversation at a café with someone who had a home birth. She told me about a book to read, which was Jane Hardwicke Collings’s Ten Moons. I read that book. That led me to reach out to a midwife, and then I had my first birth at home. I was up against a lot of, “Are you crazy? You shouldn’t be doing that.” That was nine years ago, so free birth/home birth wasn’t quite as prevalent on the internet as it is now.
That was kind of my first move and then having the births at home where my midwife, thank goodness, never touched me or guided me in any sort of way to give birth. It gave me a real sense of trust that I knew I could take a lot deeper with this experience of having a freebirth.
But there’s so much more information out there now. It’s so epic what you can learn when it comes to this. I read a lot of the books about what happens in this scenario, what happens in that scenario. But ultimately, I know that when we have an undisturbed birth, we go into a primal part of ourselves that doesn’t need any sort of coaching. That just switches on.
I didn’t really know what to do with a baby who was totally not present or blue, but my instinct kicked in. My partner said he was so inspired but shocked and in awe about the level of calm I had in that moment. He had felt like [gasp], “Oh my God, the baby’s blue; what’s going on?” But he said he just watched me go into this absolute mastery. “This is what it’s going to be. It’s going to be totally fine. Everything is all good.”
Yeah. I don’t know where that came from, but it was just in the moment.
KIM: Well, like you said, if a person is left undisturbed, then all those instincts are there and intact. We think about animals and all the things that they do instinctively. They’re not watching anybody else give birth. They’re not around anything. That’s all coming from them. Licking their babies and nursing them. All of that stuff is pure instinct. Which is epic, really.
EMMA: And if women are left alone, it does just take over. Also, there is a real surrendering of the mind. I knew that I was dealing with the mind at the beginning of the labor because I was having these entanglements around what was happening. The feeling of the baby being stuck.
But I knew that I needed to just get out of the mind—nobody was going to help me in that moment. It was just about surrendering deeper to the sensations of, “Okay, the baby feels stuck. Where is that in my body? What is happening?”
Just the ability to get out of my thinking mind, which probably would have made me fear, close up, contract, get the adrenaline. But I knew to just surrender more into the feelings and the sensations and that’s when I went on this epic psychedelic journey. Like I wasn’t in the space at all.
KIM: Tell me more about the psychedelic journey.
EMMA: Well, I love the part about how a woman goes to the stars to get her baby to bring it back down.
KIM: Who said that?
EMMA: I don’t know. Maybe it was Sunny Carl. She’s always got a good way with words. But it’s so true, and I’ve experienced it in all my labors. There is a moment that you go into the pain and you’re with the pain enough that it transmutes into a psychedelic experience. And it’s no longer pain that has you wanting to escape. It’s like an energy and a wave that comes through the body that takes you into an altered state of consciousness.
I had it in all my labors, especially that transition bit, just before the baby is about to start to move into the birth canal. I think that’s where a lot of women don’t actually get to have that experience. They’re just made to stay in their mind. If you stay in your mind, you’re not going to be able to access that place. And if you’re in a hospital situation and you have people talking to you or wanting to ask things, it’s very hard to get into that space.
All of my births have been in the dark, left alone. Music is a huge tool for me. I love music and just being left to surrender into myself. That’s why I’ve been able to access that zone.
KIM: Yeah, exactly. What would you say were parallels for you? Because the whole theme of the sexual journey and being, let’s say, a Well-F**ked Woman and having cervical orgasms, is the same level of very deep, profound surrender, where you have to get out of the mind and into the body and trust. You hit these places that feel like chasms and voids, and you have to be able to dive into them and go forward.
Did you notice parallels between your sexual explorations and what that could bring you in your birth experience?
EMMA: Yeah, for sure. I think the real intimacy of my partner helped. We’ve been together for almost 15 years now, and we’ve been through each birth and just are able to totally surrender to each other and completely trust.
Essentially he was my midwife in this birth with the twins, because he was the one who was there. He was out making toast for the kids, doing the pool, feeding the dog. He was not completely in the room because he left me to be on my own, but there was sex, parenting together, the level of trust that I was able to have in that moment. Even if I had to purge those fears, he wouldn’t hook into that fear and create a bigger problem. He was able to just listen to what I was expressing and trust that I would make a call if I needed to. But he didn’t pressure anything.
Yeah, I can see the intimacy of our relationship was a big thing. It impacted that freedom to completely trust that it was just us in that space.
KIM: Is there anything else sexually that felt like parallels or preparation for you?
EMMA: Definitely just feeling into the openness sexually and the intimacy with myself. The intimacy with my own body and my own freedom of expression when it comes to birth. Feeling completely uninhibited to be in that really primal nakedness. Full exposure. I’m so grateful that my kids have seen this really primal part of me quite a few times when I am in that birth space. It’s just this real openness that I know I needed to embody in order to bring these babies in in a really sovereign way. I needed to feel completely uninhibited in my own physical body—which I’m really proud of, because I don’t come from a culture of that at all. I come from a diet culture and a very repressed English culture, not very sexually expressive at all, very closed down. Nobody talked about sex, menstruation, none of it, ever.
I’m proud that I’ve been able to reclaim that by doing intimacy work, self-reflection, my breathwork practice, and having these births where I’ve been able to be fully expressive in my own body.
KIM: Did you say you come from a diet culture?
EMMA: Yeah! Women who were always on diets, never loved their body, always had an issue. They would never be fully expressed in their body. They wouldn’t be open and vulnerable in that sense.
I was never breastfed. My mom never put her breast in my mouth. I worried about that when I was first having kids, because I thought, “Well, what am I up against?” But I’m actually deeply instinctual and breastfeeding has been the most natural, amazing, awesome thing for me.
KIM: I love it. Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
EMMA: I would say that the world is so open and available for people to freebirth now. The energy has changed within the landscape of the medical field. The towers are crumbling in that sense, and I think people are really becoming aware of their own authority and their ability to do things differently.
If you have that inkling that you want to do it, there is so much support out there, so many amazing people, incredible stories. Just make sure that you have safe people in your space. I didn’t even tell people that I was freebirthing and wild-birthing. Nobody knew. I was blessed because it was my fourth child and not a lot of people asked. I had three kids, so it wasn’t a big topic of conversation about what I was going to do.
But I kept everything really quiet and private, just between my partner and my friends, who are very supportive and very open and willing to hold space for this type of stuff.
I didn’t share it with people who I knew weren’t going to hold the same level of frequency. I want to give people permission that they don’t need to get permission from people to birth the way they want to birth. It’s actually a really good practice for your pregnancy to claim your sovereignty, even with your words. Not everyone needs to know your decision. You don’t need to justify it. Just like you’re not going to have to justify the choices that you make when your child comes here, because you’re going to come up against choices that you’re going to have to make intuitively.
That practice can start at the very beginning of conception, making intuitive choices that maybe not everyone else will agree with, because that’s going to be a pretty consistent thing popping up if you’re having a child consciously and you want to make decisions based on your own instinct. It’s really good to get that practice at the beginning, because it’s going to happen.
I’m so glad I didn’t share my wild pregnancy and freebirth plans with people that weren’t going to fully hold them in the highest regard because I had a pregnancy that was fairly stress-free. I didn’t have to come up against any kind of dogma, conditioning, fearmongering. But it was mostly because I just stayed in my own zone and did my own thing.
KIM: Fantastic. How else do you think you’ve cultivated that trust in your body and yourself if you didn’t come from that in your own lineage?
EMMA: Well, I have a master’s degree in rebirthing breathwork, so I’ve done a lot of breathwork. The breathwork style that I am trained in is rebirthing, so it’s reclaiming the signature of your own breath pattern back to its natural state of being, which is releasing and unfurling the trauma that has happened since your own conception.
I’ve done a lot of deep work on that and a lot of reclaiming, rewiring, and new agreements from my lineage. New agreements that I’m making toward my own family line, what I’m bringing in. Untangling a lot of the grief and separation of not being breastfed or being put into school and being medically tampered with as a child.
I reclaimed a lot of my experience around that through my own deep work, and I rewired that and made some really conscious decisions to do things very differently. Because I made those decisions, the world has given me that. It’s shown me a way.
I had to move through 15-plus years of my family and my in-laws thinking I was quite insane and very weird for the things that I do. But since COVID and the exposure that’s happened to a lot of people, now my family and my in-laws have a lot of respect for how I do things and they trust that I will make the right decisions for me and my kids. It’s kind of come full circle into just feeling accepted for being my pioneering self for my own family.
KIM: That’s amazing. What about your own self-body love? When you talked about coming from a diet culture, how did you come to a place of loving your body that trusts and cultivates that?
EMMA: I actually come from a diet culture. I was a full-time ballerina, which was absolute hyper-pressure on the perfection of the body. Then I became a model, which was a whole other layer of perfectionism around the body. I lived overseas with supermodels and saw hyper-dysfunctional relationships with physicality.
People who were considered to be the most beautiful people in the world hated themselves so deeply that they would do unimaginable things in order to stay at this level of perfection.
I had a really interesting experience in the early part of my life with seeing the mental illness that comes with disconnection from the body.
But I also had my own experience. While I never had an eating disorder, I did go way too heavily into drugs in my early years, and I was not looking after my body properly at all. It took unraveling all of those experiences and becoming a mother and having these births where I was fully exposed and in my body to come to this level of deep appreciation for my physical body. How miraculous it is that it has been through so much. Full-time ballet, which is really intense, was this model culture and this bizarre world that I was in where being sick was seen as being beautiful.
Luckily I never really had to experience that; I just saw the mental world of it all and experienced it.
Then my births just gave me this experience of, “Wow, I’ve put my body under a lot of pressure over my life,” but I’ve come into a state of healing where my body is completely in its own mastery.
As a woman, the most important thing is breastfeeding, being with my babies; there’s nothing around beauty standards or the need to look a certain way that matters anywhere near as much as being available for my babies.
I’ve come to this level of deep appreciation for how strong I am physically. Especially that twin freebirth—I was flying afterward. “Wow, my body has been through so much and yet again, it just did the most amazing thing.” It blows me away.
KIM: You were flying? In what way?
EMMA: I was so high. I felt like I was just—
KIM: Like double oxytocin with the twins? [Laughs]
EMMA: I was just tripping out. For the first couple of days after I had the twins, I had a bit of a hormonal wave where I was in bed on the second night and I had just had these two babies and all of a sudden, the reality of having five kids came down on me. “Oh my goodness, why has this happened? I don’t know if I’m available for this. Five kids! It’s so much responsibility.” I just had this full wave of shock that I had just had two babies.
But after that, after I came more into this hormonal equilibrium and was feeding both babies, I stayed in bed for weeks, and we were in the lushest place as a family. I just felt like I was high.
I was so inspired in my postpartum that my business grew so big. My business started before, when I was pregnant. There was me and my business and two other people working for us, and over that period of time, over my pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, we grew to have 17 people working for us.
So my business and my life were absolutely peaking. It was a wild experience but amazing. Amazing.
KIM: I love that. Where do you think that energy comes from? Would you say that’s just the triumph of having gone through this challenge and these portals and coming out the other side? How else would you describe it?
EMMA: I would definitely say I’ve seen a recurring theme with women who have had wild pregnancies and freebirths. The energy transmission that they can gather from the world and the universe once they’ve had their babies is unlike anything you could put words around. It’s a level of empowerment that can just skyrocket you.
It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to put words to, but I have seen it happen with other friends of mine who have had a totally wild pregnancy and freebirth. They just come out of it and it’s like there’s a level of trust within themselves, a level of trust within the process that they seem to have more grit and tenacity to show up for life and their big dreams.
I think that’s what real sovereignty is and real sovereign expression. And the power of a woman—I would say that this is why it has been suppressed. Because if there were a lot of women out there who were birthing in this way, then it would be quite an unstoppable force. Because there is just something that happens.
I would say it’s not only for myself. I have actually seen, over the history of birth, my partner change after all the experiences he has had. He had a son before he and I got together and that was a hospital birth, and it was quite traumatic. That really damaged his relationship and his own mental health.
Then I saw him reclaim something of himself with our first home birth because he had this wave of, “Okay, I trust in the nature of life.” He had this kind of awakening of, “Okay, well, I trust in that.” And then, over each consecutive birth that has gone really well, he has opened up. I noticed when we had this freebirth it just landed him somewhere different.
It’s not just the experience that is available for women. It’s also for men. There is an energy that you can tap into that’s available, a real empowerment when we are given the grace of being in our own family dynamic and giving birth.
Even my kids, actually. I am so grateful that they have been at each birth, and especially this one, because not only did they get to see a miracle happen, but they got to see a baby come who was not necessarily landed on Earth. They got to see the deep trust in life. They got to be in that whole scenario in the absolute gob-smack of, “Oh my God, there’s two!” and they have just been the most beautiful siblings to the twins. There were no meltdowns about new babies coming or anything.
We were all just so high on life and being with these two new souls that made a massive ripple when they landed. It was just a huge ripple of light that went out because people were just so blown away that you could have twins sovereignly. Because we’re up against so much.
I didn’t expect this reality to come to me because I hadn’t thought about it much, but it threw me into the world of, “Oh my goodness, there is a real agenda about keeping twins separate and there is something really wrong with the medical institution when it comes to twin birth.” Because I saw the auric imprint that was happening with my twins together.
After I gave birth, I had this really strong maternal instinct that they needed to stay together. I felt almost like it was more important to keep them together than to keep them with me. I just could see how important their little auric bodies were together as twins.
That sent me, in those first couple of days, into such deep grief about the reality of twin birth, especially in Australia. Because twins in Australia are mostly induced at 37 weeks. They more often than not end up in humidicribs, separated from one another. Their cords are cut immediately from each other.
When my babies were born, they each had a cord, but they were fused. Their placentas were fused together. Even though I had fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, they should have had two separate placentas, but for some reason, my placentas were fused, so they were really close.
Those very first few days, they were never separated. They were completely together, cuddled up in this little womb outside my body. I could just see how unbelievably important that was for their souls. I can’t describe it. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve experienced twins when they’re born, but yeah, it sent me into a deep grief about what is happening in a lot of twin births.
I think there’s a statistic of something around 70% twin parents have postnatal depression, and I’m not surprised.
KIM: Because they can see what’s happened, or they’re part of that drama?
EMMA: Well, they’re part of the separation and the trauma, and they don’t often get to have a totally sovereign pregnancy. There is a lot of fear about babies getting big, twins not being able to get to full term, there shouldn’t be a natural birth, babies being born backward being wrong … There’s a lot.
I had some hospital midwives reach out to me when they saw me take videos of my twins wrapped up in bed together and they said, “Oh, that’s actually really dangerous. They’ll suffocate each other and they’ll die. We see that happen in the hospital.” I said, “No, no.” It’s absolutely not true. They were meant to be in this auric bubble together. I just knew it deep in my bones.
Even my partner and my kids felt it. “No. They need to be together in this little world.” Yeah, it was a surreal experience. I feel so deeply grateful for experiencing the magic of twins, and it’s just given me a fire to share with twin parents. Hopefully even if they have to have a hospital birth, they can fight for the rights of their twins a bit more to stay together.
KIM: That’s beautiful. So much richness in all your sharing. Thank you, Emma.
EMMA: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I love sharing the story. It’s feeling really close to me right now because they are going to be one at the beginning of November, and it just feels so surreal. But it’s an experience that I will carry with me forever and one that I am so grateful I’ll be able to share with them about their magical coming.
I shared at the beginning that I thought the baby was really secretive. Phaedra is not at all secretive. She is absolutely a livewire. She is fully present, and she loves people. She can be picked up by strangers. She’s completely content, very confident.
Halo is deeply sensitive. He loves to just be with me or my partner. He’s very sensitive to other people’s energy. He’s the surprise, secretive energy that I was picking up that whole time but not realizing was two beings.
KIM: And you’re traveling with them right now. Tell us a little bit about that.
You’re traveling with five children, including two under the age of one.
EMMA: Yeah. It’s actually so amazing. With my business, I work completely online. I’m launching one of our main products right now, Reconnected Parenting. But that has given me the opportunity to travel. We went through Indonesia first. Now we’re in Thailand and we’re just on a journey. We haven’t really put much thought into where we’re going next, but it’s just beautiful.
I radically unschool my kids, so they are just living through learning. And it has been a profoundly rich experience traveling with them. Culturally, the language, the very real disparity of wealth versus poverty. The beauty of religion. We are smackdown in the middle of Muslim mosques, Buddhist temples, Christian churches, and it feels like such a deep learning experience for them.
Even though the older ones are nine, seven, and five, I have just witnessed how much of an epic experience they’re getting by bursting out of the bubble of our very comfortable reality in the Northern Rivers of Australia. It’s a beautiful, stunning place. So lovely. But not a lot going on culturally, so it’s been an epic experience and one that I’m not ready to give up yet. Where do we go next? What do we do?
KIM: I love that. That freedom that’s available to everybody every step of the way through pregnancy, through birth, through childhood; that’s also part of the conditioning about keeping tethered to the medical system, keeping tethered to old ideas of what birth is meant to be, and the trauma that people try to program it to be, tethered to a school system, to a neighborhood. All the tethering information that we get and then breaking free from that. It’s great.
EMMA: Yeah. Well, there’s no better chance to do it than now. The world is so open. I feel so grateful because in my bones, I’ve always been an anti-authority person. It’s just a part of me. I feel so grateful that my life has opened up—it’s very easy to live like this now. It’s so easy to have an online business that lets you stay home with your kids, be available for them, keep them out of the school system.
Even when I come up against moments where I think, “Well, I want this for them,” as long as I set that intention, it starts to come to fruition. It starts to become available. The more that I want for them, the more that it just starts to become available. We are just so lucky and so blessed about the times that we’re in, as crazy as they are. If we are on a polarity planet, the level of freedom that’s available to us is very real. Yeah.
KIM: I love that. So inspiring and a great place to wrap up. Thank you, Emma. It was fantastic to hear all of that.
EMMA: Thank you so much.
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These free pregnancy and free birthing stories are some of my favorite.
What these women describe and experience truly is the pinnacle of what it is to have been born into a female body.
The things that Emma talks about as part of her journey are in my Sexy Mama Salon, and the overall themes of self-autonomy and sexual self-knowledge are in all of my salons.
Sexy Mama dives deep into all things healing, reprogramming and reclaiming of this power that lies within everyone.
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In my 8-week online Sexy Mama salon, we cover everything from pre-conception to fertility, to blissful pregnancy, orgasmic birth, euphoric postpartum and early childhood.
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How amazing this story is! Imagine what’s possible without fear-mongering. Heading for my first freebirth at 45. Lots of love