From C-Section to Free Births
And Five Miscarriages to Free Births!
One of the things I hear most often from women who had a transcendent, empowering, largely independent, birth experience, is that it wipes out the residue of former births they may have had, where they were more entrenched in the allopathic system.
Meaning, they let others tell them what to do, every step of the way, instead of birthing their children through their own innate guidance and direction.
Women who had C-sections have gone on to have triumphant free-births at home, which we’ll hear about later in today’s episode.
Women who felt that their birth experience was taken from them—and it was, although they also LET it be taken—seize the power back over their own wombs and vaginas, and become the active DIRECTORS of their births and therefore, their lives.
Some of the strongest messaging we receive in our culture is that having a baby is a disaster waiting to happen.
It’s not something that a “silly little woman” could do on her own.
Nope—she needs a team of doctors—most likely male, although lots more women are getting in on the hacking and slicing game these days—to SAVE her.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
All of the education I put out around this topic is to reassure and REMIND you that YOU can do this.
Yourself.
And in so doing, you will experience a deep transformation, an empowerment, a rebirthing of YOU as your true, deepest, most authentic and fierce self, because YOU claimed the opportunity and spiritual awakening that is natural childbirth.
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In order to have this kind of orgasmic, ecstatic birth experience means taking the reins early on in your journey.
Even during conception.
We live in an age where humans are so toxic, the their bodies regularly REJECT pregnancies, or simply can’t manufacture quality eggs and sperm to create healthy babies.
The outsourcing starts here, when couples then seek out IVF and artificial fertility treatments to override the messaging they are receiving from their bodies which is:
“Yo, bitches! You be really toxic right now. How ‘bout you clean this shit up and we try again?”
I have a great video on Natural Fertility which you can check out on my YouTube channel.
The toxicity and blockages might be emotional and psychological.
How are you “closed” to receiving new life?
Have you left enough space in your world to bring in someone and something new?
Perhaps you make it to pregnancy. And then are fraught with miscarriages.
This is another common issue these days:
20% of pregnancies miscarry.
Your child is the symbolic entity of you and your connection with each other.
AS you work out the kinks and blocks in yourselves and the collective of your relationship, you free up the flow for a smoother conception, pregnancy and birth.
Anything significant that is NOT resolved between you, will show up in your birth.
And even before that in your pregnancy and even before THAT in your conception journey.
Combine all of that with the programming and imprinting you receive around birth, you’ve got a lot of work to do to clear the space.
I interviewed Hannah a couple of years back about her free birth experience in my podcast episode: What is “Free Birth”?.
She herself had been born by C-section, as well as her sister.
She knew that on an unconscious level, she was carrying the energy of that experience, and if she wanted to shift that in order to have a clear birth experience, she’d have to do a lot of internal work, including reprogramming herself.
So she did.
For her first child, she had a totally sovereign, free birth – no medical monitoring or intervention for her entire pregnancy or birth.
She had her baby at home, with her partner, their dog and a trusted friend present.
What’s important to note, is that she knew that the experience of her birth was imprinted upon her on a neural pathway level and she’d be carrying the pain of her lineage and what she experienced with her own birth.
So she chose to consciously get in there and rewire.
**
When I was pregnant, a practitioner I was seeing at the time said to me: think of your birth like a marathon.
You’ve got nine months to prepare in every possible way: Physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
Most people focus on their “physical” preparation.
They pick out furniture and paint coolers for their “baby’s nursery” and a rocking chair and a crib.
To me, that stuff is irrelevant. I never did any of that.
Some people I knew gave me a couple of big bags of their baby clothes, and I was off to the races.
All of my other preparation was internal and energetic.
Apart from eating a whole foods, organic diet, which I was already doing and was a given, to me.
The most important “preparation” you can do is on your mindset, your fears, your internalized beliefs and then setting to work on reframing and recreating all of that to fit the vision YOU want to have.
The programming runs deeper than you think.
EVERY single image or montage you’ve ever seen of brith in popular media is of a woman screaming in pain, and being wheeled into a room, strapped down to a bed and then ‘SAVED” by the “IN-DOCTOR-NATOR” who CLEARLY knows more than she does.
THIS is what you are carrying with you.
and if you add that onto your own birth experience, which likely had some kind of intervention, whether it be a standard epidural given to your mother, or a full-blown C-section, TAHT experience has now being encoded into you.
You CAN change that.
But if you don’t CONSCIOUSLY work on it, you will then DEFAULT to the unconscious map you have had made for you by the culture at large and your own mother and her mother and her mothers before that.
***
In today’s video, we are talking with our Well-f**ked ALL STAR couple of the year, Mark and Amanda.
Their story is amazing, and encapsulates ALL of the concepts I’ve just described.
They each had two children before meeting each other, borne into the allopathic system; ie. in hospitals.
Amanda’s first child was breech, and she was told that she’d have to have a C-Section.
At that stage of her life, she was immersed in the allopathic mindset, and even though she was devastated, she complied,
Her fourth child was born at home, in her bed, with just her husband present.
This was a free birth, with no one attending her pregnancy either.
In between all of that was FIVE miscarriages.
Their story is amazing and super entertaining, so I’m going to let them tell it, and how they evolved along the way.
WELL-F**KED ALL STARS Mark and Amanda
KIM: I would love to hear this free birth story of yours.
AMANDA: My passion for having a free birth came about from having a caesarean. I’ve had four children altogether, and the first two children are from a previous marriage. I was 24 years old and was in the allopathic system. I went to a public hospital, and I lined up and did my every-four-week meeting or whatever it was where you had to be scheduled to get checked.
KIM: To have someone shove their hand up your vagina.
AMANDA: To feel the baby, yes, and check everything. I went for a 34- or 35-week check, and they told me that the baby was breech. And in Australia, you can’t vaginally give birth to a breech baby in the hospital system. You’re simply not allowed to do it.
I had a lack of options. I could try to turn the baby, but that was very dangerous. I was told it could be fatal for both the baby and me. I was really scared. I didn’t know what to do. My husband at the time said, “Let’s just get the caesarean.”
The next appointment was at 37 weeks. At that appointment, we looked through the calendar to work out what fit with my husband’s work schedule and with the doctor’s schedule. It was set for Wednesday morning. My son was actually delivered at 37-and-6, so it was just before the 38 weeks, according to my calendar.
I cried the whole way into the hospital. I cried while waiting to go into surgery. I was so disappointed because I really wanted to give birth vaginally to this child, to my firstborn. However, he was born; he was beautiful. I adored him. We went home and got happily on with life.
Two and a half years later, I fell pregnant with my daughter. I was passionate this time that I wanted to have a vaginal birth. In Australia, it’s called a VBAC—a vaginal birth after caesarean. But you are given a time limit. If you’re going to go into the hospital, which I still was at this point, I think you get two hours to progress. If you haven’t progressed, you then have to go have a caesarean.
Thankfully, I went into a birth center, and the midwife I had was amazing. She was so fantastic. “Get in the shower. Get on the ball. Do whatever you want to do.” I didn’t want any interventions of drugs of any sort, so I hadn’t done any of that.
MARK: Can I jump in? I wasn’t on the scene at this point, but from the stories that I’ve heard, this midwife essentially gave Mandy the tricks to—
AMANDA: To bypass the system.
MARK: Yeah. As much as you’re only given two hours, they have to be measured, and they can’t do that while you’re in the shower. They can’t do that while you’re on the ball. The midwife said, “Okay, when someone comes in, just be in the shower.” So you’re turning those two hours into six or eight hours if you need to.
KIM: Wow.
AMANDA: Yes. She was really supportive. “Get in the shower and don’t get out. Just stay in there if you really want to give birth to this baby.”
Her shift was going to finish, but she stayed on anyway, and that was beautiful of her as well. As it happens, my daughter was born within an hour and a half, a 90-minute labor.
As she was born, I was sitting on the toilet. My legs were shaking. My whole body had gone into the transition stage. You think you’re not going to make it. My midwife said, “You need to get up. I really need you to get up off the toilet.” I said, “I can’t. I actually can’t stand up. I can’t do it.” She said, “Well, if you don’t get up, I’m going to be fishing your baby’s head out of the toilet.” And that was my motivation. “Okay, I’m up. I’m up.”
MARK: “I can do that!”
AMANDA: [Laughs] I got up. I think I walked about three steps, and I had my arms around my husband’s neck at that point. The baby was delivered between my legs, and then she was passed up between my legs. We held her, and she was born. There was some beautiful music playing in the background, and I realized I was born to do this. It was the most amazing moment of my life. I just felt so empowered, so beautiful, so raw. It was spectacular.
There were those two births, and then I separated from that man and met Mark along the way. At first, we weren’t going to have any more children. He had two children; I had two. It seemed like a fairly happy scenario.
MARK: Comfortable mix.
AMANDA: Yeah. We had our hands full. They were all close in age. My oldest and his youngest were 18 months apart, so it was all a happy little family unit.
We went along for a couple of years, and then I decided I would like to have another baby. My biological clock started screaming at me. And he agreed. We tried to have more children. In between my daughter and our next child, we ended up having five miscarriages for no medical reason that could be found. We’ve done a lot of spiritual, internal work on that.
But then we fell pregnant after we’d been told we wouldn’t have any more children. “You’ve got so much scarring on your placenta, so much tissue that’s been torn away; it’s just an unhealthy environment. It’s never going to happen.” We had said, “Okay, great.”
MARK: But just to understand that, though, in terms of fertility and ability to fall pregnant—it was five miscarriages in about two years.
AMANDA: We fell pregnant really easily.
MARK: As much as the doctor was saying, “It’s not going to happen,” we felt that we were done. Obviously, the universe had kind of said, “Maybe you don’t need to have more children.”
AMANDA: Five miscarriages. We really felt, “Okay, it’s not meant to happen then. We have your two, and we have my two. It’s busy. Let’s move on.”
MARK: Yeah. We kind of gave up. Anyone out there who’s had miscarriages—I can’t empathize from a woman’s perspective, but I can empathize from a man’s perspective that it’s hard. It’s so hard on the woman. Hard on that relationship as well because from a guy’s perspective, you’re seeing the trauma that your partner goes through, having carried that child for a period of time and then losing it. There’s not less loss for a seven- or a nine-week or an 11-week than there is a full term. Doing that five times is hard.
AMANDA: It was intense.
MARK: Anyway, we lovingly agreed that that would be it. Then we fell pregnant again very quickly.
AMANDA: Yeah. Probably the energy started to flow differently between us, I would say. There was a more relaxed energy, a more loving energy toward creating something…
MARK: Else.
AMANDA: Else. Less focused on creating a child, and that just led to the flow of the universe, I guess. So we fell pregnant, and it’s that intuitive knowing. I just really felt when that pink line came up that this baby was going to stay. It sounds cliché, but I really felt like I just knew it.
MARK: She was right, though. [Laughs]
AMANDA: [Laughs] Yes! We went through the journey of pregnancy, which was…
MARK: Beautiful.
AMANDA: Yeah, we changed a few things. After I went to a nine-week checkup and the baby was okay, I got rid of the health-care institution that I had been going to. I went to that appointment by myself and came back and told Mark, “It’s so triggering. It’s really hard to walk in there because every time I go in there, I’m reminded of getting an ultrasound and finding out there’s no heartbeat, that the baby’s not alive anymore. I can’t go there anymore. It’s really uncomfortable.”
We didn’t go to that obstetrician anymore. We chose another health-care provider, who ended up being a really good friend in the end. He was very supportive of what we wanted to do. He was an obstetrician, but he was so fantastic. When we arrived at the hospital and I’d already had the baby, he said, “I knew you were going to do this.” They had supplied us with hospital sheets for the bedroom and some other things that we might need if I went into labor and it all happened quickly, which it did.
I felt my first contractions. They were so intense that I was in shock. “I don’t even know what’s happening.” I felt really uncomfortable and a bit sickly. So I went upstairs and went to the bathroom, and what came out of me— oh my God, it was so intense.
Then I got up off the toilet and said, “Okay, I’m done. I’m going to go back to bed.” I took two steps to leave the bathroom and said, “No, I have to go again. Oh my God,” and nothing happened. I said, “No, I’m okay. I’m okay again.” I hopped up and walked five steps down the hallway, grabbed the wall, and groaned. And then I looked up and said, “What is going on?” I went out into the kitchen and watched the microwave clock. I was rocking back and forth on the kitchen counter, watching the clock. These feelings, these massive waves of energy, were going through my body, and I said, “That was one minute while that happened.”
I did this three times, watching the clock, and then I knew when it ended, I had less than a minute to get downstairs to wake up my husband. Otherwise another one would hit, and I wouldn’t be able to walk. That’s how intense they were straight away.
I waited for this particular energy wave to finish, and then I raced downstairs. I flung open the door and said, “I do not know what is going on, but something big is happening.” And he said, “Okay!”
It was two in the morning. He got up and went to the bathroom. When he came back, I was on all fours on the bed, mooing like a cow. He said, “Oh my God, she’s mooing. They told me if she moos, it’s happening.” [Laughs]
And he rang the hospital. They said, “Is that your wife in the background?”
MARK: I said, “I think we’re coming in. I’m pretty sure she’s in labor.”
AMANDA: They said, “Well, how long has she been in labor?” I said, “Ten minutes…”
MARK: Yeah, and they said, “Well, I don’t know if you need to come in yet. Give it some time.” During this conversation, they could hear Mandy mooing. Then the midwife said, “Is that your wife in the background?” I said, “Yeah, that’s her mooing.” And she said, “Right, okay. That sounds pretty advanced.” So mooing must be an international term for a certain stage of birth.
They said, “I would get in the car as quickly as you can and head here.” I said, “Right, okay. Yep, we’re going.”
AMANDA: We went out to the car. It was a new car; we’d only had it for eight weeks. I went to sit in the seat and then said, “I can’t get in. Get a towel!” Because I didn’t want to mess up the brand-new car. [Laughs] He raced in and got a towel.
MARK: But you were on the grass.
AMANDA: I was on the grass, and my water broke. Although it hadn’t, because I threw my bottle of water. My daughter drew a picture of me throwing the water on the front lawn.
I hopped in the car and said, “I think the head is coming.” We hadn’t even left the street yet. We were 20 meters away from the house, and I said, “I think it’s the head.” He was driving, and he put his hand between my legs. He was feeling it, and I was feeling it at the same time. I said, “It’s not the head; it’s the bag of water.” And then the water broke and went everywhere on the front seat. In his mind, he was thinking, “Okay, I’ve got half an hour, 20 minutes.”
MARK: I thought maybe an hour or two hours.
AMANDA: After the water broke.
MARK: My thought process was: “Your water breaks, and then you’re going to have this two-hour-long birth process. We’re only 20 minutes from the hospital, so we’re all good. All systems go. Yeah, take it easy, doll. Put your feet up. I’ll get us there sort of thing.”
AMANDA: We left our cul-de-sac and drove 400 meters up the road. I said, “It’s the head.” And he said, “Are you sure?” I said, “I’m pretty sure this time it’s the head.” So again, he reached over and felt between my legs while he was driving. And he said, “Oh my God, okay.” He pulled over the car.
MARK: First I dialed 000, so I could get some help, basically.
AMANDA: “Somebody come!” [Laughs]
MARK: [Laughs] “Help!”
AMANDA: Then he pulled over and said to me, “You’re right. Don’t go anywhere.” I had one foot up on the dash and the other spread out over the box in the middle. “Stay where you are. I’m going around.” So he ran around the back of the car. He said when he came around, there was this head between my legs with little blinking eyes looking toward him. You know the part of labor where the head spins so the shoulders can come? Our daughter was doing that as he came around. I had worn a skirt and no underwear.
There was a road-working guy walking toward the car, saying, “Are you guys okay?”
MARK: Oh, that was funny, because when we pulled up, it was the middle of the night.
AMANDA: It was 2:30 in the morning.
MARK: Yeah. There was roadwork being done on the freeway, and we weren’t going to make it. We dialled 000, and the emergency response person said, “I want you to again put your hand down and tell me if you can feel the head.” I said, “I can feel the head.” He said, “Okay. What I’d like you to do is just pull the car over.” “Right.” And he said, “You’re going to deliver this baby.” I said, “All right.”
Then we pulled over, and there was this workman up ahead.
AMANDA: It was a road worker with his stop sign.
MARK: It was one guy, not a group of workmen. He said, “Are you okay? Are you all right?” I opened the door and yelled out to this guy, “My wife is going to have a baby! Can you get us some help?” And at that point, he was walking toward the car. He turned around and ran in the other direction. “I don’t want to be anywhere near that.” We never saw him again. We had the moment completely to ourselves.
I got out of the car and ran around the back. I don’t know why, but I took my shirt off because, you know, all the things you see in the movies. “Get me some clean water! Get me some towels! Get me this, get me that.”
AMANDA: We had nothing.
MARK: Yeah, we had nothing. We said, “Okay, so I’ve got a shirt.” I took that off. I came around the car, and our beautiful daughter’s head had already crowned. I got to hold her head as she was spinning.
AMANDA: Everything for me personally then was like a tunnel. Everything went really dark except for this piercing white light that was probably my third eye at that point. She slid out during that moment of condensing. Everything just, whoosh, went down.
Mark was looking down, and the paramedic was on the phone asking, “Is everything okay? Is the baby born?” And Mark said, “No, there’s still a bit of it in her.” I said, “There is nothing in me. Pick the child up and put it on my chest.” He said, “But the feet are still in there.”
MARK: I said, “No, no, the feet are still there. The feet are still in there, and I’m not pulling them out. I won’t, no.” And she said, “No, no, it’s out. The baby’s out. It’s out.”
AMANDA: And he picked her up and put her on my chest. At this point, I didn’t know it was a girl. We hadn’t found out what we were having.
He put his shirt over her. We were holding her, and she was really quiet and blinky. She didn’t cry or anything. I said, “It’s not crying. It’s not doing anything.” And the paramedic said, “Well, is it okay?” I blew on her face to get that reflex reaction, and she was alert. I said, “It seems okay,” but there was meconium. I said, “There’s meconium, so there is concern.”
Then he said, “What did you have? Your baby was born at 2:31. What did you have?” I lifted up her leg and said, “Oh, it’s a boy, look at that.” Then Mark said, “I think that’s the umbilical cord. Why don’t you take another look?” I lifted it up, took another look, and said, “Oh my God, it’s a girl.” [Laughs]
MARK: It’s a girl! The ambulance came within five more minutes, I think, or ten. I think we had about ten minutes to ourselves, which was just—
AMANDA: It was beautiful.
MARK: It was just absolutely beautiful. Weirdly beautiful, sitting in the front seat of the car with this beautiful newborn baby and the umbilical cord attached and everything. We transferred Mandy and Bub to the ambulance, and they went to the hospital. I followed, and then I cut the umbilical cord about an hour later.
AMANDA: Yeah, they pretty much left us alone. “Well, you guys are done.”
MARK: Yeah. And we really wanted that because Mandy had done all the reading on Bubby taking all of the nutrients from the umbilical cord, so we knew we shouldn’t cut it straight away. Our obstetrician, who had become a friend, knew this was kind of what we wanted. In no way did we plan this.
AMANDA: He knew we wanted to be left alone. And all through our obstetric care, they were saying, “You’ll have to be monitored. You just will. It’s part of hospital policy. You will have to wear the monitor.” And I said, “Well, I’m not coming in until it’s nearly done then.”
My first pains, the first waves of energy that I felt, were at 2:01, and she was born at 2:31. It was really quick. All of that happened in a very short window of time.
Then we fell pregnant again, and I was more skeptical after all the miscarriages and then having had our daughter. I actually went back to being nervous and worried that we might lose this next baby. But my steady man stood by me and kept reinforcing his positive energy. And we got through those trying times.
Again, our obstetrician—
MARK: Same obstetrician.
AMANDA: We said, “We’re just going to have this baby.”
MARK: He kind of told us, “You’re not—don’t even…”
AMANDA: He still wanted to help us with the care.
MARK: Yeah. He totally was there for us through the whole nine months. It’s like having an obstetrician as a friend, really.
AMANDA: When we had our last baby, I went to basketball practice with the older kids in the afternoon. We came home, and I fed them dinner. I was seven or eight days over my expected due date. My child was definitely at that point in pregnancy where I felt, “I want it out now.”
I had friends that were due after me, and they’d already had their babies. I was feeling pretty ripped off by that point. “Come on! I just want to have my baby.” [Laughs]
MARK: But for our youngest, we were set up to have the baby at home.
AMANDA: I had a playlist ready to go. We knew we wanted candles. But the playlist that I wanted was not what I wanted once I was actually feeling the feels. It pissed me off; that had to go. That was a funny thing that happened.
But yeah, I fed the kids. The older kids got their dinner, and the baby had her dinner, and I could feel some stuff happening. I felt a bit uncomfortable. It was nothing like with my daughter that was born in the car, but it was definitely going to happen in the next couple of hours. I decided I was going to go take a shower and just freshen up and get organized.
Mark was watching TV and said, “All right, let me know if you need anything.”
I was in the shower, and I don’t know what he could hear, but he came down, and I was holding the rail of the showerhead and rocking back and forth, making these moaning sounds. He said, “Oh shit!” [Laughs] Here we go!
MARK: Here we go again. I was lighting the candles.
AMANDA: He was running and sweating. “Oh my God, I have to get all the stuff.” He was getting the speaker and the playlist and the candles and setting up the bed with protective towels.
MARK: Yeah, the hospital had given me a ceremonial set of scrubs as well.
AMANDA: A home-birthing kit, really.
MARK: I didn’t put them on. But they’d also given us the stuff to lay on the bed, absorption towels and all that sort of stuff, so I was setting all of that up.
AMANDA: Yeah, I was still in the shower and said, “I need help to walk from here.”
MARK: It was probably three or four meters from the shower to the bed.
AMANDA: I hobbled along. This particular labor went for 40 minutes. It was another really quick one. I was standing up, holding the wall and rocking back and forth.
And then I said I wanted to get on all fours. I really felt like I just wanted to be on all fours with my hips up in the air. Again, we didn’t know what we were having.
MARK: I laid out the toweling on the bed. We have a backing to our bed, so Mandy was able to kind of grip onto the headboard and then be on all fours. I said, “All my toweling is not in the right spot.”
AMANDA: It wasn’t “perfect” for him.
MARK: I said, “Honey, can you just lift your leg up? I want to scooch—”
AMANDA: “Can you lift your leg?” And I said… [laughs].
MARK: [Laughs] This is why men don’t have babies. We can empathize a little bit.
AMANDA: I did move, because I’m a saint.
MARK: She said, “Why, why, why, why? Okay.”
AMANDA: “Move it now.”
MARK: “Okay. Okay. Now.” I kind of tried to shuffle another thing underneath. Just the pressure of her lifting her leg—I was sort of right underneath her, moving the towel, and the water broke right on top of me. Literally. I was covered in all the amniotic fluid and stuff all over my face.
AMANDA: In your mouth.
MARK: All over my mouth and in my mouth. To a lot of people that will not sound so nice, but the whole thing was just beautiful. It was just so natural and raw.
AMANDA: Then our son started to crown. Hearing your baby’s head coming out of your vagina is the most humbling and raw experience. It was spectacular. I was feeling this wrinkly, scrunched-up little head—God bless him. I was trying to feel the head, and he said, “Get your hands out of the way.”
MARK: “Get out of the way; let me do what I got to do.”
AMANDA: “It’s my frickin baby! I’ll touch the baby if I want to!” [Laughs] We were fighting over who was going to touch the baby.
MARK: [Laughs] And of course, Mandy got to touch the baby first, but I did get to feel the baby’s head.
AMANDA: He held the head—
MARK: As it came out and then as it turned. Yeah.
AMANDA: And he was talking me through it. “The head’s turning now.” I said, “Yeah, okay,” and I was breathing through that.
And then I was able to say to him, “Okay, I’m ready. The shoulders are going to come.” Our son just slipped out, and Mark caught him.
MARK: Literally caught him.
AMANDA: I was on all fours, and he passed him up between.
MARK: Straight underneath.
AMANDA: He passed him up, and I held him on my chest. And we were both just in this other world. Mark actually had the foresight to take photos. Photos of that exact moment.
MARK: I don’t even know how I did that.
AMANDA: And he said, “What did we have?” I could feel in my hands that it was a boy. I didn’t even need to look. I could feel his testicles, and I looked and said, “Oh, we had a boy!” It’s still emotional to talk about it now. It was so beautiful.
MARK: Yeah. The imprint of his head in my hand as he crowned and came out—you feel so much in your life in your hands, but I can feel that today. He’s now seven. I can still feel it today, retelling the story. I can put my hand on his head now, which is much larger; he’s obviously growing up. But I can feel the same…
AMANDA: That moment.
MARK: And it was just beautiful. The work my wife did in that—
AMANDA: As a woman, having a caesarean; giving birth, VBAC, in a hospital with a supportive midwife; going to a private hospital with an obstetrician and ending up giving birth in the car; choosing to have a home birth in the bedroom…For that cycle to come full circle is so healing. I actually still use it now in my life. I feel like, after those experiences, there’s nothing I cannot do. Things will pop up in my life, and I’ll think, “If I can give birth in 30 minutes on the front seat of a car, or if I can give birth in 90 minutes after a caesarean…” Sometimes it’ll be sprints on the treadmill. I can bring everything back to, “If I can do that, I can do this for 45 minutes. This is nothing in comparison.”
The body is an amazing, amazing vessel. Having Mark as my supportive network, and the atmosphere that he helped create, both in the car and in our bedroom, but also throughout the whole pregnancy—all of that allowed me to feel so safe and surrendered and open. The lengths of the births themselves speak volumes about how safe and held I felt in our relationship and with you. [Kisses Mark on the cheek.]
MARK: But it’s very much like a dock. On the surface, you’re saying, “Yeah, everything’s okay,” and underneath, you’re thinking, “Oh my God!”
AMANDA: It speaks to your masculinity as well that you can step up and jump into that role.
MARK: I know, but I see it as a gift. Hundreds of years ago, women were giving birth to their own babies all the time. That was what was done. It was the only thing that was done. Now women are being forced to have babies on a timeline and in a space that’s suitable to the allopathic networks. When you stop to look at it, it’s pretty awful.
I didn’t necessarily feel all of that ten years ago or seven years ago, but in hindsight now, having birthed our daughter by accident in the front seat of the car, and having had the support of our obstetrician who is part of the allopathic system, but also who sort of says, “No, no, you’re healthy; you’re educated; you understand the risks of staying at home or coming in.”
Because certainly, there’s always talk about the risks of doing it on your own. Statistically speaking, you want to look at the risks of going into hospital. If you did, you’d be having more births at home. I’m not here to lecture. But once you have the information, once you understand…and we did have all the information. Our obstetrician said, “You know what? You guys will be fine. Here’s my mobile number; call me anytime. If anything goes wrong, I’ll be there at your house within nine minutes.” That is not a service that’s provided by the system. This was just through the relationship that we built with him.
AMANDA: We did ring him, but only to tell him we’d had a boy. [Laughs] He said, “I knew you would! I knew it!”
MARK: As a man, to have that experience—we don’t get that, like I mentioned before. It’s created a platform for us that we’ve built on. To have done that together, to have leaned into one another and trusted one another and created that space…I wouldn’t have been comfortable with Mandy home birthing if she wasn’t as confident and as self-assured and as self-aware and in tune with her own body in every way. You’d just think, “What are we setting up?” But it wasn’t the case. As much as she credits me with some of the work, for all the women out there that have had babies—you’re doing pretty much all the heavy lifting. [Laughs] It was really nice to be a part of it.
AMANDA: Yeah. It was beautiful.
KIM: I have so many principles that I talk about in this realm where the tenor of your relationship then is that support. I say that whatever shows up in bed also shows up in life. Whatever shows up in bed also shows up in birth. Couples who have a lot of unresolved issues between them will see that come out in the birthing situation. But nobody makes that connection, the same way that most people wouldn’t think that whatever is happening in their sex lives has a direct correlation with the expression in every other part of their lives.
It’s wonderful that even then, before this work, you already had enough of that connection established to be able to facilitate that, and your births are a testament to that.
For that first free birth, maybe you weren’t fully ready yet to have the baby at home and declare that, but you sort of did. Your way of getting around that psychologically was, “No, we’ll have it in the car on the way there.”
AMANDA: We thought that! We thought that at the time. “Universe, see?” We actually manifested that. Because one of the things I really wanted was a salt lamp. “I want the salt lamp on, and I want some meditation music on.” I had been listening to opening and surrendering mantras while I was driving around before the birth of my daughter. That’s what came on while we were driving. “I am open. I am free.”
MARK: That’s right. I’m not very IT savvy, but Mandy had been listening to that sort of stuff pre-birth—
AMANDA: All the time.
MARK: And then as soon as we got in the car, that came on. It was just preloaded. It came on, and then within literally 12 minutes of getting in the car—
AMANDA: We stopped on the side of the road at 2:30 in the morning, and there was that orange lamplight on the side of the road.
MARK: Oh yeah!
AMANDA: It was exactly like a salt lamp.
MARK: Yeah! The roadwork.
AMANDA: With the meditation music. And only he and I were there. In my birth plan, that is exactly what played out; we were just doing it in the car.
And just coming back to what you were saying about how what shows up in your life shows up in birth as well—not that I would recommend it or wish it upon anyone, but going through five miscarriages together, what that strips away from you…there’s nothing in between the space. That clean glass that you talk about, the way that we processed the miscarriages and what was happening in our life, for both of us and as a couple but separately, how we felt we communicated very clearly, sometimes very heatedly, sometimes very emotionally, sometimes lovingly, but always—
MARK: Always coming back together lovingly.
AMANDA: Yeah. We burned down and rose again like the phoenix after each one, because each miscarriage actually made us stronger. They were awful and really, really challenging, but then we would come back stronger than the time before. That would surprise me each time. I’d say, “I didn’t think we could get any stronger.”
Then when we had our daughter, we just thought, “This baby has to be the clearest vessel that has ever been brought earthside. After having that many miscarriages, my body must be so clear.” [Laughs]
MARK: We kind of thought that she was the product of five spirits.
AMANDA: If you’re into numerology, she is a six. Her numbers add up to a six.
MARK: And they’re also that forward and backward thing.
AMANDA: Yeah, you can reverse her birthday. She was born on the 21st of the 3rd, 2012. So her birth is 21312. And she was born at 2:31. We definitely feel like she was angel-sent.
KIM: I love that. I think the average person wouldn’t be looking at miscarriages as an opportunity to clear space and to process stuff or as an analogy of what shows up in bed.
AMANDA: It’s very cleansing.
KIM: If you use it that way. But I think a lot of people might feel victimized. They might feel that they are effect versus cause, and you may well have had those feelings throughout.
MARK: Absolutely.
AMANDA: Yeah.
KIM: But you looked at them as opportunities. “Well, what do we need to clear space with?” Because obviously you cleared so much space that that baby came busting out in 30 minutes. That’s a testament to having done that space clearing, using those opportunities. I just love what you said because I’m sure many people resonate with those feelings. You’ve used those moments as phoenix-rising opportunities to rebirth yourselves and rebirth your relationship and to do even more work.
Then when you really let go and said, “All right, then we’ll just let go of this now and surrender and stop trying to have another baby,” you did have a child.
MARK: Trusting, I guess. Trusting each other, trusting what you’ve done.
AMANDA: Well, and seeing that, it was like questioning. “What can we learn from this? Why is this happening?”
MARK: Miscarriages…
AMANDA: Horrendous.
MARK: And I’m giving it to you from a man’s perspective. I hate doing that because it’s like trying to talk about a birth. I can’t, but it’s horrendous. For me, seeing my wife miscarry, and truly leaning in and going on that journey with her, then trying again…each time, I’d think, “Oh my God. I don’t want to see my wife go through this again.” I was questioning my masculinity. “Do I stop at number three? Do I say, ‘No. No more. Ten more’”?
AMANDA: As you’ve said before in your work, Kim, when one person won’t swim, there’s really not much you can do until they work through that. I still really wanted to keep trying, and you weren’t opposed.
MARK: No.
AMANDA: The pain was high.
MARK: It was absolutely not about not having a baby. It was about—
AMANDA: Not experiencing that pain again.
MARK: It was just watching my wife. I mean, I had pain attached to it as well. But obviously not the same as a woman carrying a child for a period of time and then losing it. To watch that trauma but then work together and, as Mandy said, kind of rise up slightly differently and look and assess—“Is this happening to us or for us?” Then having that evolve over that 18-month, two-year period, and reaching a certain point wasn’t just beer and Skittles. It was, “Not meant to be. Okay. We’ll get on with another chapter in our lives,” and we did.
We bought a business and started to move into that area. Within two months of buying the business, which Mandy was running, we said, “Oh, by the way…” [Laughs]
AMANDA: “My boobs hurt.”
MARK: “And I’m pregnant.”
AMANDA: And that’s how it came out. We were on the back of the bike, and every time he’d put the brakes on, I’d lean in and say, “Oh gosh, I’m uncomfortable.” Then we were at a restaurant, and I got served eggs for breakfast. I took one look at them and said, “Oh my God, that’s disgusting.” We looked at each other and thought…“Wait a second.”
MARK: “What’s going on?”
AMANDA: It’s the telltale sign. I know I shared about our daughter and her numbers and her birth; if you can take all the energy of those five miscarriages and bottle it into one child, that’s the last child that we had. He is the biggest bundle of energy, and he wasn’t not planned, but he also wasn’t—we wanted another one, but we didn’t actually say, “Are we there yet?”
MARK: No.
AMANDA: But he came. He said, “I’m here, and I’m here to stay.”
MARK: “And I’m here. Putting my stamp down.”
AMANDA: And he is loud. He’s delightful. [Laughs]
MARK: Yeah. Lots of love, lots of all the right sort of energy. He’s the one that says, “My mom is so beautiful. We’re so lucky, Dad, that Mom does this. Mom’s amazing.”
But at the same time, he’s the guy doing parkour down the street when we go for a walk. He’s 24/7—“Can we go to the skate park? Can we go to the beach?”
AMANDA: He’s my baby.
MARK: Oh yeah. He’s a lot of energy. It’s good. He keeps us both pretty much on our toes. But yeah, in reflecting on it, it’s been the most beautiful journey.
AMANDA: All of them culminated together. As I said, it’s your journey as well, but having caesareans, hospital births, car births, and home births; it’s very special. Pretty spectacular.
MARK: You’ve got to be a pretty unique individual, which my wife is, to have a caesarean and to be told just so categorically that you’re not going to be able to deliver naturally—
AMANDA: Ever again.
MARK: As much as Mandy talks about the journey across the four children and ending up birthing our youngest at home, that was the journey; without her knowing herself as well at 24, that was who she wanted to be at 24. She wanted to birth that baby, and if she had had more information and more knowledge at the time, she would’ve wanted to birth that baby at home naturally.
AMANDA: If I was pregnant now with a breech child, I wouldn’t go to hospital.
MARK: Yeah. But that’s just us.
AMANDA: Yeah. Where we are on our journey.
MARK: Yeah. If you want to look it up, the number of women that give birth naturally after a C-section is very low. Not because they can’t, but because again, the information is not—
AMANDA: You get your time—you’re on the clock. Surprisingly, my first birth was a caesarean; my second one was vaginal. I thought my third one would be considered a “you can do whatever you like.” No, I was still considered VBAC. All my pregnancies were VBAC because of the first one. With my fourth baby, I thought, “I’ve given birth twice vaginally. One of those times I was totally unassisted.” But they still say, “No, you’ve had a caesarean.” We said, “We don’t really want to do that then. We’re staying home and having a baby on our bed.” [Laughs]
But as we said, that’s our journey, and not everybody is the same. There’s no judgment. It’s just that’s been our journey, and it’s been beautiful.
MARK: It’s good to have that information, though. My exposure has only come through the experiences that we’ve had. My first two were born allopathically, and for me, there was no other thinking. My new thinking came about by meeting, loving, and marrying Mandy and then her wanting to give birth at home. I wanted to support her giving birth naturally, which then, due to the system, evolved into, “I want to give birth at home.” And I said, “Well, let’s do that.”
You’re just riddled with fear, and you’re talking about your own child. You say, “Holy shit, I don’t want to put this baby at risk.” Which is totally where we all come from as parents.
But when you get some genuinely transparent information—just do all the research. Just find the right birthing support people and have a look. Take the journey. Like you do with your work, make a start, have a look, and see where it takes you.
KIM: It’s so similar to the whole sexual process where there’s so much misinformation layered over top of our own natural instincts. Birth is, as the culmination of the sexual act, exactly the same. There’s so much misinformation and fear layered over our natural instincts and abilities. If you actually do the research, you’ll find that statistically, it’s safer to give birth at home than it is in the hospital. But we’re told the opposite, even though it’s a blatant lie.
There is so much fear around it, and there are those who truly take it upon themselves to research and educate themselves and simply honor and trust their own bodies. Honor and trust that within themselves, they have that power and wisdom. They just need to tune into it. Your process for getting there was, I would say, those five miscarriages and whatever else you used to facilitate that deep introspection to clear that space and fully own that power.
MARK: Yeah, I agree. We certainly look at it the same way. Very lucky.
KIM: Lucky, but it’s work.
MARK: Oh yeah.
KIM: I know you comment on that very casually, but I’ll just acknowledge that I don’t think it’s luck [laughs]; I think it’s the product of a lot of deep inner work and introspection and using radical self-responsibility. Luck is very minimal.
MARK: Yeah. Luck in finding one another, I guess, or in the universe providing us with one another.
KIM: I’d still say that’s the product of your good karma and magnetizing. Like attracts like, right? If you’ve done a certain amount of work…
AMANDA: We live it.
MARK: Yeah, that’s true.
KIM: I think you’re magnetizing each other at a high level.
MARK: Yeah, thank you.
KIM: Wonderful! Thank you so much for sharing that, and I think that’ll be wonderfully inspiring for people to hear, especially around miscarriages, that they can pull through, and especially what you went through and how you came out the other side. It’s a really beautiful, beautiful story.
MARK: Thank you. Our hearts go out to all those people that unfortunately experience that sort of pain.
AMANDA: Loss.
MARK: Yeah. Having experienced it, it’s—yeah. Certainly…
AMANDA: In time.
MARK: Time. But there is another side to it, so you do come out.
***
OUTRO:
I LOVE this story for showing the evolution of a woman and a couple moving from the allopathic system and restoring their own power back into themsleves.
And, that they recognized that in the processing of their various miscarraiges, despite going through the emotions of loss and grief, they also looked at them as opportunities to continue to clear space and examine what in themselves and their reltaiotnsihp could be contributing to this “growth not taking hold”.
That is the position of power, of taking control of your life, and realizing that YOU are the creator of your reality.
Once they’d done that much clearing, that baby was born in 30 minutes.
My entire Sexy Mama Salon is devoted to exactly this:
– Removing the old
– Bringing in the new
I go deeply into all the FACTUAL information and dispel the allopathic myths and pyramid scheme/snake oil that is the Industrial birth model and how home and independent birth is truly the safer and healthier option.
I show you how to remove your fears and blocks and internalized programming around birth, and reset you to the place of internal connection and knowing that we all have.
EVERY woman can have an blissful pregnancy and orgasmic birth.
This is how it was meant to be.
I’ll show you how to get there.
The Sexy Mama Salon is open for registration and begins today! You can sign up at kimanami.com, look for Sexual Savant Salons and click on Sexy Mama.
