What Hospitals Have Wrong About Childbirth, The Truth About Natural Childbirth, & Fertility Methods

When a woman gives birth and actually her partner, when you guys are going through this process, you are transforming. There's an old you that is dying. There's a new version of you that's being born. Just like with this baby that's coming Earthside. When women come to me and say, I felt like I was going to die, you did die. There was this old identity that is gone. There is a transformation that's going to happen here. If we don't honor that as a true ceremony and we don't have a closing piece to that where we integrate the stress of this incredibly challenging experience, a lot of women are left with what they actually report as trauma.

All right, folks, my guest on today's podcast, if you wind up watching the video version of today's show, has a neon uterus behind him, you'll learn why he has a neon lit up uterus behind him. As we delve into today's show on all things holistic OB GYN. My guest is Dr. Nathan Riley. Nathan, welcome, man.

It's good to be here, Ben. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, yeah. And that is a neon uterus, correct?

It's a uterus, Yeah. A lot of people, I don't know if they appreciate the complexities of the female anatomy, but just for clarity's sake, if you're watching.

This is the uterus here and these little tubes on the side, those are the fallopian tubes. And at the end you have these little fingerling things called fimbriae. And on the left side, the fallopian tubes, fimbriae are fashioned very characteristically into a middle finger, which kind of represents the way I show up in my practice and supporting people who want to have an autonomous experience, a uterus flipping someone off.

Well, although I know that you kind of give, give the finger and we'll probably get into this in our show to some modern aspects of the way that that baby management, childbirth and women's health is conducted. So probably, probably it's fitting. So anyways, and if you want to see the, the, the giant neon uterus giving the finger or anything else that Nathan and I discuss on today's show, we, of course, for many of our podcasts now have the video version. So you can go watch that and you can delve into the show notes of everything that Nathan and I talk about. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com forward slash, Nathan Riley. Nathan Riley. Just like it sounds. R I l e y BenGreenfieldLife.com Nathan Riley. And you know what's? Interesting, Nathan, and I guess this might give you a little bit of a background on me is I have twin sons. They're 15 now, so. 15, 15 years ago, my wife and I were already pretty tuned into holistic and alternative health concepts. We didn't know as much as we do now, but we knew we wanted to have some semblance of a natural birth. And so we went to these birthing classes, I think they were called Lamaze birthing classes, where I learned to co breathe with her and we set up one of those little swimming pools in the bedroom and we had a couple of doulas over and, and we had it all planned out as I, as I think that many possibly disillusioned couples do that we're going to have like this perfect natural home birth. And it didn't quite go that way. My wife labored for like 12 hours. Her petite hips didn't really seem to be able to get these big old twin boys out of her system. I wound up driving her to the hospital like 3am as she's just covered in sweat and she's a tough cook. I mean, she's like a gritty Montana rancher Jean girl. And I've seen her push through a ton, but she just, she couldn't do it. I suppose in the wild, wild west day, she might have been that person who, you know, no offense, died during childbirth. And so I brought her to the hospital. We got a C section, delivered two beautiful, healthy twin boys. I had to navigate through the entire hospital system of them, you know, sneaking into the room and taking the boys out while mom and I were asleep. And I'd wake up and have to go rescue them from their sugar and vitamin K infusions underneath the lights. And I don't think anyone, anyone was evil at the hospital. They were just practicing what they'd been taught. And so we boogied out of the hospital as soon as we were able to. Fast forward 15 years, I've learned a ton about natural birth. And you're one of the leading voices that I found in this sector. Interestingly, you're a dude. I've had folks like, probably most notably, she's called the Natural Mama. Her name's Genevieve on the podcast before, and I'll link to that in the show notes. I've done a few other podcasts on holistic principles for child rearing and having a baby. But, you know, I've come across your. Well, you have a podcast, the. What's it called? The Healthy obgyn.

The holistic Ob. Gyn.

Very holistic. Ob. Gyn. Yeah. And you're, you're also, you're a board certified obs. How do you pronounce that? Obstetrician. I always get that one wrong.

Board certified obstetrician and gynecologist.

Obstetrician and gynecologist. I'm just going to say O, B, G, Y, N. And, and you actually have a really holistic approach, not only to pregnancy and childbirth, but postpartum care and menopause and fertility and fatherhood and this so called sacred rite of passage which I'd love to learn a little bit more about. I know you also have this new course that you've developed and I'll put all this stuff in the shownotes@bengreenfieldlife.com Nathan Riley But I'm just stoked to, to get you on and talk about all this stuff and I'm just curious how you got into all this.

Well, you know, it starts off like 14, 15 years ago. You decide you're going to go into medicine, right? You take all these tests, you're rewarded with more tests and if you rise to the cream, you know, the cream rises to the top. You're rewarded with medical school, then residency. Residency is 100 hour work weeks for four years. You kind of lie about how much time you're spending working cause there's these policies in place. They don't want doctors operating on people with no sleep. But at the end of the day I kind of looked back. I also did by the way, a fellowship in hospice and palliative care. So end of life care. And I brought those communication skills into my practice as a birth worker, as I say. And you know, you look back down this long pathway after investing a half a million dollars in your education and you've, you realize, man, the mystique that drew you into the birth experience as a man, I'm never going to go through that. So I'm looking back and it's like, gosh, the mystique has been kind of blown away.

Very progressive thing to say. Nathan.

Well, well saying the reality is we have xx, we have X, Y. If you don't have a uterus like the one hanging behind me, it's going to be hard to carry a baby. So I do care for a lot of people who are, who identify as trans or you know, or they're even in heterosexual, you know, or let's just say not so heteronormative relationship. But at the end of the day my expertise is in the physiology, the biochemistry, the neurochemistry of a person who has developed these incredible diurnal and otherwise rhythms within their endocrine system that help you gestate a baby in this sacred womb, the second chakra, the center of your life force, energy. That's a very, very important attribute that, that women bring into the world. And it doesn't have anything to do with your divine feminine or divine masculine. Of course, we have both of those within each of us. It's really a matter of honoring what is possible. And women have been completely subjugated over the years, whether in the healing professions or otherwise. And as we've seen our cosmologies change and women are either valued or devalued. With that devaluation of women, we, we've actually seen the collapse of a lot of our greatest societies in written human history. So when women say, hey, I don't want to hear words like chest feeding or birthing person or whatever, I honor that. And then if I have somebody come to me who's like, hey, we're in a slightly different arrangement here, I honor that as well. I really want to meet people with compassion and love. But at the end of the day, when we're getting into the scientific data, we can't apply data from men to women or to people who are biologically female and expect the same outcomes from those studies. So we have to, you know, I like to dance here in the gray, but at the end of the day, I stand with women who largely, you know, who are, who are pretty compelled to use women centric language. And that's the language that I tend to use as well. So that's a little disclaimer, I suppose, for everybody.

Yeah. Well, were you raised in kind of like a holistic environment like before medical school?

No, not at all. My dad was a blue collar H Vac guy, was like a Vietnam vet. And my mom was a nurse in the system through and through, was an administrator at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Hi, mom. She was a very powerful administrator, but very much, very much like invested in the medical system. But that's why I wanted to go in. I was like, wow, these doctors are so great. It's not, you know, in many doctors who meet me, who see that I'm doing things outside of the conventional model, they actually don't have any disdain for me. They actually, I think in their hearts kind of know that this is really what we all thought we would be doing, which is to see the whole person. Like, I'm seeing you walking on A treadmill. You're obviously pretty lean. I know that you eat well and all this other stuff. But it's more than just. It's more than just, you know, there's this person in front of me. Let's pick apart their organ systems and try to manipulate the dials. There's a whole human history here, the whole human experience, and that requires us to take into account physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well being. So with this guide, these guideposts that led me into medicine, I found that, man, my direct experience with life is not really in alignment with this reductive model that I learned in anatomy class, you know, day one of med school, where we can cut the body apart and put it back together and we expect the same person to be. To be there afterwards. So I was questioning this stuff at a very, very early age. And. And then by the time I was finished, I was determined that I needed to do something differently. And as a quick aside, the final nudge that I needed. Well, I got fired a couple of times during COVID for taking off my mask and that type of baloney. That was like the final nudge where I was like, I got to do this my own. But Paul, check who. I think you also know I was. I was there, OB gyn and she showed up to take care of Angie, not even knowing who they were. And we ultimately ended up doing a C section. Talk about long labor. Like your wife, she was in labor for like 36 hours. I'm not sharing any.

I know Angie, and she's pretty tough, too.

Pretty tough.

And at some point, everybody married to Paul. Chuck? Yeah, if you're married to Paul, you.

Better be able to, like, hold your ground. So Paul and I have become very dear friends ever since then. And so much so, I've got like a natural fertility course at the Czech Institute and all of that. We can talk about fertility later. But Paul, when we met, he was like, hey, I really appreciate you loving us through that really hard journey in the hospital. Can you come over and spend some time with me? And so I spent a day with him, and during that, we were stacking some big stones in his rock garden. And he said, you know, you do things a little differently. I wonder what it would feel like to not be a part of the system. In the system, guys, the medical, you could argue the medical military industrial complex. There's quite a bit of coercion happening within the medical system. So he planted that seed. And then here I found myself during COVID shortly after the birth of our second Baby who actually was born at home. The first was in the hospital. I was like, we gotta go, we gotta take out all of the obstacles here and let's really dive into this sort of holistic way of caring for women, because that's what they're asking for.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. It's a cool history. You know, I alluded to my wife and, you know, potentially her being a problematic childbirth, especially in the old wild wild west days. But, you know, I kind of think about this as a little bit of a conundrum. Right. Because, you know, the modern healthcare system has certainly in, at least from my understanding, reduced a great deal of both mother and baby deaths and resulted in everything from more hygienic environment to better, better care for, for problematic situations during pregnancy, et cetera. But how do you, how do you kind of strike a balance between like a old timey, old school natural childbirth in which even there might not be epidurals, thus allowing the mother to have a more, you know, complete and arguably for some people, a more sacred experience, including, you know, the, the pain of labor and. Yeah, and. And align that with the idea that you don't want moms and babies dying right and left, trying to have kids at home not knowing what they're doing. So, you know, in terms of a birth in a modern hospital, what, what problems would there be with that? And how do you align that? I know it's kind of a big question with the idea of doing things, you know, arguably more naturally in a home or in a different environment.

Sure, that's a great question, Ben. I think a very, very short little history lesson is, is. Is. Is in order. You know, you mentioned that. Yes. With the advent of modern technologies, hospitals, doctors training and residency training and surgery and all this stuff. Yeah. We have saved quite a number of people as a result. And by the way, guys, if you get hit by a car, if somebody stabs you in the neck, you're not going to like, pray your way or biogeometry your way out of that. No infrared sauna is going to fix that. You got to go and get that fixed by the professionals in the hospital. Thank God we have hospitals now.

I'll bet ayahuasca would fix it.

Ayahuasca might. I mean, I've heard some pretty profound things.

Yeah. Friends of people are saying these days.

Just, just lean into grandmother. Great grandmother. You know, I have no problem with psychedelic use. It's just not the problem that you, it's not the solution to your leg. That was just amputated. By saw. You know, so, you know, back around the turn of the 19th century or the 20th century, we had a big, a couple people in our country that had a ton of money compared to everybody else. These are the Carnegie's, the Rockefellers, et cetera. They, there was all these different schools of thought as to what the best healing modalities were. But there was this interest in the German style of med, of medical education, which was four years college, then four years of medical school. And the people at the time, these philanthropists were looking to invest heavily into our medical education in the United States. So they hired a guy named Abraham Flexner. He published a report in 1910 after traveling the country looking at every medical training program out there. Homeopathy, chiropractics, Chinese medicine, herbalism, whatever. And those schools that were most aligned with this German style of medical education were those that were heavily financed, oftentimes historically at the cost of all these other modalities that are now seeing a resurgence. You know, I haven't been to a doctor for a long time, but I have been to a chiropractor, I've been to a homeopathy practitioner. I've, you know, I've gone like you. We kind of are exploring how can I, how can I fix myself using the most natural, sort of the most natural means possible to achieve homeostasis through the lens of salutogenesis. Meaning what can I give you, Ben, for you to reharmonize with your surroundings?

Right. Or at least perhaps a non pharmaceutical or preventive approach.

Yeah, exactly. Like pharmaceuticals and surgery are now the purview of this medical, this conventional medical model that we're talking about. So when this happened, and along with midwifery, all of these other programs kind of fizzled and there was this kind of outcasting of this is the right way to do it. The German style medical education and everything else is inferior. And the legacy of that has, has been perpetuated further. And we know that. So let's go back a little further in history. Why was the German style medical education so preferred? Well, way back, I mean we're talking like 16th century. We're looking at Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon. The church was in control of everything. And in order for us to dissect into bodies, we had to philosophize our way around this dilemma that the spirit and the soul were intimately connected to the body. Like we couldn't separate those things. So the church wasn't going to let us dissect. So we were still using texts from like A thousand years ago, up until the 15th, 16th centuries, when the. When we finally had. Some of these philosophers argue, perhaps correctly, that, hey, the body is the body, and then we've got the soul and the spirit. And when they effectively argued that we could now understand the physiology of the cardiovascular system, et cetera, because we could dissect into dead bodies. So that sounds great, it led to incredible advance in our understanding of the complexities of physiology and anatomy. The problem was that we have actually doubled and tripled down on that over the past several hundred years. And what that has resulted now in is a maternity care system that sees the human body as merely a machine. So physiologic birth is, hey, the physiology is the only thing that matters. It doesn't matter what the experience of the person is. It doesn't matter if there's more to this than just a medical procedure or pregnancy seen as a disease. We have the tools now to control everything, and we have seen how our attempts to control nature have failed us in agriculture and forestry and land management and water management. It just. We can mimic nature, but we can't do it perfectly. So why is this relevant to maternity care? At the turn of the century, when this Flexner Report came out and the midwives were forced to. I mean, let alone hundreds of years of midwives having to practice underground because they were the only people that peasant women in these feudalistic societies could afford, these midwives continued to provide care. But when the modern hospital system emerged in the early 20th century, we actually didn't see a benefit to moms and babies. In fact, we saw a precipitous increase in maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity. But then germ theory entered and we actually developed septic techniques to clean our instruments and whatnot. And then there was this burst of that bubble and. And we saw a precipitous decline in the mortality and morbidity. And that was the final straw that our society needed to entrust everything to the medical industrial complex. And now we are 20, 23, and we're not doing much better than we were several, you know, decades ago with regards to maternal mortality, neonatal mortality. And in fact, compared to the rest of the developed world, despite us spending trillions of dollars a year on our health care, we are not seeing any better results than a vast majority of developed nations in the world. And the reason for that is partly because we're doing way too many C sections. One third of babies are coming through the abdomen, and that is not people like your wife who were really, really going for a home birth, for a vaginal birth. These are scheduled C sections because baby's better out than in. We can control that environment. We don't have to go through all the rigors of labor and all this other stuff. The other thing, and I don't believe any of that, but that's sort of the justification I think we as doctors are sort of led to believe. The other thing is we're inducing birth. We're getting birth going before the mom and the baby have had this sacred sort of union where they decide it's time to go into that experience. So when you start inducing a labor early, when you do a C section, that's perhaps unnecessary because the baby's butt down, for example, you set them up for all kinds of issues later with subsequent pregnancies, you also, with induction, get them on this cascade of interventions that leads to all sorts of crappy things that can happen later in that labor process. That we, as the heroes, come in and say, thank God you were here in the hospital. But they wouldn't even have needed that heroic support had we not done all these interventions that got them off of the path of nature.

That's interesting. Your description of the advent of. Of technology and a more modern, streamlined birth kind of reminds me of that old Monty Python skit where they got, like, I don't know if you saw that one. They got all these different pieces of technology all over the birthing room and they're paying attention to their computer and the blip blips and everything, but nobody's actually paying attention to the actual mom. It's all just, you know, I'll try and find a link to that skit because it just reminds me exactly what you're talking about. I'll put it in the show notes. But the, the interesting thing when you bring up C section, you know, if, if you would rewind, like, maybe, I don't know, like 10, 12 years ago, I would have said, oh, well, the problem with the C section is that the baby isn't getting exposed to the natural flora that they might get when passing through the vaginal canal. And therefore, there might be a little bit of a delay in the development of their immune system. And I think I even came across data that it takes until a child is around 7 years old or so to actually regain the normal flora that they would have gotten from passing through mom's birth canal. Arguably, you could probably fix that with exposure to farm animals, use of probiotics, and, you know, other methods, but not, nonetheless That I was concerned about it from a, from a hygienic standpoint, the, the, the distinction between the C section, the vaginal birth. Yet now, and I think you, you might have some thoughts on this. It seems to me that scheduling a C section and simply pulling the baby out of the mother reduces a lot of the sacredness. And even, as I mentioned earlier, perhaps even the pain from the childbirth process. Talk to me about that. What we're missing out on with something like a C section when it comes to the full birth experience.

Yeah, I mean, that's a big question, Ben. That's an hour long conversation there. So when I use the word sacred.

Let me actually use instead the word rite of passage. With any true initiation, death is on the line. There was a West African author, I can't remember his name, so May is his last name, but he said that in one of his beautiful books.

A true initiation. In any true initiation, death is on the line. And when I say that around childbirth, people are thinking like, I can die. And like, yeah, you could die, but the likelihood of you physically not breathing and, and your heart beating after a birth is at least in our country and really most of the world, it's way less than 0.01%. Like, it's a highly unlikely scenario that a woman will die in childbirth. However, when a woman, when a woman gives birth and actually her partner. When you guys are going through this process, you are transforming. There's an old you that is dying. There's a new version of you that's being born. Just like with this baby that's coming Earthside. So what I mean by when I say that it's a rite of passage, it's a true initiation, is that when women come to me and say, I felt like I was gonna die, you did die. There was this old identity that is gone. And there is nothing safe about that. It's just like doing a big dose of mushrooms or something. There's nothing safe about that. If you go in with the wrong set and setting, there is a transformation that's going to happen here. And, and if, if, if we don't honor that as a true.

Ceremony, and we don't have a closing piece to that where we integrate the stress of this incredibly challenging experience, a lot of women are left with what they actually report as trauma. So even women who have natural, uncomplicated, undisturbed bursts in the hospital, perhaps they had somebody shove their hand in their vagina without getting full consent. Their body was saying no, but somebody was holding their Arms and legs back because I need to check on the baby, they shove their hand in there. And even though they had an unmedicated birth, no epidural, nothing like that, a vaginal birth, they feel like something was wrong. So I'm helping women unpack this trauma. And I'm realizing that because we're not honoring this experience of a person. I used to have attendings, the supervising docs when I was in residency say like this birth plan thing is ridiculous. You don't bring in like the flight plan for the pilot of the airplane. But that reflects that we have some sort of control over this. This is something that is far deeper than a medical procedure. And when we don't treat it as a medical procedure, that that stress of this really exciting experience, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes scary as hell, doesn't get integrated appropriately. And that is probably a definition that even Gabor Mate would agree with, that unintegrated stress is actually what, what leads to this trauma pattern in the future.

Trauma is just a long term series of disconnections to your true self, as Gabor would argue. You know, as you, as you bring this up, it makes me question a little bit what the alternative would look like. What, what in your idea, kind of like that. Not there's a gold standard, but what a, what a natural birthing process would look like. And, and just one thing I'd throw into what you just described. Although these may seem like trite examples compared to a birthing process, you know, it's like an Ironman triathlon, right. I wouldn't pick you up in a helicopter and drop you off at the finish line. It's going to be a far more transformative experience to train for nine months leading up to that race and put in all the blood, sweat and tears and suffering during the actual race to actually make that metal that gets hung around your neck at the finish, or I guess in this case, Iron man baby, a lot more rewarding. And you know, there are of course hundreds of other analogies that I'm sure people could draw up in terms of the difficulty of a process resulting in a greater reward afterwards. You know, Greg McCown in his book Essentialism, says that we should be asking ourselves the question, what if this were easy and trying to find the easiest way? But you also need to take that with, with a grain of salt and understand that sometimes the easiest way is not the most character building or transformative way. And sometimes doing things the harder way has some, some beneficial side effects, you know?

Yeah, and let me spin on that. For a minute, because I love essentialism. I think that actually is a bit of a reflection as to how I've been really trying to live my life since getting fired from the system for the mask thing. And by the way, in case you haven't heard that story, I was caring for a guy who's 95 at his end, at the end of his life, hasn't seen family, hasn't been touched for 18 months, locked away in a cell, and people were sliding food, you know, through his door and closing it. He just was desperate to have some love at the end of his life, and I gave him that. Was that the right or wrong thing to do? I don't know. However, I mean, I would argue it's the right thing to do, but.

When that happened, I had to really, really kind of reconcile.

Like, what is really needed for this person right now. Like, what is. What is actually happening here? And what does easy. What does an easy birth actually mean? On one hand, we have people giving birth at home. My wife. Very, very brief story. Her water's opened at. At 5pm on. On our guest date, which is the. The due date. I call it a guest date because you don't really know. It could be off over two feet.

I like that. Guess what?

Her waters opened at 5pm we called our breath work friend. She's an effigy breath worker, Sarah Tromoly. She lives in Louisville. She came over. We started breathing at 6. I went into, like, tetany. I was out in outer space by 6. 45, we're talking an hour and 45 after labor started. Our baby was out. The portal opened. Baby Everly Rosa came out asleep on my wife's chest and the portal closed.

And that, as far as we. If we're going to talk about easy, that is way easier than having a C section. It is way easier than being in a hospital being induced for two days, just under the semblance of this sort of notion, this illusion of safety provided by the hospital. Now, that's not to say we don't need hospitals. There are some reasons why we should induce. There are some reasons why we should do C sections, but we shouldn't be inducing one third and doing C sections on one third of pregnancies. So we have to reimagine what does easy mean? You are creating other issues by doing the C section, especially if you're going to have multiple pregnancies, which could be far harder than actually going through this process of integrating this sort of sacred ritual of giving birth vaginally. And it's also not for everybody. There's not a right answer here. But when women say, hey, I want to have a home birthday, we in the medical profession should not treat that as a stupid, uninformed, naive decision. There is a really, really good reason for us to honor birth. And I would argue if we want to fix any of these big problems we see in the world and we can't even get birthright, like the only thing that's helping us stay alive as a species, you know, and relevant here on this planet, I think we need to get. Get birth right. I think we need to reimagine what, what easy birth actually means, because my wife described hers as ecstatic, like it was a pleasurable experience.

Well, let's. Let's put a wand in your hand and make you the home birth fairy, and you were to kind of wave it around and implement a few things that you think would be recommended for a natural birth or a home birth. I don't know if you put scenarios like that together, but especially for people who might not even be familiar with that. Or maybe somebody's listening and they're like, oh, I'd love for my baby. Or maybe, you know, somebody's listening, want to talk to the children, because it's her grandbaby. We want to talk about natural birth. What's it actually look like?

Well, I'll take you through an exercise I do with all of my couples who come to me for pregnancy support. I care for people across the world through pregnancy. I just had a couple, actually, twins. They just like telemedicine. Yeah. Everything I do is remote, unless close enough to mean I can drive to their home birth, which I do.

And by the way, you're in Kentucky, right?

Yeah, Louisville, Kentucky. So my. My last clients that I attended their home birth, they lived up near. Near Lake. What is it? Lake Michigan. They're in, like, the Gary, Indiana area. And they also had like a 20 minute. I didn't even get there in time, it was so fast. But they had really dialed in their lifestyle and everything, so they had this really easy, beautiful birth as well at home. But anyways, the exercise that I ask everybody and I'll ask you now is if you actually close your eyes. Maybe not because you're walking on a treadmill, but if you really kind of tap into your. Your inner space there. What. What do you imagine? Imagine you and your wife's name is. Is Jessica.

Jessa. Yeah. Jessica. Yeah.

So imagine you and Jessa are going to have another baby. Let's Just play hypothetical here. What does the room feel like to you as you're welcoming in this? Let's say it's a little girl this time. She's kind of. She's coming. What does the room feel like to you? What does it smell like? What sounds are you hearing? Who is there? What are you tasting like? So just do that exercise for me. Like, what, what. What would that ideal experience, that sacred experience feel like for you?

Yeah, it would. It would be peaceful. It would be ceremonial. There would be music.

Or really relaxing and peaceful music. There would probably be incense or aromatherapy in the room.

There would likely be lighting, but very, like, soft, natural lighting. There would be comfortable bedding and. And my wife would feel like she was in a place of safety and trust. There would be supported loved ones gathered around, if that were my wife's wishes, to have people in the room like her family members or my family members or me or our sons to support. And there would probably also be someone there to help us feel, you know, confident, whether, you know, a physician or a doula or a midwife to help out with the process. And.

Yeah, it would be very, very peaceful and ceremonial setting.

Well, the reason I had you do that, Ben, is that when I ask people that question, they say the exact same thing. So I don't even need to present.

And there'd be a lot of really white walls and bright overhead fluorescent light also.

Oh, you forgot about that. And the beeping.

Lots of beeps.

Forgot out a big. You left out all the stuff that we expect in the hospital. So you mentioned a really important thing there, and that was that where your wife feels safe. So anybody listening, wherever you actually feel the most seen the most witnessed, wherever you feel the best cared for, that is the best place to have a baby. It may be a free birth out in the woods or in the water with the dolphins or whatever. Wherever you feel that that's the best place that is actually relevant. Because if you're not feeling safe, if you're feeling stressed out, we get this surge of catecholamines, which actually counteracts the love hormone oxytocin. I won't get too far into oxytocin, but that is a lecture series all on its own.

So that safety piece is advertised by the hospitals, but all those things that you mentioned at the very end. So let's actually just walk through what a hospital birth looks like. You're on your back. Usually you're in this uncomfortable bed wearing this starchy, kind of uncomfortable, scratchy gown. Your Baby emerges. After they're yelling at you, they're pulling your knees back to your head. There's all this cacophony of noise in the room. The baby emerges. They immediately cut the cord. Although some hospitals are now finally opening up to the idea that we're going to let it pulsate for 60 seconds. The last birth I was at, just the one in Indiana. I think we waited 90 minutes before we even addressed the cord or the placenta or anything. So they clamp the cord, they cut it. They get the baby dried off. They dress the baby up with a little. In a little burrito outfit. They put eye goop on the. On the baby's eyes, a little hat. They maybe even stick a needle in their foot, injecting vitamin K. And then eventually they get the baby on your chest. But in the meantime, they're touching you, they're probing you. There's these bright lights, there's beeping for days on end. All this in and out, people coming in and out, maybe not even introducing themselves. That is the reality of what the hospital experience looks like. I think we should improve upon the hospital experience. And is it possible to have the birth that you just described, your dream birth or Jess's dream birth? Is it possible to do that in the hospital? And many would argue no. And my clients are sort of deliberately choosing home birth because they had something bad or something that didn't feel right in the hospital setting.

Yeah, you'd certainly have to change the birthing environment in a hospital. There'd have to be, you know, there'd have to be special rooms in the hospital in which they literally fabricated something close to a home scenario in order for something like that to occur, huh?

Well, yeah. And I mean, if you, you know, the. The water in the hospital. So.

Paul.

Paul, check. When he came in and I was caring for Angie, he brought his water, which he uses those big charging stations and whatnot for, you know, natural water that he charges. And he was like, taste this water and taste this water. And he gave me, like, a blind taste test, like the Pepsi Coke challenge or whatever. And his water was, like, effervescent. It tasted good. It felt good. That water felt dead, you know, and we won't get into Schauberger's work and, you know, a lot of the great sort of. Well, you're. Heck, your dad freaking sold me my whole house system. I mean, there's a lot of great insights now, Gerald Pollock's work into the quality of water. But let's then go to the Food. We've got vegetable oil laden food in the hospital cafeteria. We've got Coke and Pepsi products. We've got all this sugary crap there. Then we have a building that is vibrating with emf. We've got bright ultraviolet lights, no red light therapy in the hospitals. No amber lighting. The sounds are just piercing. Imagine dying in the hospital with those sounds. So, you know, the environment in the hospital is great for acute care. Is pregnancy a disease that needs hospital supervision? I would argue no. And part of it is because we are not. Our metrics are only looking at is the mom and baby alive afterwards? And if so, then we did a good job. But the, the, the sort of.

The encumbered sort of essence that women come out of. That experience with many women, not all women and their partners and their babies and then get home is like a, it's a, it's like a burden. They just like shrugged the weight of the world off their shoulders. They're back at home in their bed with their kitchen with all their healthy foods, with no emf. At night they're turning their routers off. Like they're actually be able to be still for once. So, you know, in the hospital system we've got important metrics. We're probably overly focused on blood loss and infection rates and everything at the cost of all these other aspects that I think are, are equally beneficial. Not to mention, you know, least of which you mentioned, when your babies aren't able to, to root around on the chest. Cause they've got eye goop and they're bundled up like this. They're not able to root around and connect to them to their mother or their father immediately after birth. They've been inside there for nine and a half months and now you're gonna strip them away and put them somewhere else. The babies do so well when they're just right on the chest. And so I could go on like this for hours. Ben. I'll stop there. I mean there's just such a, it's such a stark contrast, the two environments.

Why do you keep the cord attached?

There's no reason not, not to keep it attached. So there's this stuff along the cord. You know, the cord has three vessels and there's this Wharton's jelly that covers. That coats the entire cord. And the Wharton's jelly, when it's exposed to slightly colder temperatures than the body, than your core temperature, it actually contracts. It's sort of like cooling jello. It contracts and that actually causes a compression of the umbilical veins. So Sorry, the umbilical veins. So, so the reason that that's relevant is that the cord will naturally stop pulsating and you have no transfer of anything thereafter. Um, the reason that we started clamping it early on was that at some, at one point, we actually thought that colostrum was dangerous for babies. And you and I both know that colostrum has come a long way since then. But we, you know, we don't want the baby to get that colostrum. We don't know what that stuff is. It's not milk, whatever. I mean, we're talking a hundred, 100 plus years ago. Now we know that colostrum is really, really healthy, but we haven't. We haven't divorced ourselves from this. This routine, habituated practice of clamp it as quickly as possible. Like, heaven forbid, the baby gets a little bit of extra blood. The big. The big fear is that the baby's going to get too much blood and end up with, you know, hemochromatosis. Way too much heme iron in their system, and they end up, you know, crunking on us later. But I've never, ever seen that happen.

Yeah, it's kind of funny you bring up colostrum, because I've thought it might be a good idea for some kind of a futuristic supplements company to simply specialize in. In birth care products, because colostrum is fantastic for sealing up the lining of the gut, which is one of the reasons it's in breast milk, because babies have a little bit of a natural leaky gut. And then there's this stuff called Vernix. I think it's a bacterial flora from amniotic fluid. And I. I do know there's one researcher, I forget his name, but he actually has a supplements company where they're developing work called Perry Probiotics from this Vernix, from this amniotic fluid. And then, of course, you can sell some placental smoothie powder on the side. And there you have it, all sorts of lovely nutrients in the birthing room. So as far as after the birth has occurred, are there any particular things that you really prioritize from a postpartum care standpoint?

Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing to remember, there's a great book out there called the first 40 days. And I have a friend who's a Chinese medicine doc who actually contributed to the course that I'm launching here in a few weeks, the Born Free Method.

Oh, who's your friend? I'm curious, as I'm known.

Valerie. Valerie Jacobson. She is not super. She's not like out there in the space, she's just like doing her work. She's actually pregnant as well. But she Contributed A whole 30 minute lesson on nourishing the yin and yang after, after you had a baby. And some of the eastern philosophies have, I think have a much better approach to what is needed in that postpartum period. So you've, you're depleted in yin and yang, you're depleted in life force energy through and through. And those first 40 days, although I would argue the first 12 months is a time to really start to, to nourish yourself, to replete yourself, not just of the nutrients. Like let's not magnify this to individual nutrients. It's the entire essence of who you are needs to be re equilibrated with your new environment, with this new baby. Um, so what I would, what I recommend people do is to try to nest and rest for those first six weeks. Um, and that doesn't mean you're just laying in bed lifeless. It means you, it doesn't mean you're not going outside. It means that you're actually just giving yourself some time to heal. And again, when we talk about holism, so my shirt right here, we're talking about physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well being. So this is a, this is where we start to close the ceremony circle. This is where we really integrate. What did I just go through? What was this to me? So this is where journaling exercises from intimacy, you know, reconnecting with your, your partner, these new, this new relationship you have. And I don't mean having sex, I mean being still together, holding one another, listening to one another's heartbeats. Art therapy can be very helpful at this time. But first and foremost, if none of those things sound interesting to you, eating all of nature's multivitamins, which are by the way the same foods I recommend preconception up to 120 days before birth. And you're no stranger to this, neither is your audience. But really, really healthy organ meats, fermented cod liver oil or really any really high quality fish oil.

Sounds like a Weston A. Price diet.

Go, go and eat Weston A. Price and you're going to be covered. I'm just giving those like, I'm giving those like. Best bang for your buck. From conception all the way through postpartum. Where was I? Oh, eggs and eggs and bivalve shellfish. You're going to be, you know, through and through. You're going to be as healthy as can Be. Even if you're not able to go out to Whole foods and spend $2,000 a month on groceries, there's, there's some very, very easy ways here to nourish yourself.

You, by the way, I should include there, there's a one pager that spells out the details of the Weston A. Price diet. I'll hunt it down and put it in the show notes. Yeah, because you got ferments and, and bone broth. And you, you. What were you just talking about teas?

Well, I was just saying, like focusing on those foods that are going to warm you externally warm, but they may be cooling, very yin nourishing. So like a peppermint, hot peppermint tea. Those types of things really, really, really go well in that postpartum period. You know, if people are breastfeeding, staying very well hydrated, vaginal steaming can actually be really, really impactful in the healing process, which I can get into later if you'd like. Sits, baths, just caring for your body like you just became a parent. Whether it's your seventh baby or your first honor, this moment, this is such a great ride that you're on. And you know, you don't have to become a parent to stand in adulthood. I don't believe that. But if you are going to become a parent, this is the ultimate initiation into adulthood that now this little person here is going to be looking to you to keep it alive and to love it through its ups, its downs. You know, I should say his or her ups and downs. You are now a parent. And for those dads out there, the roles and responsibilities of a father nowadays are more critical than ever. This is an opportunity to really lean into the experience and to. And to consider that your time is not your currency. It's your presence that's your currency that has served me through and through. Ben.

Huh? It's so cool. You know, by the way you brought up steaming, I had read up on its benefits about three months ago for male prostate health and sexual health and also pelvic floor relaxation prior to something like a morning bowel movement. And I had like a wooden box in the garage and cut a hole in the top, made some tea, put it in there, took the lid off the tea and kind of sat there and played my Italian duolingo for a little while. And since then I actually got a seat, I think a Leia Moon. I gotta see. It's got like, you know, it's like Cadillac. It's got like infrared light and a done for you steamer and, and like that, the full meal deal. You know, two or three times a month, I'll still sit on that thing and do meditation or prayer or still. Yeah, a little bit of duolingo. But. But talk to me about steaming and, and especially how it. How it fits into your practice, your recommendations.

Right. Well, we've talked so much about pregnancy and postpartum. I will start by saying if you're pregnant officially, it's contraindicated to steam while you're pregnant. What we're talking about is boiling herbs. There's a hot pot of water and you squat over it, or you get a stool like Ben has. There's a hole there, and the steam comes up and flushes over your external genitalia. For a woman, that's the vulva. The perineum around the anus goes into the vagina, in through the cervix, through the tubes, hits the ovaries on the outside, fills kind of the pelvis and abdominal cavity with this really healing.

Let'S say blood engorging. You know, steam. It doesn't burn you, it doesn't hurt. It's really a matter of getting blood flow to all these critical parts. I use this in my fertility practice. I use this across the board. This is something really, really important in pregnancy. You can actually use it to help prepare the tissues in the pelvis for childbirth. So 37, 38 weeks, you can start doing this a couple times per week. It'll help to actually nourish those tissues, helping them become a little bit more elastic. Helps the connective tissue, all those, you know, collagen containing constituents of your pelvis, which has to open up. It actually can help to kind of get the pelvis and the body ready. It's not a ways of inducing you. It's really a matter of preparing the body for this thing that's happening. So that's one use. And then in the postpartum period, yeah, the steam. Actually, remember, it's not just helping to nourish the tissues by improving blood flow by opening up all these little capillaries and blood vessels.

It's also whatever the herbal constituents are that you use there. And there's a variety of different blends that the steamy chick on her website that she sells, I just send people there whenever I have an idea as to what they need. You can use these herbs to also provide some medicinal healing properties to the tissues themselves. And, man, they've actually studied this in the postpartum period. Kelly actually helped lead the study with Kimberly and Johnson and women within A matter of days, their tissues are back together, their pelvic floor feels relaxed again. It's also a moment to just do some self reflection, sitting for 20 minutes on the stool, having some bend time to do some duolingo. That's actually really important as a part of the slowing down process. But let me extend it further because actually the vast majority of women who I recommend steaming for are people who have the common women's health issues that their doctor is recommending either pharmaceuticals, especially birth control, or surgery to fix. So this goes from recurrent infections in the vagina or bladder, cervical infections, STIs.

Early cervical dysplasia, which can lead to cervical cancer if that viral message isn't fully integrated into your corpus, the uterine fibroids, abnormal periods for any reason, uterine polyps, early endometrial atypia, which is the precursor to endometrial cancer, tubal disease, from maybe a past gonorrheal infection. We can clear out the scar tissue in the tubes. It can help to improve blood flow to the ovaries. So a lot of my PCOS clients, they actually find that they can start ovulating again. In addition to the steaming, we're doing a lot of lifestyle modification, but the applications for this are far ranging. Endometriosis is a huge thing for women in our country. So this steaming practice has a number of ways that it works. I think the mechanism is a little bit unclear still, but this is an ancient practice, Ben, that predates modern medicine by thousands of years.

Yeah, just because I only have so much time. Like I mentioned, do it two or three times a, a month. But in an ideal scenario, how often are you recommending that, that women, for example, steam?

Well, for most women, it's usually three days before their bleed and then three days after their bleed stops.

And it's like a 20, 30 minute steam.

Yeah, you could do it for longer. Like, you know, a pot of, of boiling water is only going to have so much steam coming out of it for so long. But you can actually put it onto a heating element.

Yeah, that's what mine has, the layer moon. It just keeps it a certain temperature.

Yeah, it's like a little, not a Bunsen burner, but you know, like a hot plate under there that just keeps it going. So for most women, if it's your first time, I don't even recommend using any herbs. Just get a hot pot of water and boil the water and then squat over top of it with a blanket around your waist so the steam doesn't Escape. It just kind of goes up in there and just see how you feel. If you feel like a hell yes, I really liked that. Then we can go a little further. And I always offer people, you know, go to my website, send me an email, and I'll set you up with a free steaming consultation. Because it's so. If I wanted to get rich, I'd be out doing C sections in GYN surgery. This steaming thing is such an easy intervention that almost everybody's going to benefit even if you don't have an active complaint. I just think it's a really, really nice sort of self care thing we can do whether, you know, whether you have a vulva or a penis. I actually steam myself.

I was just going to ask you if you steam.

Yeah, well, I had like a really bad jock itch, you know, from, you know, probably stress, probably jiu jitsu, whatever. And it would come and go with stress or if I was eating too much sugar, of course. And I was like, let me just try this out. I got some of Kelly Garza's cooling herbs and I made a little pot of water and I sat on there. I got like a bedside commode that they use in old people's homes and whatnot, and pop the thing under that. I got the commode for like five bucks. The herbs were ten bucks. And I popped it under their hot water and within a matter of days it was completely gone. So now that doesn't address the under, you know, the upstream cause. Perhaps I need to get my gut in order. Maybe I had some other, you know, medical things that was under a lot of stress. But for the time being, while we're trying to fix these other issues, like your cervical disease or your endometrial issues, your abnormal periods, your painful periods, your endometriosis, we can use this as a far less invasive intervention than pharmaceuticals, birth control, surgery, and, you know, whatever else your doctors have to offer.

Yeah, it feels really nice. Although, correct me if I'm wrong, I actually wanted to ask you about fertility. I would imagine just because heating the nether regions for a guy is contraindicated for fertility, which is why it's a good idea to avoid saunas and hot tubs, et cetera. I suspect that steaming for a guy, I think it's called Lingen steaming when guys do it probably wouldn't be great if you're trying to maintain or upregulate fertility. But if you have any comments on that, feel free. And I'm just curious about your overall methods for fertility Enhancement in general, because I know that's also a specialty of yours.

Well, fortunately, I currently have a track record of 100% with my program. I almost, like, I just stop and just say I have 100% track record, and then I never have to change the numbers. But, you know, people find me before, usually before or maybe after they had a, you know, an IVF sort of process that didn't go the way that they wanted to. Let me start by saying they find it if IVF didn't work or if they're kind of wincing at the IVF cost, which on average across the United States is somewhere between 12 and $15,000. The most recent couple that went through my fertility program, the lowest cost that they were estimated in their city was 18 grand. And they got pregnant. So my program is about six grand.

And that's just like an online program.

It's. It's all remote. Exactly. Yeah. And they get a big box of stuff. So I'll. I'll walk you through what I do so that you can understand.

I'm not using hormone therapy. I'm not gonna be doing any surgery. I can order labs and imaging, but usually those things have already been done as a part of their ob GYN workup. So what typically people have happen is they haven't gotten pregnant in a year of trying. Right. Meaning penis and vagina ejaculate, no baby in nine and a half months for a year. They haven't found that success. And their ob GYN wants them to go and see the rei. So reproductive endocrinology and infertility is what it used to be called. They may have changed their name a little bit, you know, since then, but what that is is basically we're going to hijack your hormone system in order to force your body to get pregnant, failing to realize that there's a signal here. If you're not finding fertility to be easy as everybody else seems to have it, there must be something upstream that's causing that. And before I go into the women's side of this, men, 40 to 50% of fertility challenges are due to our relatively low sperm counts, low motility, low morphology. And what all of that means is that there is something that we men are doing that is causing this precipitous decline in fertility rates. Specifically, when it. Look, when we look at sperm counts and motility as that's declined over the past several decades. And I don't think it would be any surprise to your listeners to know that, like, hey, you've got four Powerful modems in this guy right here. You're putting it in your pocket and it's sitting centimeters from your gonads, just blasting it with some pretty powerful radio waves. So that's.

That's actually been fleshed out in research, by the way, if anybody wants to look it up in terms of sperm morphology and exposure to cell phone in close proximity.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So the first thing I tell people is turn your wifi router off at night. Get this thing out of your pocket. If you have to have it near you, just have it on airplane mode until you need it. That's already better than most others. But we also have these 5G towers popping up everywhere. It's. It's something we should be concerned about. But then the. Some of the other things. Like you said, you know, no more prolonged hot sauna use, you know, or.

If you do use that new that. Have you seen the ball cooling underwear. Nathan, you can. Actually, I still have. I, you know, I'm not trying to have a baby right now, but I. I just, you know, suspect possibly there might be. Be potentially down regulation of the activity of Leydig cells in the testes with repeated heat exposure. And I've thought about getting a pair of those just for my. Just for my sauna says. But yeah, apparently keeps your balls cool.

You want to do it together? We'll do like an N of 2 trial and we can send our semen off and get it.

Sounds like a fun trial. At least parts of it. Right?

You do it live too.

So. No, we won't. We won't put anybody through that.

Yeah, I think it's called like. I think it's called snowballs or something like that. Anyways, I totally derailed you. Keep going.

Oh, it's okay. It's okay. So that type of stuff. There's some research out of Scandinavia that has shown that prolonged sauna use is. Is potentially going to be detrimental. If you're on. If you're having fertility challenges, consider that there's a variety of nutrients. I get guys eating. Actually, I tell them to go and eat smoked oysters. Three cans per week. That's my, like my prescription pad. There's selenium, molybdenum, zinc, magnesium, fatty acids. All the stuff that you're. That you're testicles are going to use in order to create as many great sperm as you can. So even if your doctor told you I have a normal semen analysis, consider the range of normal. It's like 20 million to 200 million per ejaculate. We want to get that number up as high as we can. If we're sort of even contemplating going down the 18k route of IVF, so adding those nutrients, CoQ10 can help be helpful. A bunch of fish oil, that type of stuff can be really helpful. Along with the Weston A Prices, you know, their sort of foundational principles. I also tell people, lose your bike shorts. I'm also, I was also an Ironman distance triathlete and I still was biking to work in fellowship in San Diego every single day. And my wife and I weren't getting pregnant. I lost the underwear, I lost the bike shorts. I started supplementing, you know, doing some supplementing. I actually, I actually cut my exercise down because my adrenals were being skunked from too much exercise and too little sleep and too much stress at work. As a fellow at ucsd, so improving sleep and all that other stuff, eventually my wife was like, listen, you're stressed out about this. Let me take this into my court. And she started tracking her for her cervical fluid and whatnot. And I'll get into that when we get into the women's side. She started tracking those things which are physiologic markers of.

Which of the four phases you're at within your menstrual cycle. And within a cycle or two, bam, we were pregnant. And gosh, the elation, the. It was just like, it was like sheer elation. I was so exuberantly stoked that we were pregnant. And I, I really wanted to give that to other people, which is why I'm taking this approach. So on the women's side.

Yeah. And by the way, just a quick note for, for the men, we conceived a week after my Ironman, one of my Iron man triathlons. But I always trained on one of those. I think it was Sella Italia, I think made a S E L L A. Although there's a other manufacturers out there. I use one of those bike saddles that has kind of like a hole for your balls and a real, like a split up the middle of the seat. So there's very little pressure on my nether regions while cycling. Your sit bones take a little bit more of a hate. You kind of got to build a little bit of butt callus. But yeah, it. Apparently I was fertile after racing Iron Man. I don't know how much of it was the. Was attributed to the seat. Maybe I should write them a thank you letter, but that was my method.

Well, let's consider the whole picture, Ben. You know, you've taken very, very good care of yourself. You like to optimize your nutrition. You're drinking healthy water, like living water. We should say you're doing a lot of other things that also supports healthy spermatogenesis, the development of healthy sperm. If you take the average American and we add all of those factors in together, it's not just the bike shorts. You also have to stop eating some junky stuff. We have to get your body nourished. We have to get your stress levels controlled. If you're in a state of stress for a man or a woman all the time and you're dumping cortisol into your bloodstream.

Your hpa, your hpatg gonadal access is going to prioritize resources towards getting away from the lion versus creating babies. It's not a good time to create babies if we're in this constant state of stress. So for both people, you know, whether you're an ironman distance triathlete or whatever is. If you can do any of these things, it's going to at least improve the likelihood. I like to get everything dialed in. So we're just talking about some of the basics now. On the women's side, there are so many factors. There's vulvar, vaginal, cervical, endometrial, meaning the inside of the uterus, fallopian tube of ovaries, your other hormonal pathways. All of this is relevant. But what I actually, I want to pause there because we're talking, we're getting into the nitty gritty. What actually, I think helps most of all. And we can talk. I mean, really, all the stuff I am applying to the men, I'm also applying to the women. And in addition, we do something called a Dutch test, which is an incredible. I should totally talk to you about that at some point. A Dutch test.

I implement it with all my clients.

Oh, perfect.

Dried urine test for hormones. And I like it. Just because you get the same hormones hormonal analysis as you do via blood work and saliva, but then also upstream and downstream metabolites in those hormones. So if cortisol is elevated, maybe you don't have excess adrenal output. You have poor cortisol clearance due to hypothyroidism or something like that. Like you can really unlock the. The hormonal picture or. Or reveal it a lot more easily.

That's right. That's right. And. And then we can also see, are you ovulating? Are you getting enough progesterone from the corpus luteum that results in the ovary after you've ovulated. I mean, there's so much we can do do with that. I also do a stool analysis on all of the women in my practice. And part of that is like, for example, if you have hyperactive beta glucuronidase activity, which is produced by C. Diff and some other species of the gut flora, you can actually cleave off a part of the metabolized estrogen and then it gets reabsorbed. So you have people that are in a hyperestrogenic state and we don't know why. Your adrenals, your gonads, everything seems to be working well, but it's actually a gut issue. So those two together provide some, some foundational work for us to start dialing in lifestyle. But even before we do all of that, then, you know, I include biogeometry signatures, I include tangerine quartz to work on. Second, some second chakra creative expression issues for these couples. You know, I give, I give them four different books. You know, I mean, it's, it's a packed supplements, organ meats, whatever. I give them all of that to start. But the first thing I have them do is to write a mission statement. What are you guys doing here? Like, what is your purpose here? What are we trying to achieve? And then I follow that up with a 10 day connection challenge. Because a lot of couples who are on this fertility path, they have started to like, lose track of the big picture. Their sex has become mechanical. Intimacy is out the, out the window. It's a matter of, okay, the pee strip turned. We have to have sex right now. It's time to have sex. And that is not a fun way to, to make a baby. If we look at this through the lens of conscious conception, what if the spirit of this baby, the soul of this baby is waiting for the right time to come into your womb, but mommy and daddy are just not on the same page. So I do a mission statement. I have them write it up and paste it in their bathroom, in their kitchen, in their bedroom. This is what we're going to work on together, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder. And then we do a 10 day connection challenge. And it's, it's really ramping up the sort of intimacy practices that I think are very, very critical for people who are on this fertility challenge. So it starts with, you know, hand holding, with foot rubs, with dancing in the room, not even touching, just dance to a favorite song together. Start to express with one another, start to be vulnerable with one another. And it leads all the way up to things like genital massage through, through your clothes, no orgasm. We're just going to play here. Getting people to reconnect, actually, I think is the most critical part and probably the primary reason that my program works so well.

Hmm. Wow. By the way, Breathwork also, my wife and I, we do breathwork sessions regularly together. There's even an app I like to use for this. Even though it's a little bit weird to have some random stranger's voice playing in the speakers walking through Breathwork. But it does seem to work. It's got nice music. We use an app called Othership for this and it involves just basically, you know, clothed or nude, you know, tantric style breath work with breath locks and eye gazing. And it's a more intimate connection than we'd ever get on any random date night. So I think breath work is amazing for that as well. And when you talk about conscious conception, Nathan, it reminds me of a discussion that I had with my friend Adam Wengauer. And I'll link to that in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Nathan Riley we talked for a while about fertility. He tried for a long time. He lists a whole bunch of his methods as well, which even included things like CBD and certain plants, plant medicines, etc, but he used a daily, daily meditation and visualization to visualize his child being brought forth into the world they successfully conceived. And you know, as with many of these multimodal practices, who's to say what worked and what stacked on top of each other? But that was a fascinating interview. And then you just brought up biogeometry. I know that's a, that's another one of those hour long discussions. But for those of you curious about it, speaking of Paul Check, he and I talked about a. And he also has a fantastic interview on biogeometry. So I'll link to my interview with Paul Check, in which we discussed it and also his interview with the, the Dr. Karim who came up with that. Yeah, we had. We've done a full biogeometry workup of our house as well and implemented that. But in brief, why would you use bio, biogeometry for, for fertility or for birthing, Nathan?

Well, a big part of it is. So when we, a lot of people are like, that's so woo woo. Well, I would conjecture people to think about how little we actually know about conception. Right? This, this egg is sitting there. It's this giant vacuolated egg. It's the only Human cell that's visible to the human, to the eye. You can actually have it on your fingernail and you wouldn't be able to see it. It's still small, but you could see it when we look at it under a high power microscope during IVF and we introduce sperm, we can look at the egg and see what happens. The sperm rush this egg, they all start lining up around it until one breaks free. There's this explosion, it's zinc mediated, there's this flash of light and stuff starts working. And another part of the mystery that I don't fully understand is the eggs always rotate counterclockwise whenever these sperm line up around it. I don't know if it's because it produces like a centrifugal force that pushes back out against the walls to prevent it from collapsing. I don't know, but it's pretty fascinating. So anyways, now, now we've got these two gametes, the sperm and egg have met. Now what we get these millions of divisions. These cells just start, just start dividing rapidly. And if you look at a zebrafish, you know, under a, on a time lapse, you'll see the cells divide, divide, divide, divide. And you can see them all kind of moving to a place somewhere in this little zebrafish organism. And they don't know where they're going, right? We don't know where they're going, but there seems to be a plan here. Now you could say, you know, through the Christian lens, of course there's a plan, God made it that way. Or we could also go, we can investigate further, we could look outside of those bounds and we can ask ourselves.

What, what perhaps could be happening here? These cells seem to be respectfully nudging against one another, finding their way. And if you go to chimatics videos where they vibrate a tin plate with a bunch of sand on it, you get these incredible geometric patterns. You can see this in 3D with gel like substances as well. When you course a certain frequency of sound wave through that body or on the tin plate, these patterns emerge. Well, it strikes me as very, very similar to that video of the zebrafish time lapse, where these cells are all going to some space within this sort of three dimensional object without really knowing where they're going. There's something there that's helping to facilitate this. We can call it God, source, spirit, the field. You know, I'm borrowing from Taggart's work and the reason I bring all of that up is that right now, wherever you're sitting in the world, you're probably being sort of bathed in radio frequency, like it's kind of that question. You can try to EMF the hell out of your house, like Ben or Luke's story or whatever, but there's still going to be something around in your wave, you know, your space. Go deep into the Amazon, you're not going to have that. Why is this relevant? Well, if we don't, if we don't have a better explanation as to how these cells know where to go, then interfering with this field, that could potentially be the answer, perhaps can be, let's just say, can be dissuade from its normal operations in this early embryogenesis, when the, when the embryo is forming. If biogeometry can mitigate the influences of this bath of radio waves that we're in, then perhaps it can actually lead us to less fertility challenges. Let's just say, of course, we have to consider everything else that's at play. But again, I'm trying to do it all in the most succinct and precise way that I can, knowing that every single person is going to be very, very individual.

Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating stuff. You know, I, I think it's both. I think it's the miraculous way in which God designed the universe, combined with the advanced physics and mathematical algorithms built into the universe. A fantastic book called Quantum God, which goes into this idea. And also, if you're more of a visual person, the website Inspiring Philosophy, one of my favorite websites on religious philosophy has an entire, like 12 part video series called I believe it's called Quantum God also, or the Quantum of God. And it really helped for folks who want to wrap their head around things like sacred geometry and mathematics in the universe, particularly quantum mathematics and physics. So it's, it's absolutely fascinating. You brought up comatics. I, I also love my wife and I recorded each of us saying I love you to each other. And then I believe the website is sound made visible. They'll turn that into beautiful poster art. That's a graphical representation of the sound waves of, of digital voice signatures. And so that's hanging in our bedroom. You know, my I love you signature and my well, I love you, Jessa signature. Her I love you, Ben signature. So if you're listening and you haven't looked into somatics or chimatics, it's. It's also fascinating.

Really interesting.

Yeah, yeah. Nathan, do you teach a lot of this stuff yet? You have this born free method. I know you're in the process of launching and bringing to the world. You already do a lot of telemedicine, as we've discussed, and you have some programs on fertility, et cetera, that you alluded to. And I'll. I'll hunt down links to all of that and have them in the show notes. But tell me about this Born Free method.

Yeah, so the Born Free Method was my answer. And it's actually a collaborative effort with Sarah Rosser, who's one of the farm midwives. Ina Ma is sort of a spokesperson for the resurgence of midwifery in a contemporary lens in the United States. And of course, we. Midwifery did not start here in the United States. This is a. There's a lineage of women caring for women, passing down this knowledge over the millennia, and mostly from the, you know, East Asian, the African diaspora, South America. All of this knowledge in traditional midwifery is honored by midwives. And so I don't call myself a midwife because I feel like that would be a little bit of a. I don't know, it'd be kind of like spitting in the face of this incredible ancestral history. But having said that, Ina May and a group of midwives traveled across the country back in the 60s and 70s, planted themselves in Summertown, Tennessee. And they have people from around the world that come there to give birth through the lens of autonomy, historically. And it started as a commune, cannabis farm, all of that. They had their own book, you know, printing press and all this other stuff. Well, the youngest midwife there is one of my dearest friends, her name is Sarah Rosser. And she and I sort of shared frustrations with the. Not just the medical industrial complex. That's easy. We were also frustrated with the resources that were available to women and men who were going to be getting pregnant or were currently pregnant, as far as not just educating themselves on the information, but applying that information through the lens of radical responsibility, informed consent, and really owning your decisions and the outcomes of those decisions. And really, even more so than that, seeing birth not as a medical procedure, but a spirit, spiritual opportunity, as a spiritual unfolding. There's a sacredness to this. And if we can restore that in the ways that we've already said, we're going to see the world improve, you know, thereafter. So a lot of courses out there do a lot of, here's the evidence, the information, let's magnify it. And then a lot of others are not talking about the evidence at all. So we have people that are kind of. They want a little bit of both. And we put together, I think the ultimate, most comprehensive pregnancy postpartum support course in the world. I mean, there's nothing like the Born Free method. Wow.

Okay, cool. Man. I wish, I wish this had existed back in the day when I was going through all of this would have been a life send. I will, I'll link to that. I'll hunt down all this stuff. I'll link to it in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Nathan Riley but that one's called the Born Free Method. Nathan, I could probably fire questions at you about childbirth all day long, but I know your website's a fantastic resource. Your podcast is Holistic OB gyn, right?

Yep, that's right.

Cool. And if you're listening and you have questions or comments or feedback and you want to add them to the show notes again, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Nathan Riley.

Yeah, for anybody out there who's, who's interested in the Born Free method, I also want to add that it's not just an eight week course where we get into vaccines and vitamin K and, and there's a whole unit for dads. There's a whole unit on psychedelic and cannabis use in pregnancy and postpartum. These are resources that are not available anywhere. And we really did a really diligent job in making it as unbiased as possible. In addition to the course, you're actually buying into a 12 month experience where you're going to be joining me and Sarah for weekly calls for the entire 12 months that you're enrolled. So this is a really great opportunity to have a journey with us in order to really lean into the upcoming parenthood that you're about to experience the sacred unfolding that is birthed. And I just appreciate Ben having on, having me on and letting me spin my wheels a little bit. It's been a lot of fun.

Oh, amazing. And you know, final comment, since it's April 20th, I'll have to make it the. On Sunday three days ago, I was out with my buddies playing Frisbee golf and we came up to the next pad and there was a couple there and they were high as a kite. You could, you could smell some skunk meat about a mile away and they had a little, little baby stroller they were just pushing down the path and it just, just made me wonder about secondhand smoke exposure and babies. And so when, when you're pairing cannabis with babies or cannabis with childbirth, please operate responsibly. I'm sure you talk about that plenty in the Born Free Method. So, yeah, and I don't. Yeah, I don't. I guess maybe I will throw this last thing in there. Thc, I believe that that can have an impairment in fertility, can't it, versus like some of the other cannabidiols.

Well, we, we actually don't know. So the studies that have been done, if they have been looking specifically at thc, they're using extracts. When you actually look at. So one of the only randomized controlled trials that was well enough done that I'm willing to cite it was looking at 30 women who were non users of cannabis, 30 women who were users, and they were all small, smoking it. I don't smoke anything really ever. I vaporize and that type of thing. But not with a vape pen, but with like an organic tobacco dry vaporizer using a volcano.

Volcano.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. These women in this study were actually smoking it. And they were all in Jamaica. They were all from a lower socioeconomic background and they followed up with the kids that were born to these women five years afterwards. And there was a wash in their assessments of their childhood development. And if anything, there was actually a slight benefit on those, you know, sitted through those studies for those babies that were born to women who were using cannabis. Can we use that study alone to justify anything? Hell no. We need far more data. What I will say is that as we're starting to modify these products, we're starting to synthesize and Delta 9 and all this other stuff, we're, we're, we're messing with nature, which goes back to the very beginning of our conversation. The more natural something is, the more likely it's actually going to be safe, so to speak, and perhaps even beneficial. There are communities. Let's look at psychedelics. I know that you've had like a mixed history with psychedelics, but there are certain communities in the, in the Amazon River Basin, Santo Daime, these communities where they actually hold ayahuasca as. Revere it as a deity. Those kids there are getting exposed to ayahuasca before, during and after pregnancy, throughout. It's like a part of their culture and they're not performing any worse and perhaps even better, depending on the cultural lens as to what you would consider good or bad childhood development. You know, in the Amazon River Basin, you, you're not in the U.S. you know, you're not stuck in this quagmire that is the US society in many regards. They might not want to be a part of that. And perhaps, you know, utilizing ayahuasca helps keep them from this sort of the insanity. Sometimes this productivity rat race thing where we're all siloed off and there's not a lot of community, who knows? But we haven't found from at least psilocybin, ayahuasca and cannabis. I haven't seen any definitive evidence that it's actually harmful.

Yeah, there's.

I could say otherwise for other dogs.

Okay, that's useful. And who knows, maybe it's all those magic mushrooms in Jamaica inducing neuroplasticity in the young child. That could also have an effect because that's all over down there. Yeah. My take on the plant medicine piece is basically, I think that a scenario in which people are using it as an alternative to God as escapism or sometimes even as just a noble excuse to do drugs is a sad and dishonorable use of these compounds. I also think that the purposes of using psychedelics for divination, which they actually work for, I mean, you can get a lot of interesting messages from the spirit world. Using psychedelics for divination is actually, at least for Christians, forbidden in the Bible is pharmacia. So although I, I think that they can be used for that, for me, it would be hypocritical for you for me to use them as such for things like trauma, end of life therapy, you know, microdosing, and, you know, responsible usage that doesn't involve one replacing God or replacing relationship, community, family, or sometimes even just, you know, fasting and being in nature and doing the hard work. I think that there can be. That's right, A proper set and setting. And then where I really, really draw the line is taking a heroic dose of psilocybin, laying back and asking the universe, what would you have for me to see? Just for me, that that's exactly what for my handbook for life, the Bible expressly remarks could be dangerous, I suspect, because it is a very intense.

Experiencing of God without a true knowing of God that comes through things like prayer, devotion, you know, chopping wood, carrying water, doing the hard work, et cetera. And I've actually paradoxically seen in particular, you know, Christians who turn to plant medicine winding up having kind of a starved spiritual life outside of their use of plant medicine. So there's something else we could, we could unpack for a long time. But that's kind of my general take on it.

Can I give a tiny little bit of resistance? Would that be cool?

Yeah.

So I remember reading, I think it was the three part series you did, and it got me very thoughtful about it because I used to be the guy that was like the Johnny Appleseed of psychedelics, like, everybody should do this. And then I started learning a little bit more about what my relationship was to that. I mean, this is years ago, and since then, it's something that's very personal to me. And I will say that your experience through, you know, growing up as a Christian and utilizing the Bible as a means of guiding you in life, I actually think that's very beautiful. And given how many. I just am really curious about your take on this. Given how many times it's been translated and cut and pasted and reimagined and rewritten and whatever stuff being omitted, stuff being added.

Could it be that, you know, sort of in the lens of stealing fire, Jamie Wheel, I'm sure you're familiar with that. Could it be that the original Eucharist was a psychedelic and perhaps that was a little too close to God and it would tarnish these control systems that perhaps otherwise the church would have loved to utilize against the populations?

Yeah, related to your first point, there are certainly a host of inconsistencies, inconsistencies and errors in the Bible because it's been drawn from so many different manuscripts. Those errors primarily are things like geographics, present past tense usage, etc. Things like, oh, the Ten Commandments, for example. Those are. Those are pretty accurate translations and things that appear to be very relevant and important in the Bible, such as, did Jesus die or did he not? Did he rise or did he not? Are the Ten Commandments an actual thing? Or even the multiple uses in very kind of like stern and forbidden language of the use of the word pharmacia make me want to play it safe, so to speak. And so the Bible does have, you know, on the flip side, thousands and thousands of manuscripts that define the. The fact that it's got a lot of evidence behind it, but some things do get lost or mistranslated. However, those are. Those are not the things that are, say, relevant to one's salvation or the very big things. Like, it's pretty tough to, based on the manuscripts that exist, misinterpret something like pharmacy or the Ten Commandments or the birth of Jesus. So that's one thing that I would think about. And then, so, yeah, there is a great deal of psychedelic usage, especially in the early Christian church. I mean, Brian Marascu has proved that pretty definitively in his book. But yet, for example, one of the churches that engaged in that pretty heavily was the Church of Corinthians. Paul wrote a very stern warning to the Corinthians about their use of substances and some of the things like orgies and practices that were weaving their way into the church that did not seem to align well at all with the Torah, nor with Jesus's teachings. And so despite it being a part of early Christianity, for me this kind of falls into the category of, you know, well, Christians and organized religion in general have done a great deal of harm to the world in the past and there's been many, many errors that have been made. You don't necessarily throw the baby out with the bath water. Nor do you say that just because something was practiced in a religion at one time that that makes it an acceptable part of the religion, nor something that is approved by that religion's key text, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I think one of the big apprehensions I hear from people a lot who have really invested a lot of their life into the study of the Bible and whatnot, is that they start to realize like, whoa, maybe the church didn't want us to take these.

Knowledge.

It would have allowed us to bypass the, you know, their power structures, you know. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I've got a whole textbook up on three part textbook, the hidden teachings of Christian mysticism. And I've, I've read them all cover to cover and there, there was a great deal of mysticism as well as plant medicine usage early in the church as a way to, you know, unlock the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, or, or to divine with the spiritual world. And.

That could certainly come across as sending a message to people that this is hidden or forbidden knowledge and it's protected from the people who might need it most or who might benefit from it. Therefore, we should somehow make it public and get rid of the gate that holds it back from the people. Whereas my take on it, because I've read that entire series and absolutely fascinated with it, but when I read the Bible and it says that the only way to God is through Jesus Christ and also does things like forbid practices such as mysticism or witchcraft or the occult or pharmacia, I find mysticism and the places you can go with plant medicine absolutely fascinating. And I suspect that possibly when I receive eternal life and get to heaven, that I'm going to have a lot of foreknowledge and a lot of bliss that I can get from those things here on earth, but that I potentially risk losing based on my interpretation of the Bible if I practice that stuff here in this life. So despite me being intrigued with it and seeing a lot of benefit from it. For me, it's just like a big old red warning sign on a lot of the popular usages of it. And so I do not think it should be open and accessible and heavily encouraged, specifically like divination through plant medicines or in theogenic use in the church community. Nor do I think it should be gated and held only for the. For the higher ups in the church. I think it should be questioned altogether in terms of its religious context for things like divination.

Yeah. I wonder, you know, before you ever. When was your first, you know, experience with mushrooms or plant medicines? I'm curious how old I was.

Probably 30, 32.

Do you think that those experiences helped to validate maybe some of your feelings about God, or do you think it brought you closer to God and now you have the tools and you can say, this is not actually the way I want to go. Do you wonder about that?

Yeah, if I have no regrets, only gratefulness for all my experiences in life. But if I could go back over again, I wouldn't use plant medicines for divination. I think that I was in sin in doing so based on the use of what would be called pharmacia in the Bible. So, yeah, it's one of those things where, you know, I. I was. I was fine. You know, I had wonderful experiences, but I can't say I can come back from all of that and recommend it to others, at least in the context that I was using it.

Totally. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. Yeah. I wonder how many people may find they're like, atheistic. There's nothing out there. And then bam, they take a big dose of mushrooms and they're like, oh, my God, I have things to explore. I just wonder about that.

I mean, yeah, there's very few atheists who will do a plant medicine experience and remain atheists. However, the problem with that is I think it does threaten to send a message to the world that you need these types of substances to find and experience God. When I think that the message should be more simplistic than that.

Yeah, I mean, not to mention so many people that are in the psychedelic space. They, you know, went to Burning man, did some mushrooms, and they come back and think they're a shaman. Right. Like, they haven't really done the integrative work and really kind of leaned inward. In fact, they keep chasing that. In fact, there was a. I used to work in the hospitals, as you know, and when I left, that was our. After our first baby I had given a talk, like a lunchtime talk around psychedelics for the. For existential pain and distress at end of life. And then I left. But the chaplains that were there listening, they remembered my talk. And when another chaplain was recruited from another hospital from out of state, and they arrived there, they were excited about the prospect of maybe talking about psychedelics with somebody at the hospital that I used to work at. And one of the chaplains said, hey, new chaplain, you should reach out to Dr. Reilly. He used to work here. I think he would be helpful to you. And this is a person who has dedicated their. Their entire educational process to divinity and trying to understand some of these ancient texts and, and how to relate to people from these various backgrounds. And they were starting to be questioning a little bit, like, am I on the wrong path? They were starting to go through some love. Rough life experiences. I offered them a journey and they came out of that. And it would re. It re. Established their faith. Yeah, which, which, you know, so in other words, every single person's experience is completely different. Are there people that I think probably should do some more internal work before they do these medicines? Absolutely. Is this a way of escaping whatever you're. You're not wanting to face? Hell, no. Like, you still have to do the work.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you're talking to a guy who, you know, 20ft away from us has entire closet full of DMT, LSD, psilocybin, you know, ayahuasca, dry. You know, everything that, that is out there, I have, all the way down to injectable ketamine. And I use that stuff very precisely, like a laser knife, and extremely careful with it. And I think the main thing that's changed for me over the past years is heroic dosages or the use of them for divination is a. A thing of the past. And so. And so. Yeah, but. But it's interesting what you talk about, too, for the fertility piece and what I talked with Adam about. So I'm personally going to check out the Born Free method, and I feel like you and I could almost do a whole other podcast on plant medicines. So maybe we line that up for round two. And. And for the people who turned it off, thinking that we were just about to wrap up. For those of you who stuck around. There you go. There's. There's what you have for desserts and things to think about. Well, now, Nathan, I guess we'll try and close this again, or else we're going to rabbit hole down something else. Try. How about the Mariners. So, folks, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Nathan Riley to delve more deeply into everything that Nathan has to offer and to leave your own questions, comments and feedback about the birthing process, about fertility, even now, about plant medicines. And I love and welcome all thoughts out there. So Nathan, once again, thanks so much, man.

Thanks brother. Appreciate it.