Embodied Birth with Nekole Shapiro

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have some fun.

Hello and welcome. I'm Alexandra J. Johnson and today's guest is Nicole Shapiro. Nicole synthesizes a lifetime of experience as a bodyworker and tantric practitioner, her birthing experiences as a mother and doula, and her profound love of science into embodied birth, a holistic approach to the birthing experience. She is also a licensed massage practitioner and holds a BA in Asian Studies and a pre medical certificate from Columbia University. Welcome, Nicole.

Hi. Hi. Thanks for having me.

So great to have you. I love your energy and your enthusiasm. You're fantastic.

Thank you. It's Hawaii, you know, when you come from Hawaii, how bad can you be?

That's great. We all need a dose of that. We all need a little dose of Hawaii, for sure.

I say that to anybody who tells me they haven't been. I'm like, everybody needs to go to Hawaii at least once in their lifetime.

It's an amazing place. Right? Do you just transcend into a whole new world?

Yeah. It in and of itself is an oxytocin generation. I think that's awesome.

I love it. Cool. So I would love to start off hearing what embodied birth is. I know a lot of people might have opinions about what it is, but I would love to hear what had you created this embodied birthday holistic approach?

Yeah. Well, I think it's sort of been steeping, you know, my whole life, but it really became sort of like a mission around watching my peers.

And particularly.

This one line I hear often or I was hearing often with my peers. I would really like to have a natural delivery, but if it can't happen, if I can't handle it, I'll have an epidural. What I heard in there were a lot of people with a desire to have a birth on their own, with their own bodies doing it and no intervention, but a real sense of defeat almost from the very beginning. A real sense of hopelessness or confusion on how to actually have that be. So when I moved. So that was just kind of steeping in my head as I was still in New York and had my first baby and was finishing up my pre medical studies and talking to my mom, who's a doula trainer in Hawaii. All this stuff was just kind of steeping in my head. And then I moved to Seattle and I moved to Seattle and was Pretty much like plopped down in the middle of this community that was very strongly sex positive. And, you know, when I was 17 years old, I was. I might have even been 16 was the first time I started massaging the public for money. And it was in my apprenticeship at my mom's massage school, then called the Honolulu School of Massage. And there was this older man that came in, he was probably in his 40s, and he was talking to me about being holistic and how the mind and body are connected and, you know, things that I very much believed. And he said to me, well, don't you think that the genitals need healing? And he didn't feel creepy. Like, I didn't feel bothered by what he said. You know, it sounded very matter of fact. And I said, well, I think so. And I don't really know that society is ready for that right now. And it just kind of, again, it was one of these things that steeped and was like, not really in my. You know, I didn't think about it much past that. But when I showed up in Seattle, I started meeting these people in this community who seemed ready. You know, they were talking about, first of all, they were talking about the genitals, they were talking about sexuality, right? Like, even that in and of itself is pretty radical, right? And I started saying, wow, you know, I wonder if while I've been in New York, learning more of, like, what academia and New York City and capitalism and all these things are about, I wonder if people have been, you know, actually getting ready to think about sexuality in this way. But the other thing that was going on was every time we would talk about sexuality or people around me would be talking about sexuality, I would just picture birth. I would just keep thinking about birth.

And it was like.

It was literally like that final piece of the puzzle that started what I'm now doing, because I started to see that, you know, being around a massage school my whole life, being around tantric tradition my whole life. But both of them were trying to avoid sexuality because when massage came into being, you know, as something that people got educated on, they really wanted to distinguish themselves from prostitution. And so there was a real, and there still is a real strong thread of don't go anywhere near anything related to sexuality. And the tantra that I practiced, the ashram that I grew up in and practiced with, they really didn't want to be the sex people, so they were also avoiding it. And, you know, I've done a bit of quite a bit of yoga throughout my life. And it was just kind of this thing. It was like, not really ever talked about. And so I saw that perhaps my first birthing experience was not all that I had envisioned or experienced expected birth to be, because in some way I had actually avoided this major piece that was related to birth, which were my genitals, my womb, my pelvis, my high, deep oxytocin states, with perhaps even some erotic feelings in there. And so I started as I was. First of all, I started talking this way, and people pretty quickly started asking me to talk more about it and to teach. And I started seeing how perhaps I could create a curriculum, looking at it, you know, really looking at birth from a holistic perspective. And of course that's going to incorporate sexuality, and it's going to incorporate, like right now, my Facebook post is a picture being held up that says vagina. And sometimes it feels like that, you know, it's like this is where the baby is coming from. And yet people, you know, still have a hard time even saying the word, let alone actually exploring it and getting to really feel integrated with it. Right. So embodied birth is really, it's about bringing holistic understanding to birth, and that incorporates into it the part of our body that births. And it's amazing to watch how triggering that is for people because our society has really shied away from the vagina.

Totally. It's shocking, right? People don't want to talk about it, but like you said, the baby comes through the vagina. I mean, we might need to address that.

Yeah. And so it's, you know, it's like, it's been a real education for me. A friend of mine that I met in high school in Hawaii, she attended a sexuality and birth class that I taught there. And she was so helpful to me because she said, you know, Nicole, you're. You're suggesting that women be embodied in their birth canals while they're birthing and most people aren't even in their bodies at all. And I was like, oh, okay, a little bit here, you know, Right. Like, not everyone grows up the way I grew up. So, yeah, just this last piece that I was like, oh, right, this part too, it's still for a lot of people. What does that mean, be in my body? I mean, a lot of the one on one work I do with people is like, there's this real desire to look to an expert to tell you what to do. And for me to constantly be turning back around to being like, whoa, what do you think you should do? How does your body feel about that? Let's check in with your body about that and then all the emotions that come up around that and people, you know, and all the. What is the word? I don't even know. Avoidance of emotion, shame around emotion, you know, and it's very much a part of it. Like if we're going to really be in our bodies and in our power and in ourselves, emotions are a part of it. Right.

So what does that mean, you know, because this is, I think it's a huge piece for just women in general and then also especially for the birth, but to be in your body, like, what would that experience feel like for a woman? You know, when would a woman know she was in her body? Like really embodying her body wisdom?

Well, so we have a class, 30 hours of the hundred hour program is a class called holistic Peer counseling for birth and parenting. And I'm very excited to say that I think we're going to actually be able to do it over the Internet a bit this time. So people don't have to be in Seattle to do it.

Fantastic.

But a big part of that class is running people through a number of practices and meditations to just help them be in themselves. Like as I'm talking to you, I'm looking at my computer. Because I'm talking to you through my computer. So I'm looking at my computer outside of myself, people watching television looking outside of themselves. So meditation things that turn us internal help us get more of a sense of where our bodies are at in relationship to the world around us. So like one practice that we run is a sensory practice which is literally just like for one minute you have to say what it is you're hearing. And that's it. You just say like, I'm here, I hear this, I hear this, I hear this, I hear this, I hear this. And then you do it with all the senses. So that would be one example of like bringing yourself just into your experience in the world around you. What does that feel like? Like right now as I'm talking to you, my head is a little sore because I was woken up too many times by my 3 year olds last night. That's a part of my reality. And we've really been in a culture that says we'll take something for that. Now I had to learn that I'm allowed to take something for that if I want to quiet it down. Because in my world you didn't do that. You were supposed to really be the sensations of it and work through it and cry if you needed to cry. And rage if you needed to rage. And run around the block if you needed to run around the block or slow down and take a bath, if that's what you needed. So just learning how to be in ourselves seems to be one of the first steps for a lot of people. And then in the process of getting into yourself, of course, that's where I was bringing up the emotions. There's usually a lot of emotions there. And then once you get there, my goodness. I mean, for those of us that get into ourselves, I mean, there's a whole universe in there. There's so much going on. There are a lot of cells, as I put it.

Totally, there's a lot going on in there.

And so, like, for birth, you know, like my second birth, where I was so much more. I gave birth. It was like my first birth. I just had an assumption that it would be great and I didn't show it reverence. I was like, alright, sure, I'll go into this hospital setting. How bad can it be? Sure, all right, no problem. You know, like, I was in this sort of, like, on some level, I think I just thought, I just took it for granted that I believed it would be like the greatest yoga experience of my life. The second birth, I really gave it reverence and being in myself for it, which even I feel like if I were to do it again, I would even more so be able to do that. Right. Which is like, not really the reason to keep having babies. But my 10th one, I'm going for 10, but I get it. I could totally see you doing that was. I was gigantic. You know, I mean, like, really being inside of myself and just feeling everything that was going on to the extent that I could. I was huge. I was gigantic. My inner world was huge.

And so from the first birth, you just kind of assumed that it was going to be great, you know, like, oh, we'll just do it. And then it sounds like the second birth, you actually, like, really took it on and really practiced and really made it a top priority to kind of create your desired outcome. Is that right?

Yeah. And I think also that I had put together more appropriate tools the second time, like the first time, what I did was got acupuncture every other week, walked, you know, tried not to gain the weight that my OB was upset that I was gaining. Walked around Central park every day, got my massage, you know, like, it was a little bit more like external. More external, right. And for prepping for the second one, I was more clear on what my internal tools needed to Be. And that's really what my curriculum is. That's really my hope is to provide more people with those internal tools. You do.

Because so much of being pregnant, having a child is very mechanical and very physical. And take your walk and take your prenatals and do all of these things physically. But then what you're talking about is like the mental, emotional, spiritual journey that we've kind of got to go on if we want to have an embodied birth.

Yeah, well, and then the irony is, right, Even when you're talking about the physical, mechanical kind of stuff, like my OB says to me, I walk in as a birth worker and I'm like, so what do you think about perineal massage? And she says to me, oh, this research shows it doesn't really help. And I was like, what? How can it not help another one of these things where my entire reality starts breaking down around me? I'm like, how could that possibly not help anything? It's like trying to take in my mind, it's like trying to back bend when you've never back bended before. Oh, yeah, no, just do it. It'll be fine. But again, I went into, well, she's. And I was very much in my Columbia pre med. I was kind of a little bit more on that side of things at that point. I was like, well, that's what the research says. Okay. As I started to look at this material the second time, because I didn't walk out of my first birth intact, I had a natural unmedicated delivery and I walked out. Totally not intact feeling. Not. When I say intact, I mean like my person, my psyche was fractured afterwards as opposed to being bigger and deeper and stronger. I felt very frightened and confused. And it's very possible that some of my post traumatic stress from being downtown in 911 got re triggered. But anyway, I just did not, you know, people were like, oh, you're such a rock star. You're amazing. And I didn't feel that way. It didn't feel like the right title. I was like, no. I don't know what just happened. Fuck you. I didn't like that. You know, like, I was like very upset and everyone sort of had this like heroine title over me, you know. So as I started to relook at the material the second time I revisited this perineal massage idea. And I realized that when most people teach perineal massage, they teach it with two fingers. And I was looking at my two fingers and I was thinking about the size of a baby. And I was like, well, perhaps that would be why it wasn't proving to do much help. Because they're really not. We're not really prepping the area in quite the same way that you would if you were really to massage the birth canal. It was like this filter had kind of, like, been taken off. I started giving myself permission to think that way because prior to that. Right. As a body worker, you're not even supposed to think that people have genitals, let alone think about how you would apply bodywork to them. Yes.

I was a massage therapist. Totally. It was like, stay away at all.

Yeah. I mean, like, even, you know, some people won't even, like, work your glute. Your glutes because, you know, you have to go under the draping for it. It's like, how are you going to help somebody's back if you never touch their sacrum? So it's edgy. It's edgy. It's tricky material, for sure. But when I was really looking at my own birth, I didn't really. It was my own birth in particular. I was like, well, this is what we're going to be doing, honey.

You did the paranemia massage before the birth and during the birth.

I didn't actually do any during. But yeah, we prepped. We thought a little bit more about what the size of the baby was actually going to be, particularly the head. And, you know, we really, like, did some deep tissue and we. My husband actually went through massage school, too. So we literally did it like a massage. You know, we found the bony landmarks, we found the tendons. I mean, it's really amazing. It's an amazing world in there. If you really, really take your time to discover it.

That's so great. And it sounds like that's like a great practice for couples as well.

Yes.

You know, get in there.

Yeah. I mean, it really is, you know, to change the terrain of, you know, let's say most people, you know, probably just have, like, penis, vagina, sex, and that's pretty much what they do. And there's not much thinking about it. And, you know, I've had it said to me, well, I just don't want the mystery taken out of it, you know, and it's. And to switch that around and be very deliberate and to constantly be checking in like you would with a massage like, that hurt a little bit too much. I think maybe we need a little bit more coconut oil, maybe. No, that's too much pressure. I need less pressure.

Or wait, wait, wait.

That point feels like it's really releasing something. Let's stay there. The whole process of that, I think in and of itself is very valuable between the two people that are about to become parents of a new person.

Yeah, it's interesting. Like you said at the beginning, a lot of times we don't even want to say the word vagina. And a lot of there's so much stuff around women and just our bodies and really celebrating and trusting our.

Our body.

Do you have any recommendations for how we start to celebrate and really acknowledge our body wisdom and acknowledge that everything is perfect, that our vagina is perfect, that everything is all good?

Yeah. So, you know, when I taught the second ecstatic birth. When I taught in the second ecstatic birth, tele summit was called the body series. I was prepping that material right around when my friend said this to me about, most people aren't even in their bodies. And, like, all these pieces kind of came together and it was a real. Like, I have material on, like, our monthly cycle. And, you know, this term they say, guys say I popped a nut. Yeah, right. Like, I like, popped it. Ovum. It's like one of my. And I do. I feel like that, like, when I'm about to ovulate, I mean, I'm high as a kite. I'm so generative. I'm like, almost creative to the point of a problem. Like, I'm like, okay, we don't have to be planning your third cousin's life. You know, I mean, my brain in this, like, hyper creative kind of place. So same thing kind of happened around that time, and I came up with what I started calling the embodied birth method. And there's four steps to it. And one of the steps has. It breaks down into three more steps. And so I would say. So I'm going to apply that to your question. So the first step there is literally just asking yourself first questions, but answering them in the first person. So since we're talking about vaginas, let's say I would say to you, give me the first word. Thought, sound, movement, whatever comes to you when I say vagina.

Soft and luscious.

So I practice this, you know, so it's this first person thing, right? Like, that's not everybody's response. Everybody has a different thing. Some people, you say it and they recoil, you know, that's their first. That's their first impression of that word. So then we just take that and we. We go further and further with it, you know. But it's. The first step really, is to just be true and Honest with where you're at. Because that in and of itself seems so hard for so many people. Because I shouldn't feel that way. I shouldn't. You know, I'm. I'm liberated. I shouldn't feel, like, recoiling at a vagina. That's not how I should feel. But if that's how you feel, then that's where you're at. You know what I mean? Yeah, totally.

So just being honest, actually what the beliefs are about our vagina.

Yeah. Or whatever it is. Right. Like, you could say another one I often do is birth. You know, what comes to you when you think of birth?

Magical.

Yeah.

What?

Are you serious?

This is incredible.

Part of it is that in our culture, Right. Like, you and I are talking right now, right. So a lot of people will, like, put us on some sort of pedestal and be like, they know. Just because we happen to actually be looking at material and trying to figure it out and trying to put it into shape and form for other people to absorb. So then they'll start thinking that they should think how we think.

Yeah, totally.

And that's not helpful. So that becomes helpful. And so the second. So the first is ask. The second is what I call plunge, which some people have told me is a scary word, but that's the word I have right now. And the plunge step is like, okay, so if we're talking about vaginas, the plunge step is like, huh, interesting. Well, that was my first response to that word. Maybe I should plunge a little bit more into this topic. So the first step of plunge is to learn more. So at that point, right. You, like, take, I don't know, clitoral revelations online, or you look at Sherry Winston and you take one of her classes online or read her book, or you go on this here interweb thing and you Google vagina, and you see what comes up, and you really just start learning about it. And that's at the point where it's valuable to hear what I have to say or hear what you have to say or hear what Sherry has to say. But it's from a very different perspective. It's not from a tell me how to think perspective. It's more of like, huh. I had this response. Let me get some more information and start thinking about how I feel about that. So the first is to learn, and then the second is to meditate. So whatever material you learn, then you meditate on it and see how it feels for you. Like, you know, someone might tell you, I don't know, like, I will Tell you the clitoral complex is large, if not larger than many penises. And you might go, I don't know how I feel about that. Let me meditate on that. You know, let me sit with that. Let me see how that feels. And just stay in that kind of, like, meditative state about what you learned, to really try and integrate it into who you are. See how it feels to try that on for size. And then the next step is to play around with it, you know? And like, okay, so she's saying that, you know, there's this thing called the clitoral complex. And I've looked up. I've looked it up online, and I've taken the classes at this point, and I've meditated, and I'm willing to investigate the possibility that she's saying something true. So let me check it out. You know, let me. Let me have my partner or I. By myself or whatever way you want to do it. You know, see if I actually can feel my own clitoral complex and see how it's responding to X, Y, and Z. And, you know, that would be more of that, like, play phase. But it's, again, it's bring it back to your own body. And this is where I feel like growing up as the daughter of a massage school owner comes into play, because I just did this with everything. You know, in massage school, you learn anatomy, and then you massage the anatomy. And I say, I was probably one of the only elementary school kids walking and thinking about how it was affecting my hips as I walked, or were my knees straight? Was I walking? Toe, ball, heel? You know, like, I'm, like, walking to school in elementary school thinking about my alignment.

That's awesome.

So it's not just a picture in a book tied to my own experience and my own. My own body, you know?

Yeah. That's so great. I love it, too, because you're very, like, supporting us as women, too. A lot of times I think we maybe are scared of, like, I don't know, all the answers, you know, and we're not set up to know the answers around birth or our sexuality and not wanting to be the one who doesn't know and, you know, wanting, you know, being willing to play around with it and say, I actually have no idea about my clitoris. You know, like, what. What do I. I need to learn and being open to that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that is, you know, I. One of the things that was very exciting for me about going to Columbia for college is that I finally, like, got to Be a nerd. Because in. In Hawaii, it's really not very cool to be a nerd. So I was one of these kids that was like, I don't know how I get a 4.0. You know, I don't know. I don't know how I aced that test. I don't know. You know, it was like this. I couldn't look like I was actually really into it. And so when I finally got to Columbia and I was with other, like, you know, other nerds, I could, like, really, like, be into it. And so if you really, like, are into just learning, you know, then you almost don't ever want there to be an end, because you just love learning.

Yeah.

You can apply the same thing here.

So what do you think is. On the topic of being willing to learn and being willing to make mistakes, if you will, what are some of. Kind of like the common mistakes that you see us women making around birth preparation and just kind of birth. The whole process?

I guess I don't really like the word mistakes. I know.

I was just thinking that. I was like, that wasn't the right word.

I know. What are these word things? They're so complicated. Well, I wonder if. I think if we step back a little bit. There was something you said earlier about fear, and I can't remember how you put it exactly, but fear of being.

Not knowing.

Not knowing? Yeah.

Like, we're the only one that doesn't know how birth is, so we're just not going to do anything and just pretend like we maybe know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess, like, first of all, fear is. If you're experiencing fear, I would give that some attention. I would give that some love and see where that goes. You know, if I'm working with somebody. And this is part of what we teach in peer counseling is, you know, that distress things that are keeping us from our greatness, those things need love and attention just like anything else. So there's this real desire to sort of jump, to, like, circle around the distress, you know, so let's say the fear or the shame or the confusion, like, to just kind of like. It's almost like the picture I get is, like, I'm walking around the street, walking along the street, and then there's this fear feeling, and I want to, like, walk around it. And I really support people in staring at it and really walking into it and feeling everything that's in there and deconstructing everything that's in the middle of that. And I think that in many cases, that's where our greatest power is. It's just all bunched up. You know, again, I'm a body worker, right? So it's like. And then this is where I also really love science, is because in my mind, it's like energy wants its optimal expression, really. And so even within our psyches and within our minds, just like a muscle is going to perform more optimally if you get rid of the tension. I think the same is true for our psyche. So if there's something that's holding us from what we desire, you know, we truly desire from our greatest expression, our greatest experience, then I say, let's sit and stare at it. Let's love it, too, and really take our attention to it and find what's in there.

And then do you think, just in preparation for birth, that this is like a. I mean, it's a good, obviously amazing, lifelong practice, but especially important before the birth and that those issues will come up potentially in birth if we don't work with them?

In birth and in parenting and in the person that you become when you leave the experience of the maiden and walk into the experience of the mother. There's a. And that's part of why I think that ultimately I've been brought to this work and to this focus, because.

People.

Don'T even get that yet. I mean, they don't even. How many maidens are aware that the moment they decide to have their egg meet a sperm, they are no longer maiden and they walk and begin taking steps closer and closer to mother. And what that means, most people don't even speak that, let alone really dive into it and find what that is. So then, of course, you know, postpartum has got everyone just a fluster.

And so you think a lot of that is potentially not integrating or not like fully having a rite of passage or emotional work or whatever you want to call it, to actually step it into that.

Yes. I mean, even just this term, right Of. I haven't gotten my body back yet.

Yeah.

How many times? Oh, well, she, you know, she wants to get her body back. And, you know, I'm like, you're not going to. You're not going back. You don't go back.

There is no going back.

Different.

Different woman.

It's. And it's. It's painful, you know, I didn't know that I was making that choice. It's painful. There's pain in there, you know, and there's joy and there's, wow, who am I now? Cool. But there's also pain. There's Also mourning. You know, just like when we leave our home for the first time to live on our own, you know, huge transitions in life. So I feel pretty darn excited if I can help anybody have tools to integrate that before they start parenting, you know, giving them tools to actually apply to themselves and then to their relationship and to their child. And, you know, in my grandest plans, I would hope that that would also start to diminish the number of divorces that happen within those first few years of a child's life, you know? Right.

Because the issues just come.

Oh, my God, it's just so demanding. Becoming a parent is so, so demanding. It's like, ridiculous.

So do you have any. I mean, obviously you can't really prepare, but do you have any recommendations of preparing for it and recommendations for a woman who may be listening and like, I would like to consciously step into that role or actively move towards that.

Yeah. Well, take hpc.

Got it.

Take holistic peer counseling so that you can get some practice in these skills before you get there. And then we're really working on creating that as an online community so that people can also have. I think peer support is hugely, hugely undervalued right now. And I think we're getting clearer that it's helpful. Like in Seattle here we have a program called PEPs where, I don't know, the PEPS organization puts families together that all had their children around the same time. And then that group will meet maybe once a month. So there's a lot to be said for, for peers. So we're not isolating. You know, I think isolation is tricky. I learned how to finally ask for help. You know, I mean, you don't get to Columbia without sort of being a one woman machine in a way. You know, I had very high standards for myself and I still have to regularly work on my, you know, being more humble and recognizing that I need help. So that's. I could say, well, you should set up help for yourself, but there's something about you need to kind of go. That's the passage. Right. That's a big part of my passage from maiden to mother is recognizing my limitations.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

And then not having it be a weakness because I know a lot of people in our culture, you know, to ask for help for women, even if they're not conscious of it, it's, you know, we want to be able to do everything.

Yeah, yeah. Well, in our part of us also in there is accepting that, you know, I could get help, but they're not Going to be doing it like I do it. So also the mystery of community, you know, the mystery of aggregating people and seeing what comes out of the many, as opposed to, I have a vision and this is how it should be, and it should be this way. And if it's not this way, that's wrong. You know, like, there's also that. I've had to grapple with that a lot too. Like, oh, well, I have a picture in my head, but I can't actually do all these things on my plate, so I'll hire someone else and they might not do it the way that I would do it, you know. Right.

So being comfortable to kind of surrender to the process. And like you said, too, it's a whole new world of we can't go back to how we used to live our life. Like, there's like a call for us to step into a whole new way of living and being.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And really, you know, I would love for more of us to be speaking to that because I think a lot of what. I don't know how to really frame this.

But, you know, the other thing that.

I found becoming a mother is all of a sudden I realized all the things that mothers are blamed for and how easy it is to blame mom, because moms are usually isolated and underre, so they can't really stand up for themselves. That makes sense. Yeah.

In what ways? Because I'm not on the process and making the journey into being a mom. What ways have you found that women are blamed?

You know, like, well, my mom really fucked me up, like that kind of line. Well, you know, I have that problem because my mom X, Y and Z. So that kind of rather than real, like, I don't feel like there's been enough of a communal voice to how much work moms do. Yeah, Oprah's helped. Right? Like, Oprah started this huge thread some number of years ago about the work of being a mom and how it's, you know, the most amazing and most demanding job all at the same time. That was very helpful. So it's just stuff like that I was describing to somebody the other day who doesn't have children, that I had my two children with me and another adult to help me. And we were trying to walk from one person's house, from our house to the other person's house, and it took 15 to 30 minutes just to get half a block. And they were like, how, you know, like, until you have these little beings with you, it's unfathomable. You're like, how could that possibly take half an hour? And then all of a sudden, they're in your lives and you're, like, feeling it and it's happening. And so I guess some level of celebration for the people that do that work, you know, for those of us that. That are spending the time, you know, we'll say that, for instance, education is underfunded. You know, it's similar to, like, wow, you took 15 minutes of your time to, like, be present to these little beings while you were trying to actually accomplish something. Like, let's have a party about that. Amen. As opposed to, like, how come you weren't on time? Right. Which is part of what's out there. How come your kids are making so much noise? Could you quiet them down? You know, it's like celebrating those of us that are actually doing that work. It's a lot of work.

Yeah, totally.

I love that.

I love that, too. And I think it's such a great and important topic for us as women to celebrate our own work, you know, celebrate what we're doing. I know for me, I'm, like, ridiculously being pregnant, ridiculously grateful for my parents. Like, I haven't even gone through the experience of having a newborn, but I can just feel like, holy wow, what parents give up to nurture and love us, even if they're not perfect. But holy wow. It's ridiculously amazing.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so I have the exact same thing. And, you know, our parents will say that to us, right? They'll be like, well, just you wait. Yeah, right.

You're like, whatever, whatever.

You suck. But it is such. Isn't it such a beautiful experience when you feel that. I love that. Those moments where, like, I feel the gratitude for what was done for me. I love them.

Yeah.

And I couldn't have gotten them without it. I don't. You know, I don't think I could be as grateful for what my parents did for me if I wasn't going through the work of doing it myself.

Absolutely. Totally. I totally can see that and feel that. And, yeah, I think that it's so great, too. And like you said, honoring kind of the. The struggles or the challenges of it. Like, wow, okay, this is definitely challenging and calling me to a whole new level of living.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's exactly right. I think at one point I said, part of birth is we become big enough to create space in the universe for another person to come through.

That's beautiful.

I love that.

Very cool. Gee, so much awesome stuff. And it's such an important topic. It is totally. I totally think it's, like, one of the biggest topics in our modern culture for women, you know, because there's definitely, like. And you said you were driven and had your visions and going to Columbia and everything, but there's definitely women in ambition and not having the time to take care of their kids. It's a very interesting time, I think, all around. So I appreciate all of your wisdom and your thoughts on that. I'd love to hear kind of switching gears a little bit, because I know that you're super passionate about this. I want to make sure that we talk about it. Oxytocin. Can you talk to us about oxytocin and why this is so important and how we tap into it and why we want to tap into it?

Yeah. So when my mom. So when I got to Seattle and I was trying to figure out if I was still going to apply to medical school, Seattle has a real thriving midwifery community, which I wasn't aware of in New York. And I started thinking, well, maybe I'll do that. Maybe I'll go that road instead of the medical road. And I said, well, I should probably go attend some births before I make that commitment. My mom gave me her doula training, and I attended my first birth as a doula. And I guess it was in the process of doula training where all of a sudden I was like, this is the education, really, as my mom's giving me the doula training. I was kind of surprised because my mom has talked to me about birth for a very long time. She's been a birth educator for, I think, over a decade at this point, maybe going on two. And so what I felt like she would talk to me about versus what was being specifically taught in the training didn't seem to really line up. And so what I got from her more informally was a lot of conversations about oxytocin. And oxytocin is a hormone that they're learning more and more and more about now, but it's been coined the love hormone. So you often feel it when you're like, if you give a sheep oxytocin that didn't give birth to babies, they'll start taking care of all the other babies. Really? Yeah. That's the maternal instinct component of oxytocin. If you give oxytocin to a female prairie vole and then put her next to a male prairie vole, and then you drop them in a whole bunch of voles, she will seek out that prairie vole. She'll only go after the one that she was by when she first had the oxytocin injection. It's a bonding hormone. There's all of these effects of this hormone. It also happens to be the hormone that causes your uterus to contract for the baby to come out. So most people don't feel all that bonded to really bright lights, lots of hustle and bustle, people speaking to them abruptly and somewhat, you know, with that kind of like, I'm at work kind of way of talking. This is what is often true in a labor room. What I started to question was why birth education wasn't like. At that time, I was like, why isn't it just all about oxytocin? Why isn't everyone just learning everything that they can learn about oxytocin so that they can increase their own oxytocin? Because what we have is. I think we're in the, like. I mean, we're definitely above 50% of women, and we might even be closer to 90% of women who get some amount of synthetic oxytocin pumped into them while they're laboring.

Wow.

So I'm seeing this gap of care because in my mind, I would think that what we would want to be doing is supporting women to produce as much oxytocin naturally as possible. If we know that oxytocin is present while you're orgasming, wouldn't you rather have more of that feeling inside of you than fear or contraction or tension? So it's probably a good third of the focus of my work is just about. So there's the more oxytocin, please class. And then I'm talking about oxytocin often within sexuality and birth and within holistic peer counseling and then with clients. And just in like. One of the baseline pieces of the training is to teach you how to be what I call an oxytocin generator yourself. So if you're going to be present in the birthing room to hold yourself to being an oxytocin generator while you're there to help keep the oxytocin in the room going. Because if I have oxytocin, one of the other pieces of research is if you. If you give a rat oxytocin and you drop them into a bunch of other rats, those rats ultimately end up with higher levels of oxytocin as well.

Fascinating.

There's a lot of new research. One of the baseline lessons that I'm really teaching is that when I first Started the more oxytocin class and teaching that material was to show people the difference in how oxytocin behaves when it's in your central nervous system versus when you just put it in the blood, which is what's happening when they're giving it to you in the hospital. But there's all this new research coming out to show that oxytocin is also created in the cardiovascular system and the gut. And so there's a lot. Shestan Uvnas Mobati wrote a book called the Oxytocin Factor, and she's been doing research on oxytocin for like three and a half decades. Wow. Yeah. And one of the, one of the pieces that she points out in her book is that when she first started doing oxytocin research, 90% of biomedical research was on the system of fight or flight. And so it was like you were almost like science was like, you're either in fight or flight or you're not. And so the oxytocin research really starts to give voice to what they call, what she coined, what I say she coined. I mean, she calls it this. And then I also call it this, the system of calm and connect. And I call it like biological feminism. Like the feminine side finally started to get some scientific props, you know.

Nice.

Is that helpful? It's a lot. It's a lot of. So great.

It's awesome. So is this something that. How do we prepare to do this? How do we become an oxytocin generating goddess? Like, what are some steps to like, get some more of this juice flowing through?

Well, so the other thing is that, and this is, you know, where, like, I didn't realize really how edgy all my material was. But so people have vagina distress and they also have oxytocin distress, like people. So one of the things that I finally was able to identify is that I have a lot of experience. Experience because of the way that I grew up being in a very heightened oxytocin state. And high isn't even the right word for it, but let's say infused, deeply infused oxytocin state in a non erotic setting. Most people have. Their relationship with oxytocin is usually in an erotic setting. So, like, I got bodywork on me all the time. I don't know how many times I've had hands all over my body. Right, right. Yeah. Probably your average American has not ever had that even once. And if they have had it once, it was probably in relationship to having intercourse. Right? Totally. Right. So because touch is a huge oxytocin generator. So intimacy is a huge piece of oxytocin. You go into a very intimate state with people. So that's why I was saying I think of Hawaii as very much an oxytocin generator. First of all, it's warm. Heat tends to increase your oxytocin unless you have distress around being hot, which many people do. So that kind of like you put yourself into. So what I usually do is, again, go back to this method that I brought up before, which is the first thing I would do is ask people their own experience and try and identify help. I would work with people to help them identify experiences in their life where they have been in an oxytocin state. And then we build it out from there. Again, I don't want it. Even the research becomes tricky because, like I said, there's research that says that you increase your oxygen when there's heat. The more warmth there is, generally the more oxytocin. But not everybody's like that. Some people, they start feeling hot, and they're immediately stressed out and very uncomfortable. That's that. Like, we would ask, you know, I ask this in class oftentimes, it's like, what comes to you when I say oxytocin? What comes to you when I say intimacy? What comes to you when I say calm and connect? And we ask enough questions, we can get to what helps somebody. We can get to where someone is at the current moment when it comes to the topic of oxytocin. Then from there, then we would go into the plunge stage where you'd start learning about oxytocin. Then maybe you start learning about oxytocin. Then that jogs some sort of memory where you're like, oh, yeah, I remember that time that I was in Hawaii. Yeah. And we were on, like, a hike, and the wind came across my face, and it was awesome, you know, or, you know, I used to go over to Grandma's every day after school, and she always greeted me with a cup of hot cocoa, you know, and there's just this kind of warm. In tantric terms, I would say, like, you're merging. There's a real merging kind of feeling. Like, usually when I get into an oxytocin state, it's almost hard for me to see clearly. Things get very pixelated. There's this very, like, reality takes on a less structured form. Right. And then I had someone in my class who was looking at this, you know, when I was trying to show different, give out different ideas. Of what puts us into an oxytocin state. I had like a Zen garden, like a Japanese Zen garden photo up. And she said, yeah, see, that doesn't do it for me. But if you had a baked potato up there, that would do it. And that's. So that's the first set of work really, is to find out what it is for you. Right. So I do session work with people. Right. Like, one of the other aspects of what I'm doing is that I've really blown up the doula model and I train people and I practice as an embodied birth doula. And in the embodied birth doula model, what I suggest is that people, I mean, ideally, people start working with me before they're pregnant. So the moment that someone says, you know, I think I might want to have a baby, I would love it if at that point they went and talked to somebody. And so in this case it would be me or someone who's trained with me. And I have two hour sessions with people. And this is some of the work that we would do in those sessions.

That's awesome.

I do that for about, through getting pregnant, through the pregnancy, and then I'm present at the birth and then for about a year postpartum to really hold this perinatal period.

Yeah, that's beautiful. What an amazing support that is that you give to the woman. And I can't even imagine for you too, what rewarding work. So awesome. So cool. So then oxytocin, essentially you could start practicing before you get pregnant. It's just an important practice to kind of start getting into that oxytocin zone more often. How does that impact. You said it definitely impacts birth. Can you just talk about, give us some of the pros of actually doing it? Because a lot of people are like, I don't have time for pleasure or joy and things like that. But if you give us a little bit of incentive of why we want to do this for our birth, like, why is it important for us? Why is it important for our birth process? Why is it important for our baby?

Yeah, see, that's another example of something that I would like take to the client. I would say because I'm not pushing an agenda. That's another big difference here. I'm not trying to convince you to have any type of birth other than the birth that feels right for you. I'm going to teach you about oxytocin. I guess what you're looking for are these things about Michel Odin. In his work, particularly his book Primal Health, he Talks about a set point and how our babies. The highest level of oxytocin available to a human being is at birth. We create more and more oxytocin receptors the further we go on in our pregnancy. And we will get the highest possible natural dose of oxytocin in an unmedicated birth. That's exciting. It is exciting. That sounds pretty exciting. Geez, it is exciting. I'll be very excited to talk to you postpartum. Yeah. You know, when you're pre. Pre birth, you have an idea of what that feels like. And then during the birth, it's like, it's a whole. You know what I mean? It's. It's this out of. Out of this world experience.

So.

So if you want to go from. You know, see, I think that if. I guess what it is that. I think that if we hook you into your body, you will generally have the experience that you just expressed, which is like, wow, sign me up for that. Right. But usually there's a lot of fear and distress that is in the way of that happening. And so that's where I say, I just want to support people to be where they're at. So if there's more distress, then, you know, if this distress is really noisy, we're not going to just like, force you through it, right?

Yeah, totally.

If you want to integrate whatever is causing that tangle, I'm present with you to help you untangle that, but I'm not there to force you to do that. Right. So that being said, the set point concept from Michel Odon is that he says. I can't even remember which movie he says it in, but he says, so basically, the system in our central nervous systems that helps decide how many oxytocin receptors your body will be generating and how much oxytocin your body will be generating. So, like, a baseline expectation gets created in the birth and around the perinatal period. So if you have a child that doesn't get that huge infusion of naturally produced oxytocin, he's suggesting that their bodies will adjust how much oxytocin they will expect out of life. Does that make sense?

Wow. Yeah. That's huge.

Yeah. Yeah. There's footage. There's this really amazing footage of.

They.

Did a study where they took infants and they had the newborn birth. Right after the birth. The newborn would just be put right on the mother's abdomen. And a much higher percentage of the unmedicated delivery babies than the medicated birth babies crawled up to the breast and suckled all by themselves.

I love that.

Does that make sense? Yeah.

In the videos it's like, oh, my gosh, that is miraculous.

It's really amazing. I know one of the sessions in holistic peer counseling for birth is about.

Boobs, Vagina, boobs, all the important things.

You know, I mean, it's really amazing, right? It's really amazing because there's all this distress about these parts of the body that then all of a sudden are like, in your face when you become a mom, you know, or the most.

Important part of the whole process of becoming a mother. Right?

Yeah. And then you're like. And like, we kind of really wouldn't exist as a species unless we kept having babies. But then there are these things involved in having babies that we're supposed to be really self conscious about and not really even have and be like shameful about, you know, I mean, it's just this, like, that's so great. So I'm taking the lid off of that and basically being like, we are going to celebrate these things and we are going to really learn what they come up against, the shame and the stress around these things, so that we can fully embrace this experience.

That's awesome. I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it. Celebrating.

I know.

I've had that thought. My husband doesn't think so, but I would say I have smaller boobs. But as a younger, a younger part of my life, it was definitely kind of a distress of having small boobs and just really accepting them. Accepting my boobs for what they are. Like, holy wow. These boobs right here soon are going to be feeding a human being. How can that not be anything but.

Goosebumps?

Like, oh, my God, that's amazing.

And then what's so funny is you're talking about your distress of having small boobs and I like, have distress for having big boobs. You know what I mean? It's like, who does have distress in other boobs?

Boo. And the size of your nipple. Oh, my gosh. Yes. I love it. I love it. I love your passion and your commitment and also your humor about it. I think it's so great. So just one more kind of question if you will, and then we will wrap up. But if you could kind of leave a woman or just share something, whatever is on your heart or whatever, is there just to really empower and inspire a woman to go for the birth that she would most desire, what would you say to her today?

I think the first thing I'd say is that what you want. Are you somebody who wants to have the birth that you want. I would really just start there.

That's awesome. And just be with that.

It's usually all like backing up. A lot of this stuff is just backing up to where you're at. Right. And then from there, you know, if the, if the answer is yes, then we go all over the board. I mean, all over the board. Birth is like, like, what's the word? It's like, It's laden with. The terrain of birth is right now in our culture is not very clear cut. And so, you know, I'll have a client that comes in and is like, I want to have a home birth in water. I want my partner to be gazing me in the eyes madly in love with me while that's going on. And I want to have an orgasmic birth. You know, there's all these things that we want that people want and then there's like accepting the limitations of reality, which is a great skill to start developing before you become a parent. You know, so like, what's your financial situation, what's your housing situation? Like, what's your. So there's so much to complicate things and there's so many questions to answer before you actually get to that room. If you're going to really be conscious about this, that first thing to do is to get clear how committed you are to actually creating and putting one foot in front of the other towards the experience you want to have.

That's awesome. So not just a this is the idea that I would like to have or this is my kind of ideal. It's actually taking the steps necessary to move forward into that vision.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, this is where like in sexuality and birth, I'll say, you know, like, what kind of sex do you want to have? And how many people really work towards having the kind of sex they want to have? You know, it's like we all. There's a lot of fantasizing going on around love and then.

Sorry, go ahead.

No, say what you're going to say.

No, no, I was just going to say. And then like the fantasizing then sets us up for when it doesn't go how we fantasized and we didn't take the steps and we're disappointed. Like we're setting ourselves up for failure.

Right. But it is, you know, it's not really been put out there for us to, for instance, Ask the world to treat our vaginas and our wounds the way we want them treated.

Totally.

It's amazing to Me how radical of a suggestion that is. And that's a big part of birth. How would I like my womb treated? How would I like to treat my womb? How would I like to treat my birth canal? How would I like my birth canal treated? So to sit in that. To sit in that desire and then to actually put work towards making that happen, you're healing centuries of ancestral trauma with that. And it's hard. It's very hard work. It's not going to be comfortable. It's hard work. It's emotional. It's noisy in our heads. It takes time. It's what somebody said, the inconvenient work. Or we just sit in our fantasies and then, you know, like you said, are upset when that doesn't happen magically. Right.

Yeah. It's so amazing. I just was getting goosebumps as you were talking about that of just like, really. I just love. I love the energy that you have in really supporting us women to have the courage to. The courage to actually step up. I mean, this is like a courageous heroine journey that it's like, are you in? How do you want it to go? And are you willing to be brave?

That's right. That's exactly right. And that's what reclaiming this will be. We aren't going to reclaim this by not bringing our attention to it. It's not going to happen. We can't ask someone to turn it back over to us. Could you just give it back?

I'd like to not do that work.

Do you just pass it back on over? We have to reclaim it, otherwise we won't be able to hold it. It either. Even if someone handed it back to us, we wouldn't be able to hold it.

Yeah. So great.

I love it.

I love it because it's so inspiring, too. I think part of my process of being pregnant and being so interested in, as you said, asking the questions and plunging and meditating and playing around with it for me has been kind of what I've been doing. And there's part of me that's like, does it really make a difference? You know, like, I'm questioning all these things and, you know, just kind of having that question for me. And then there's like the empowering thing of having this conversation. And if we inspire someone to be like, no, I want to do it differently. And then all these people changing, like, we can literally change the world around birth and children and have a whole new generation of oxytocin little munchkins running around.

Yeah. And there are a lot of people that have been talking along those lines for some time. There's Sonny, Carl, who wrote Sacred Birthing. And I think there's a line in there like birthing a new humanity. You know, it's literally, there's this real understanding that like, we're bringing a new. Almost like a new species. I don't think of it quite so black and white, but I'm more of a continuum kind of gal. But there's definitely. There are people that are organizing themselves around that way of thinking that's so great. I just love it.

I feel like it's very inspiring because as you were saying, it's a challenging job to be a parent. And I feel like it brings a little bit more for me anyways, and some of the women that I've talked to, it brings a little bit more of like, purpose to it. I'm like, you know what? This, me actually going through this challenge and being willing to challenge certain things and be the mother that I want to be. I'm actually impacting the world in a huge way. Just, you know, by walking my child to the neighbors. Like, that's a big job.

That's right. Yeah. Like one of, one of the people, you know, I did birth work before I did birth work as a body worker. And just from my background, people often turn to me for things related to their birth. And there was this one mom that is coming to my mind that she has a master's in education from Vanderbilt University. So like top notch education in education. And she, she taught first grade and she had made the choice to be home with her daughter for some period of time after she was born. And the identity crisis that ensues around this decision, I had it too. It's not, you know, it's not specific to her. When we, you know, as my mom said to me at one point when I was in my, you know, college prep high school, you didn't learn how to cook? No, I didn't. You don't have home accent. No, I don't actually. So she was having this real crisis about this and, you know, for her. For me to reflect back to her that she's. Who isn't more qualified to be there to be with her daughter? I mean, she knows child development so well and she's this child's mother and has all this love and dedication. I was like, oh my God, this is like the luckiest kid on the planet. You know, but in her mind, it had all been organized around career. Right? That those talents and those skills and that Understanding was all organized around the focus of career. So it was like a total reframing to flip it around and be like, wow, wouldn't it be great if all of us had that education before we became parents?

Totally.

It would be very useful. Yes. Sign us up. Yeah.

Yeah. That's so great.

I love that.

That's so good. I love it. There's so much information. I think we could talk forever. So I'd love for you to share just your website where people can learn more about it, take these classes and just tap into and connect with you more on this wisdom. That would be fantastic.

Okay, let's see. You can go to embodiedbirth.com e m b o d I e d birth.com I have right now on there two audio classes and three video classes that you can just take online. I also have just a ton of written material on that site. I have an Amazon store with all sorts of things you can like, you know, books and DVDs and stuff you can click through to to get more material. September 4th, I'm going to be starting a holistic peer counseling for birth and parenting class. It'll be the first one that we're really looking at allowing people to hook into from anywhere. So that's a good place. And you can sign up for a newsletter there, which I should write more often. But sign up because I will be writing more often. And then another really great place to be aware of what's going on is to like my Embodied Birth page on Facebook. I do a lot of Facebooking. You can friend me, Nicole, Malia Shapiro. Nicole spelled Nicole and E K O L E. I use my personal page for work stuff too. I have a video, I have two videos, I think on YouTube if you just Google. Google my name on YouTube. I have a Twitter account which is also Embodied Birth, but it's really more just linked to my Facebook page. I don't tweet very actively. I think those are all the ways right now that you can stay aware of what's going on. Facebook is probably the most active and I'm going to be partnering, I'm partnering now more and more with the business here called Birth and Beyond. And so hopefully they'll be helping me use more of these avenues in different ways. I'm local to Seattle. That's where the in person classes happen. But I've gone to Reno to teach and Hawaii to teach and different places. Exciting.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your wisdom and your energy and your passion. Really, really appreciate it.

Sure. I should say one other thing is that I do do sessions through Skype too. So if people just want to do one on one time with me, we can also schedule that even if you're not local to Seattle.

Very cool. Awesome.

This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Yes, thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Mama Goddess. Sending you lots of love and blessings. If you'd like to connect more, go to mamagoddess. Com. Until next time, keep rocking it and have an awesome day.