Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering with Sarah Buckley, M.D.

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 Dr. Sarah Buckley. Dr. Buckley is a family phys and widely recognized authority on pregnancy, birth and parenting. She is the author of Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering and she is the mother of four children. Welcome, Dr. Buckley.

Thank you, Alexandra. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yes, it's so great to be chatting with you. I loved your book and I love your work and I just appreciate your medical side and then also your wisdom on the, the spiritual, the mental and emotional side as well too.

Thank you.

Very unique. So we're honored to be chatting with you today.

Fabulous.

So I'd love to start off with the preconception. What do you recommend a woman, a couple do preconception with their diet and just anything that they should do before they look at starting their family.

Well, the first thing I want to say is that that time preconception and the health of the mother and also the father is of the most important inputs into the health of the child life. It's like when you plant a garden, you really want to prepare the soil really well. And so I recommend that couples really take some time and usually at least three to six months to clean up their act, if you like, clean up their body to prepare for their conception of the baby. And this means some sort of basic things like getting rid of toxins in your diet, cigarette smoke, alcohol, cutting down on caffeine, and really choosing nutrient rich foods. You know, and there's a couple of things I want to say that people might not think of when I say, you know, have a healthy diet and one is good levels of fat. Not a fan of the current fashion for low fat diets. We really need a lot of fat. Our brains are made out of fat and in particular our babies brains are made out of fat. And our bodies go to a lot of trouble to provide good levels of fat for our babies and to store fat in a woman's body for breastfeeding as well. So fat is really important to a growing baby. So you know, we don't want to eat junk food fat. We want to eat high quality fat, which includes in my book saturated fat, high quality butter, high quality coconut oil, cold pressed organic oils, olive oil, some of the omega 3 oils like flaxseed oil, as well, and I think fish oil as well. Personally, I believe that that's a really important nutrient for the brain of the growing baby. So healthy fats and including full fat, dairy. And the other thing that I want to highlight for the mother before conception, going through to her pregnancy and birth, is having healthy gut flora. By that I mean the 1 kg or so of bacteria that lives in our intestines and that actually is probably the largest part of our immune system as far as we know. Because what a mother has on her gut flora and her bowel flora is what her baby's going to get from her at birth. And so optimizing the health of your gut flora, beginning to understand, actually optimizes your child's immune system lifelong and reduces the risk of allergies. I just saw a study yesterday showing that when the baby had low, had poor gut flora after birth, they were more likely to get eczema in infancy. So we just beginning to understand how important gut flora is. So, and again, I would suggest as a doctor, I'm not a big fan of antibiotics either. So really minimize and optimize your gut flora. And that means probiotics if you need to, but fermented foods like sauerkraut, fermented beverages like kombucha, like kefir, yogurt, those sorts of things, and really optimize that gut flora. And by the way, the man's gut flora can make a difference too.

Nice. So how much, how much would you recommend? Like, is there a recommendation for how much they should do for the probiotics? You know, do you have.

Yeah, look, look, the best way to get it is really in your food. I mean, you can take probiotics as a pill if you can't get it out of your food. But really, I really suggest fermenting foods. Kefir is a really great one. You know, you can grow it yourself at home, or you can your own yogurt or you can buy it from the supermarket. You just need to make sure that it really has the good bacteria in it, which is abc, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Bifidobacterium bifidus, and Lactobacillum casei. So at a minimum, those three to optimize your gut flora.

And then you said for the man as well. So could you just touch on that a little bit? Because I know a lot of the women focus on their bodies and their diets. And how does the man's diet and his lifestyle influence the preconception phase? And why is that so important?

Yeah. Well, with the woman, you know, what she brings to conception is her whole history of health right from the time she was in her mother's womb because that's when her eggs started to develop. For the man, he's making sperm every minute, a thousand sperm a second from each testicle. And look, sure. Over about three months. So for a man, it's a shorter term, well, generally shorter term thing, although his general health and well being is important so he can really go to work and optimize his health and well being so that he has the most healthy and powerful and super sperm that he can contribute to the baby. And that means all the things I'm saying for women, you know, reduce toxins, you know, optimize your diet, healthy fats, probiotics. Because a man's probiotics can influence a man, sorry, gut flora can influence the woman's gut flora when they pass it between each other during sexual activity. So yeah, all the things that apply to the woman also apply to the man. And look, I do, I do also recommend, I think the ideal is for both partners to go and have a hair mineral analysis to check the levels of nutrients and the levels of heavy metals and other toxins in hair. That's a really great thing to do. I suggest six months before you want to conceive and really give yourself time to optimize your health and well being. And just some figures, there's some, there's a group in the UK that have been doing this for many decades called Foresight and they have some excellent outcomes. You know, when, when the health of the woman and the man is optimized through a preconception program, the chances of miscarriage are reduced, the chance of having a healthy live baby are increased, the chances of preterm birth are reduced. And this includes women who have had fertility problems in the past. I've got lots more to say about this. I'm actually, I've made some videos so there'll be some free video segments available on my website called gentlenaturalbirth.com and you go and see a lot, hear a lot more of what I say about, particularly diet in the preconception time. And also I talk about the spiritual aspects of preconception as well, about, about connecting with your baby even before conception.

Very cool. So how do you, what do you recommend? You know, somebody listening to this and is thinking, when do I start this preconception? Do you say six months is like the ideal to start? Kind of.

Yeah, I do recommend six months. I Mean, whenever you think about, start to think about having a baby, it's a really good idea because you never quite know when it's going to happen. And but six months I'd say is a minimum to really, you know, look, you may find that your body, your health, your diet's in good shape, your HAEM analysis is good and there's not a lot to improve. But you know, for most of us there's something to do over those six months and to, you know, to use a form of contraception at that time. So you really, you know, your body is in peak state of readiness to conceive when you do conceive your baby.

Great. So then also I'm curious on which I know you talk a lot about in your book as well. There's once you do conceive that there's so many tests that you can do from the ultrasounds to the whatever, the amniocentation. Yeah, whatever that is, all of those things. Like, there's just so many. Can you just talk on that? And maybe some of the challenges and the pros and the cons of doing those.

Okay, so let's go back to first principles, I guess, the mother's perspective and the medical perspective. So the medical perspective is there's some conditions that uncommon, you know, the chance of a baby having an abnormality at birth is about one in 50. And each, you know, most of those abnormalities are not so common. Down syndrome is about 1 in 600, for example. And from a medical perspective, if we reduce the number of babies born with abnormalities, then that improves the outcome for mothers, improves the outcome for babies, improves our statistics. Dying around the time of birth. And of course, you know, the other thing is that, you know, people, you know, nobody, nobody would choose to have a baby with a congenital abnormality or a disability. So, you know, it's a really well intentioned system from the point of view of the medical profession. The problem is that we don't have any treatment for the vast majority of those abnormalities that we detect in babies before birth. And the only thing we can offer to women is to terminate the pregnancy. And so women often don't think this through when they're offered these tests. Well, what happens if something's wrong? You know, we go along to the test, even an ultrasound scan, and want to be reassured that everything's okay and our baby's fine. And most of the time that happens. But sometimes it doesn't happen. Sometimes there's a suggestion that there's a problem. And that suggestion there's A problem is called a screening test. So you go along there, you have a blood test or an ultrasound scan and you're told you're in a high risk category. And then what you need to have done is a diagnostic test. That's just a suggestion that there may be something wrong. And generally, you know, with those screening tests and I'm talking really now, I'm talking about things like the first trimester testing, the triple test and the second trimester, I'm talking about the nuchal translucency scan. I'm talking about those tests that test mainly for chromosomal abnormalities, the major one of which is down syndrome. So when you go along and have one of those tests and you're told that you're in a high risk category, what that means is your baby has more than, it depends on the, the test that they're using, but more than like a 101 in 250 to 300 chance of having that abnormality. So you know, if you think about sort of just generally, I mean, that's a pretty low chance, but from a medical perspective that's a higher risk. And then you're, you're offered a diagnostic test which can really, you can really see whether your baby does have these problems. And at the moment the only diagnostic tests we have are the one you mentioned, amniocentesis, where they take a sample of the baby's amniotic fluid and they test the cells, the chromosomes inside the baby cells that are floating around in the amniotic fl. And the other one is the chorionic villus sampling where they take a bit of the baby's developing placenta around 12, 13 weeks, something like that. And again, they test it for chromosomes, they take it away to the lab and they have to grow the tissue, actually they have to grow it in the laboratory over a couple of weeks. So it takes a couple of weeks to get those results back. But that's the diagnostic test. And it both involves sticking a needle into your belly one way or another. You need a little where the baby is. Yeah. And to take that sample. And that has risks. You know, there's a risk of causing miscarriages, the main one. So that sort of testing for down syndrome is well intentioned. It's designed to screen women so that only those who are at high risk get the diagnostic test. But the problem is if you're in that and if you come back, if you have a test and they say, well, you're at high risk for having this, it's a, it's a very concerning result to have and it's really worrying. And, you know, it's a difficult time in your pregnancy to be worried. You're just starting off, you don't really know what's going on. And, you know, one of my big concerns about all of these tests is that the worry that it puts into the mothers and it's going to be several weeks till you can have the test done, a couple of weeks till the results come back, and you're going to be in this state of concern about your baby. And we know that stress and good baby and then we're, you know, setting up these tests and systems that increase stress for mothers. And that's my concern, you know, and that's something I think people really need to think through and also to think through. Now, would you consider having a termination of your pregnancy if your baby was found to have an abnormality? And that's I know that's a really big decision and you're not necessarily what you do unless you're in that situation. But if your answer is definitely no to that, then I'd suggest not even getting on the train, not even having the first test, because that's ultimately the decision you could end up having to make. For book by Barbara Katz Rothman called the tentative pregnancy, and she calls it the tragedy of your choice. You know, do you have a continual pregnancy with a baby with an abnormality that might die at birth or might live lifelong with a problem like down syndrome? Or do you choose to terminate, you know, a wanted pregnancy and all the emotional trauma that goes with that, which can last for months and even years? So it's, you know, this whole system, I mean, it's well intentioned, but there's a lot of heartbreak, a lot of potential heartbreak in it. So I really recommend people think about that beforehand. I actually wrote a chapter in my first book on it on prenatal testing, and that's going to be up on my website. I'm putting together a new membership website called Gentle Natural Birth. So that chapter will be available to members on my website that will be launched in September.

That's so great. So then for the. I love that too. And the question which I think is so important that we ask the question of what would we do if we get the results? You know, and it's a challenging question, but what would you recommend? Somebody would you say, don't do any tests at all, do ultrasounds? Like what I know in your book you talk about the potential dangers of ultrasounds as well Which I know a lot of people just don't know and they don't talk about as well. So can you just share a little bit on that too?

Sure, sure. So ultrasounds are really quite recent. We've only been doing them the last 30 or 40 years and we don't have a lot of research on the potential risks to the baby because we know that ultrasound. I don't know if anyone's gone along to a physical therapist and had an ultrasound put on their sprained ankle or soft tissue injury. And it's a different sort of ultrasound, a higher level ultrasound, but you can tell that ultrasound causes heating. When they put it on your skin, it causes heating. So that ultrasound that we put into the mum's belly to look at the baby also causes heating to some extent and it causes other physical processes within living tissues. And there's no doubt about that, that's really well established in the scientific literature. But what's not established, what we don't know is what does that mean for our unborn babies? That we're exposing them to something that actually has significant biological effects that causes heating at a tissue level, that causes a process called cavitation, that causes disruption to the cell membranes. All of those things we know. And the research has really, it's quite shocking when you start to really think about it, that so many babies are being exposed to ultrasound and we can't say for sure that it's safe. Some of the older studies suggested that, and these are studies from the early 80s where the scans were only three minutes long and the machines had about one tenth of that power output that they have now, 1/10 to 100. And those studies showed that there was an increase in left handedness or non right handedness among children that were scanned. And there's nothing wrong with being left handed people, but what that shows is there's something going on. The ultrasound is actually causing some shift in the brain. And what does that mean? What else might it do? We really don't know. There was an animal study that showed that the more ultrasound that these baby rats received in pregnancy, the more scrambled their brains were, the more abnormalities of neuronal migration, to put it in a scientific sense, occurred where the brain cells that are meant to migrate up and from the base of the brain up to their final position, actually a lot of them went astray. And the more ultrasound the mothers received, the more astray their babies brains went. And we know that if you give enough ultrasound in these studies that the babies died if they had more than About, I think it was 60 minutes. So six hours of ultrasound through the whole pregnancy, which is a lot. I mean, that's proportional. It's only a 21 day gestation. So proportional to humans, that's days and days of ultrasound. So I'm not suggesting it causes that sort of effect, but, you know, what does it cause? And the answer is we don't know. And we just don't have the studies. And we don't have any studies done since 1993 when the machines changed. When the FDA decided that they weren't going to limit the output of the ultrasound machines used in pregnancy, they were just going to put readouts of it so that the person using the machine could keep the output within certain parameters. And the outputs increased by about seven times at that time. And we don't have any studies showing that that higher dose of ultrasound that our babies are now getting is in fact safe for our babies.

And so then for you, you had your four beautiful children at home, did you do any ultrasounds or you just didn't do any of the testing. And I'm just curious because you have your medical background and then you also have like a new way, a new paradigm that you're sharing as well.

Yes. Okay, well, I didn't have any scans with my babies. And you know, I think it's, I'm not saying to anyone, do it or don't do it. I think, you know, you've got the information and decide what's right for you. I'm not in favor of the routine test because really, not only is there no evidence that it's safe, but there's no evidence it's actually useful. When all that happens is the only, the only benefit, if you like, and then put that inverted commas, is if some abnormalities can be picked up on, the mother can be offered a termination so the baby dies earlier in pregnancy rather than at birth. So, you know, we don't really have any substantial benefits for that, for that routine scan. And often it's a little like I was sharing with the prenatal testing. There's a chance of false positives where there seems to be something wrong with the baby, but it turns out to be fine soft markers where we see something that may be associated with an abnormality but might not be either. And again, that's causing worry and concern for the mother. So, you know, I'm not in favor of the routine scan. I think if there's a reason you need an ultrasound, sure, you know, it's a great test, you know, the older. In the olden days, we used X ray, which we know definitely was harmful to the baby. So the information that's needed, I don't have a problem with it. But exposing all of our babies with no established safety and no established benefit seems a little crazy to me. So I chose not to do that. It was my first baby. I just thought, well, I don't really need it. And I'd also had experiences, you know, with, within the medical system where exactly, as I say, you know, something might be wrong. No, there's some. Some slight problem there. And you've got to go back again. You've got to go back again and say in my article, in my chapter on this, in my book, you know, it can end. You can end up feeling like your baby belongs to the system, not to you. And that's what I wanted to avoid with that first pregnancy and my second one. I actually went and heard a talk by Beverly beach from the talking about possible hazards of ultrasound. And I was pregnant with my daughter Zoe at the time, this is 18 years ago, and my ears pricked up and I thought, that's another good reason not to have an ultrasound. I didn't any tests at all, any ultrasound at all. And there was no need to. And look, if there was a pressing reason, I would have considered it, you know, And I think, I think the other thing is if you do have a need, there's a lot of information about this in my book. But if you do have a need to have it, you know, I recommend that you talk to the sonographer and get them to use the lowest dose possible, that information. And really, you know, you want them to be aware that there are some risks from this and, and you have the shortest scan possible and you want to go to someone that's experienced at it so they can get the most information in the shortest period of time. Now, for example, my last daughter had a clicky hip. She was breech. And I decided to go and have a scan of that. So she had an ultrasound scan of her hip. And I talked to the doctor and I said, these are my concerns. And so we had a short scan and it was something. Information that was useful to me. I wanted to know if she had had a problem with a hip joint, which sometimes happens with breech babies. And, you know, I made an informed choice and I got the information and I talked to the doctor and, you know, I was quite happy with that decision.

Right. Yeah, I love that too. And I love that you hold the perspective of everybody needs to Figure out what they need to do, you know, because it's not like ultrasounds know that there is a time and there's a place, and it's a great. We live in a very amazing time. We can do these ultrasounds, and there's certain things that we can do. So I just appreciate your willing to be able to kind of hold both of them. It's really.

Yeah. There's one more thing I want to say about Alexandra, which is that the other thing that I think ultrasound shifts for us as mothers is it shifts our relationship with our babies. I don't know if you know the feminist Jermaine Greer. She's originally from Australia, and she just talked at a home birth conference, and she was talking about ultrasound, and she said, we don't believe anything is real these days unless we see it on the telly.

Yeah.

Which is our baby on the screen. And I think what it does, you know, in a subtle way, it puts the knowledge of the baby out there rather than in ourselves. I mean, we're always in touch with our babies. You know, we've got this ongoing connection that doesn't, you know, that's constantly there in our pregnancy, and we can tune into our babies and our babies, you know, within a. You know, we might. We might go to an ultrasound and be amazed there's actually a baby in there. But if we just wait a few weeks, we'll feel the baby move and we'll know there's a baby in there, and we'll have this internal relationship and ongoing dialogue with our babies, you know, physiologically as well as emotionally. I really recommend that women, you know, tune into their babies and get that deep internal knowing because, you know, and I think ultrasound can cut. It can cut across that. So you know your baby from the inside. You don't need to know your baby from the outside.

Yeah. I think that's such a great point. And being pregnant, I definitely. I always say, like, this is like, the biggest spiritual practice of surrender, because you. You can't control it. You can't see, you don't know. So it's just like surrender and then trusting in your intuition and. And just going with the flow, like creation is doing its thing.

So that's so beautiful, Alexandra. And how far through your pregnancy are you?

I am seven, almost eight months next week.

Oh, how exciting. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing I say also, you know, and I'm sure you've experienced this, is it's like your baby's on this particular wavelength. It's like a radio station for me, you know, they're sort of always on the station and we sort of operate a little bit differently in the outside world. But we can tune into our baby's radio station. You know, we can sit quietly, we can meditate, we can walk, we can do yoga. And it's a very beautiful, blissful place to be just to hang out on our baby's frequency.

Definitely. I love it. Beautiful. Well, so there's so many, there's so many topics. But I'm really curious and I know you have an ebook and you talk about this in a lot of your work, the Ecstatic Birth. So can you share on what ecstatic birth is? And I know some people may be like, what, what is ecstatic birth? There's nothing about ecstatic or birth being ecstatic. So can you just talk about the potentials for our birth?

Yeah. So what I say is that Mother Nature intends birth to be an ecstatic experience for mothers and babies of all mammalian species. You can't necessarily ask them. But the reason I say that is because during labor and birth, Mother Nature provides an ecstatic hormonal cocktail. And this is there to enhance ease, pleasure and safety for mothers and babies of all mammalian species. And these ecstatic hormones include four hormones that I particularly single out in my talk, which my talks in writing, which is oxytocin, which we know is the hormone of love. And that's the hormone that actually causes the contractions of labor. But at the same time that it's doing that in our uterus, it's also being released in our brain. And in our brain it has calm, connecting, loving, trusting, reduces fear, has a whole lot of really reduces pain as well. There's a whole lot of really beneficial effects within the brain. And it also is working during labor in our brains to switch on instinctive mothering behaviors. And this happens in all species. You know, it's an essential that every mammalian mother is switched on to caring for her baby straight after birth. And they weren't necessarily in other mammals anyway during pregnancy. That won't necessarily take care of a baby during pregnancy, but once that baby's born and it comes out, oxytocin and these other ecstatic hormones have switched on the mothering parts of the, of the mother's brain. And she knows exactly what to do in a species specific way. You know, for a rat or a mouse, which a lot of this research has done on, they huddle and, you know, offer their teats and they, they lick the babies and cuddle with them. I mean, for human Mothers that involves picking up our babies and holding them skin to skin. And, you know, it's been demonstrated that there's a sequence that mothers usually go through when they meet their baby. They'll, they'll touch their baby, they'll touch their hands, they'll stroke their baby, larger strokes on the body, they'll hold their baby on the left side so that the baby's ear is close to the mother's heart and can hear the mother's heartbeat, which will be familiar from the womb. And then of course, we allow our babies to suckle. So there's species specific mothering behaviour among every mammal and that's switched on during the processes of labor and birth by the hormone oxytocin. And the second ecstatic hormone is called beta endorphin, which are called the hormone of pleasure and transcendence. That's a hormone that is a natural pain relieving hormone and it's a hormone of euphoria. It's like the runner's high hormone or it's a hormone. It's the feeling that people get when they take a dose of those addictive opiate drugs. And to reduce pain, it's designed to imprint reward. It activates the reward centers of our brain and it's designed to positively addict us to our baby. In fact, there was a study that, so that it activates the reward centers in the brain, which actually oxytocin does as well. There was a study, actually an MRI study, where they looked at the brains of new mothers when they heard their baby cry. And what they found was when the mothers had had a vaginal birth, when they'd been through this process and had all those hormones acting on their brain, that the reward centers of their brain and the alertness centers in their brain lit up just on hearing their baby cry. So that's been treated. Their brains have been shifted by these hormones, these peaks of hormones in labor. And then the third ecstatic hormones I talk about are epinephrine, norepinephrine, also called adrenaline, noradrenaline. And these hormones are hormones of excitement. And again, they peak around the time of birth. And this peak around the time of birth makes the mother alert and gives her the energy to push her baby out. The baby also has a peak of these hormones that prepares the baby for life outside the womb, called the catecholamine surge. That prepares the baby for breathing outside the womb for that period between when they come out of the womb and they're not getting placental nutrition to when the mother's breast milk comes in. And these hormones make the baby alert and ready to do all those things the baby needs to do after birth, which is find the breast and attach and suckle, which is essential for survival. So they're essential survival hormones as well. In fact, the other hormone, norepinephrine, helps the baby to learn the smell of the mother. The peaks of norepinephrine, and print the mother's smell on the baby. And I think about that with my last baby, who got a big dose of the ecstatic hormones. And, you know, she's been so addicted to my smell, even now she's 12, and she just, when she's stressed, she just wants to smell me. Imprinting of my smell being, you know, rewarding and a positive experience. And then the last static hormone is prolactin, which is the breastfeeding hormone. But it also has, like the other hormones, significant effects on the mother's brain. You know, it switches on maternity and all mammalian species. I'll call it the hormone tender mothering. And I think prolactin, it starts to increase during pregnancy. And I always think of, you know, when you're pregnant, don't know if you've had this experience, and you see little baby animals and you go all gooey. There's a particular sort of gooeyness.

Yeah, totally.

That's your mothering brain being turned on even during pregnancy by all of these hormones, but particularly prolactin. So and birth, we get peak levels of all of these hormones. We get the peak level of oxytocin, the hormone of the love, peak levels of beta endorphin, hormone of pleasure, peak levels of epinephrine, norepinephrine, hormones of excitement, and peak levels of prolactin, the hormone of tender mothering. And so we get this ecstatic hormonal cocktail, as I call it, that's designed to. Not just to imprint mothering behaviors, to imprint pleasure and reward. And actually, there's a whole lot of ways that those hormones also enhance safety. We talked about the catecholamine surge preparing the baby. Another mechanism is the mother's oxytocin actually crosses into the baby and. And turns down the baby's brain activity, puts the baby a little bit asleep. So in state, the baby's brain isn't using a lot of glucose and a lot of oxygen, and it protects the baby during those strong contractions of labor. So there's a whole lot of inbuilt safety factors, some of which involve these hormones and other hormones and factors as well, that are built into this ecstatic birth model, as I call it. And it's designed to be a good experience for the mother. And it's designed that the mother gives birth and she picks up her baby and she says, wow, I could do that again. You know, that experience. That's the feeling that you have. And Mother Nature wants every mother to have that baby because she wants us all to have lots of babies.

Yeah, that's always my thought. You know, people say that they don't remember. There's the typical comment of, you don't remember the pain because Mother Nature doesn't want you to remember it so that you continue to have babies. But I'm like, really? Is it supposed to be that challenging? So what do you think is what's going on in our birth culture? That birth is associated with pain and what can we do about it to start creating more ecstatic births?

Yeah. Okay. There's a couple of things I'd say to that. The first thing is that one of the. I'm going to quote one of my heroes and mentors, Michelle Odont, you know, the French. He's a surgeon, actually, and he wrote a lot of books on birth. And he says the problem is we don't understand. I've got to use this French accent here. The basic needs of the laboring woman. And it's true, we don't. Because if you think about birth among all other mammals, and we are mammals, and our systems of birth are almost identical across mammalian species. So other mammals seek a quiet, private place to give birth. And. And if you're an animal breeder or you have a domestic animal who's going to be laboring at home, the first thing that you do is provide privacy for that animal and provide a safe space and, you know, a nesting box. And what do we do to women in labor? You know, we provide a public space with all sorts of people walking in and out, even when they're naked or showing their intimate body parts. We provide strangers and strange noises and strange smells and strange machines. And we, you know, we strap them to machines that go ping in labor. And all of those things not only are against our mammalian heritage, but they have a hormonal impact. They actually trigger the fight or flight hormones for the laboring woman. And what this means is that the fight or flight hormones kick in and she thinks she's in danger and her body switches off labour. Not only does it switch off labour, but it also shifts blood away from her uterus and baby and to her, the parts of her body, she needs for fight or flight. So the two effects of a surge of these hormones, and we know this from studies done of laboring women, is it slows labor down and it deprives the baby of blood and oxygen to some extent. And it makes sense, you know, in the system that we have a very disturbed birth, I would say I call it undisturbed and disturbed birth. Disturbed birth model. The things that we need to intervene for is, you know, slow labour and fetal distress, you know, the baby not having enough blood and oxygen. And if we look at, you know, how we care for labouring women, you know, we don't, we don't take into account their emotional needs. And in contrast, in traditional cultures and other cultures worldwide, that's the number one priority is the emotional needs of the labouring woman. And if we tend to her emotional needs, needs, we make sure she feels, you know, as I say, private, safe and unobserved in labour, then her labor is going to be much easier and go much more smoothly and her levels of fight or flight hormones are going to be lower. And that's not going to be counteracting those positive labour hormones that actually cause labor to happen. And, you know, if we look at statistics for this, we could say that this explains why taking a doula to hospital with you, a doula helps to create that safe space for you, reduces your chance of intervention, increases the health of the baby at the birth. We can say that's why home birth has such good outcomes, because mothers and babies feel private, safe and unobserved, and their chance of needing a caesarean is way, way lower, you know, 5 to 10% at the most, compared to about 30% for women giving birth in hospital. So all of these things are, you know, unmeasurable. And, you know, when we're looking at having, giving birth ourselves, you know, the thing we want to consider is, is it, you know, how can I create a situation that is private, safe and unobserved for myself? And another, another way of looking at, at it that I talk about sometimes is that the hormones of labor, of having a baby are almost identical to the hormones of making a baby. Yeah, we have the same requirements. So setting up a situation for labor, you really want to set up the sort of situation where you could make a baby is the ideal situation for having a baby.

That's so great. I love that. And it's so different too. You know, most people just see from the movies and it's not, does not look like the romance is flowing in the hospital.

No. And that's exactly right, what you say, the romance. Because, you know, and for the mother and baby, you know, Michelle Adon calls it the beginning of a great love affair. You know, it's Mother Nature's best shot at species survival, is that mother and baby fall in love with each other. It's all designed for that to happen. And, you know, when we start messing with these ecstatic hormones with various interventions, like epidurals, like cesareans, you know, like synthetic oxytocin, we start messing with all of these hormones and we mess with that great love affair that's meant to happen. And the mother and the baby comes out and the mother doesn't really know what to do and she's not interested and she hasn't fallen deeply and maybe in love with her baby. You know, and in the wild, that would be a recipe for the baby not surviving. It's not true in modern society, but still, you know, I believe that's. That's not an ideal start and it's not what mothers want. You know, it's a big enough job being a mother in our culture to start with. And, you know, if you can have that great start and fall in love with your baby, gosh, the whole thing is going to be so much easier.

Yeah. And then, so what is your, what's your thought from your just experience and being a medical doctor, that, you know, the complications, because it seems like you're saying a 30% of cesareans that happen and the epidurals and all of these things. How does this impact, like the mother and the baby?

Baby?

And is there anything that we can do? You know, because a lot of people, like, there's. I needed to go. It was an emergency. I had to go and the doctor saved me. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, it's sort of. We call it that. We call it the cascade of intervention. So you have one intervention and that messes with your hormones and you need another intervention, which messes with your hormones and another intervention. Now, for example, you know, when a woman's induced in labor, you know, know, she gets a high dose of a synthetic version of oxytocin, and that causes her contractions to be very intense right at the very start of labor, which is not when they're designed to be intense. Labor is designed to gradually build up and the hormones gradually build up so that by the time labor is at that most intense time, you've got a good buildup of your pain, relieving effects from beta endorphin and oxytocin so that sudden onset of severe pain, then the mother needs another intervention, which is something to repair her own natural painkilling hormones because they haven't had a chance to kick in. So, you know, analgesic of some sort, maybe an epidural. And then the epidural slows down her own oxytocin release. And then she needs, you know, something to kick her labor on, or then she needs a cesarean. So you can sort of see it from the hormonal perspective. Once we start messing with it, we end up in this cascade of intervention. And, you know, the best, the best thing to do is really to not start with any of those interventions and, and to really start with a low technology model of birth, midwifery care, home birth, birth center. At the least, take a doula into hospital with you so that your fight or flight hormones aren't going to be activated. So, yeah, when we look at the interventions, we can really understand the effects by looking at the ecstatic hormones. And epidurals, for example, reduce oxytocin, which is why when a woman has an epidural, her labor often slows, and then she needs synthetic oxytocin. They also reduce beta endorphins. So the thing, actually, the thing I did say about beta endorphin, maybe specifically, is that when we're under the influence of beta endorphin, it puts us into an altered state of consciousness. And in that altered state of consciousness, we can, I say, we can transcend the stress and pain of labor. So when you get an epidural, you don't get that effect. And, you know, that's why women with epidurals can watch television, you know, because they're not in that labor land, that older state of consciousness that Mother Nature wants us to get into when we have epidural baby. I've heard a Native American tribe describe it as the laboring mother goes out to the stars to collect the soul of her baby and bring it back. So that's what mother Nature wants to happen during labor. And, you know, various interventions really interfere with that, let alone the fact that we're in an unfamiliar and, you know, as far as our, like, primal survival brain goes, we're in a dangerous situation. And, you know, it's not safe to go into that older state of consciousness in a dangerous situation. So all of these things conspire against, you know, the full expression of our ecstatic hormones and, you know, the maximum ease, pleasure and safety during birth, because that's what it's all about. It's not about experience, actually. You know, it is a good experience, but it's not about that. It's about mother and baby surviving the birth and thriving and going on to have more, more offspring who survive and thrive and, you know, imprinting pleasure, reward, love, beginning with a great love affair. All of these things that naturally happen at birth are really essential for species survival, have been through, through millions of years for all mammals, even though it's not. They're not essential for species survival. For modern human beings, there's a big missing when it doesn't go right, when mothers have to don't have that falling in love with their baby and attachment can be interfered with and breastfeeding can be interfered with. It's all the same hormonal systems.

Wow. It's very inspiring. We do not want to mess with these. We don't want to mess with Mother Nature.

Right? Yeah, yeah. And on the other hand, I call it Mother Nature. Superb design. You know, we can really access that and maximize that by going with our hormones, by providing, you know, circumstances where women feel private, safe and unobserved, by making sure she's attended by familiar people in labor, by, you know, not interfering, you know, with the. The processes of labor and birth. By not talking to her, actually, because all of the crisis that are happening for the laboring woman are happening in a part of her brain called the limbic system, which is the middle layer of the brain. And on top of that is our rational brain, the neocortex. And, you know, the laboring woman needs to sink down, we need to down into our limbic system for all of these hormones to, to optimally express themselves. And when we ask questions, we have bright lights, all of those things that sort of wake us up. We go into our neocortex and that takes us away from that, the full hormonal expression. You know, it's like. It's like you're in the middle of making love and someone comes and asks you what six times three is.

That's awesome. I love that exact. It puts it into perspective. You're like, what? Who cares?

Right? That's right. With a white coat and a bright light, then it would give you a heck of fright and take you completely out of that hormonal state that you're in. And you probably wouldn't achieve conception either.

So what about the interventions? And then the baby's born. There's so many things that are done to the baby, from the cleaning to the cord clamping and all of that. Can you just talk about. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the cord clamping and when is the best time to do that and some options that we have around that.

Well, you're probably getting the idea that I'm a big fan of Mother Nature and that whatever she says goes. So Mother Nature's superb design, if you look at other mammals, is that we don't clamp and cut the cord at all. I know my friend Sarah Wickham, who's a midwife in the uk, she says that if Mother Nature designed us to clamp our baby's cord, we'll be born with a cord clamp on our thigh. That obviously isn't true. So, you know, there's no cord clamps in nature. Now, what happens in nature is the baby comes out after a few minutes, the placenta comes out, and then the mother chews through the cord to separate the baby from the placenta after it's born. And that's birth physiology. That's what, what's designed to happen is that we don't do anything until the placenta comes out. So cord clamping is actually, you know, is, you know, there's no cord clamping in nature. And I'm not suggesting women bite through their core through the baby's cor. So, yeah, I mean, you can cut it at that stage if you want to, or you can have a lotus birth or, you know, in actually, in developing countries where there's not access to sterile equipment, there's a technique of burning the cord, of actually using a candle flame and burning through the cord. And at that stage, when the placenta comes out, the cord is pretty much. There's no blood flowing through it. And, you know, you're not really going to get. You're not going to get a spurt of blood. You're probably not even going to get a drip of blood at that stage. So that's what Mother Nature designs. And one of the reasons, reasons that that's so optimal for mothers and babies is that when the placenta, when the baby's been born and the placenta is still in the mother's belly and the cord's not cut, there's quite a large amount of blood, around about 100 mils or a third to even up to a half of the baby's blood volume, that gets transferred from the placenta that's in the mother's womb to the baby that's just been born. It's called the placental transfusion. That 100 mils of blood is rich in iron. It has the equivalent iron of 100 liters of breast milk, or a month worth of breastfeed. So when baby's cords are clamped earlier, we know from scientific studies the chances of that baby being anemic in infancy is much higher because they're not getting that extra iron. And of course, that cord blood, as we call it, or it's the placental transfusion is the proper name. That placental transfusion contains stem cells. And everybody wants to get their hands on those stem cells and go and bank them and sell them and all sorts of things, but they have a purpose for the baby. You know, Mother Nature doesn't design such valuable cells to be wasted. Mother Nature designs that those cells, after birth migrate to the baby's bone marrow and start to form various types of blood cells because they're hematopoietic cells. So that's the function of stem cells. And there's a whole lot of other factors in that. In the cord blood that we're really just beginning to understand. You know, there's factors in there that optimize the baby's brain growth and that minimize hypoxic damage. If there's any areas in the brain that didn't get oxygen in labor, it actually helps to recover those. There's extra red cells in there that help the baby to have optimal oxygen levels in those moments after birth. There's bilirubin. You know, when the red cells get broken down, they form bilirubin, which makes the baby a bit jaundice. And that bilirubin is an antioxidant, which the baby needs after birth. So when we look at it from, you know, Mother Nature's superb design, we can see that there's many, many factors that benefit the baby. We can also see that there's lots of harms we could do by depriving the baby of that hundred mils of blood through immediate cord clamping. And similarly, you know, for the baby, after the birth, the baby, you know, the mammalian heritage or for our primate ancestors anyway, is that the baby goes onto the mother's body, and we imagine a great, great, great, great grandmother giving birth in the wild. There were no blankets, and maybe not as the baby had to go in the mother's body to keep warm. And the mother's got this system to warm up the baby, you know, when she's had these peaks of oxytocin after. After birth, and as the baby nuzzles into her and she massages her breast and then licks her nipple, she gets more surges of oxytocin and that opens up the blood vessels on her chest wall. We call it vasodilation. That produces a natural warming effect. It's actually the same mechanism where, you know, when a woman's sexually aroused, she can get a flush that goes up her chest, even up to her neck. And that's the, that's the same system with oxytocin opening up those blood vessels. And its function is to keep our newborn babies warm. So the newborn baby is really, really well warmed on the mother's chest, naked skin to skin. And in that environment, the baby can enact their innate and pre programmed behaviors to look around to find the breast, which it locates by smell because the mother's nipple smells a bit like amniotic fluid. Then the baby massage the mother's breast and then the baby will lick the nipple and then the baby will eventually get on and suckle. And that's a pre programmed behavior, limbic system imprint, you could say, for the baby. When the baby does that and gets onto the breasts themselves, they'll have a perfect suck. They'll know what to do like every other mammalian baby does. You know, the mother pigs, they're stuffing the baby onto her nipples. You know, after birth they know what to do. Human babies, we just need to give them the right environment, which is naked skin to skin on the mother's body. And if we start messing around with them and removing them for any reason, we actually interfere with that whole pre programmed behavior. And we interfere with the effectiveness of the baby's first suckling and probably subsequent sucklings as well.

Wow, amazing. You just articulated that like beautifully and amazing. Wow, that's like so incredible.

These are great. There's actually, there's a public health physician from South Africa called Nils Bergman. So if any of your listeners ever get a chance to hear him, he's fantastic. In talking about the pre programming, the limbic imprint, he talks about the environment of evolutionary adaptation that, you know, through millions of years of evolution, the environment the baby's adapted to being is on the mother's belly, on skin to skin. And that's where the baby can do all these things and that's where the baby expects to be. And the other important thing about that actually is that that has a hormonal influence on the baby as well. Because being skin to skin with someone releases oxytocin. So the baby, the mother, has got this oxytocin surge after birth. And the baby's pre breastfeeding behaviors Increase the oxytocin. In fact, increase it by a factor of 10 at that time. And the baby also also gets an outpouring of oxytocin through the processes of labor. But also in those moments after birth, those hour two after birth when the baby's skin to skin and the suckling increases oxytocin. And that oxytocin switches off the baby's stress system, that catecholamine surge I was talking about, and switches on the baby's calm and connection system. And some people, like Nils Bergman, believe that that's actually tuning up the baby's stress system for life. The baby not knows that, you know, stress happens and then the calm and connection happens. And you know, it's for other animals. If you want to produce an animal that's stressed in adulthood, you remove that animal from the mother in the early days after birth. And that's what we do routinely. And then we have epidemics as culture. And you know, I think those things are probably linked, right?

Wow, that's so amazing. I love that, the placenta, I just love all of it, like the whole process that you just took us for the placenta transfusion. And people just don't know this. They don't know that this is important, you know, and they just get the cord cut and it's not a big deal, but it's vital. This is amazing. Stem cells and skin to skin and oxygen and wiring our baby's brain.

One of the take home messages from that that I want to leave people with is, you know, if anything happens during birth but doesn't go the way you want if you end up having a cesarean. No, the answer to that is skin to skin, skin to skin, skin to skin. Because all of those things will reduce the baby's stress system, reduce your stress system, help to switch on that limbic programming for the baby. And when a baby's had a difficult birth and they're groggy or drowsy or they haven't yet woken up because they've been pulled out a bit impolitely by cesarean. They're not ready for it. You know, skin to skin, you know, like I'd say hours and hours and days of it is what's really going to make the difference for a baby that's had a difficult birth or a baby that's having difficulty breastfeeding, actually, because, you know, when I was at medical school, we learned all that we call the primitive reflexes that babies are born with, like the stepping reflex when you stroke the Bottom of a baby's feet they step. And the rooting reflex where the baby turns its head. And all of those reflexes we now know are designed so the baby can crawl up the mother's belly and find the breast and self attach. And the baby has those primitive reflexes for at least six weeks afterwards. So where there has been difficulty in birth or there has been trauma or the baby's not suckling properly, a lot of, you know, you can use this. You can get in the bath, skin to skin, naked with your baby and let your baby crawl up and enact those specific species specific innate behaviors and find the breast and self attach and they'll have and they'll correct their suckle. And you know, a lot of people have resolved their breastfeeding problems from allowing the baby to reprogram it, reprogram themselves if you like.

That's amazing. Yeah, I've seen the videos of that, of just watching kind of the babies crawl from the belly up to the breast. And our amazing midwife, Mary Jackson, we just talked to her last week about this, that she was just saying that babies that have had the trauma or whatever, you just let them crawl up and just kind of create their birth experience and release the stress and reattach to the breast. So it's miraculous.

Yeah, it is miraculous. We're all self healing, aren't we? And never too late to have a good birth.

Yeah, I think that's so great too because I know a lot of people definitely are preparing and they want to have their ideal birth. So I love that you added that because sometimes people don't have their ideal birth and then what can we do after to be co creators in that. So that's really beautiful, the skin to skin.

Actually one more thing about that, which is breastfeeding, because these hormones I'm talking about, three of those hormones are hormones of breastfeeding. Oxytocin, beta endorphin and protein prolactin. So mother Nature, you know, breastfeeding is mother Nature's backup system. You know, if you don't get that attachment and that great love affair happening at birth and that happens through breastfeeding. And similar to the MRI study that I quoted before, we know that mothers who are breastfeeding have more activation of their empathy systems when they hear their babies cry because those parts of their brains are continually being activated through these hormones with each breastfeeding episode, the breastfeeding is the other way. You know, Mother Nature, nature doesn't give us just one shot. Mother Nature has all These backup systems to make sure that really happens. Because as I said, it's not. It's not. It is a good feeling, but it's not about having a good feeling. It's about species survival. And that good feeling means that we're having our reward system activated, which is motivating and rewarding us to do all those things we need to do for our babies. There was a study in rats actually where they gave the mother rats between day three and day 10 after giving, giving birth. And those mother rats, they gave them a choice between having a dose of cocaine and contact with their pups, with their babies, and they actually chose the baby. So at that time the baby's more raw, rewarding to their brains than cocaine babies are. Yeah.

That's so great. I love that too that you said that. They give us numerous opportunities so there's like we're not screwing it up. If we kind of mess up in something, there's always an opportunity to kind of reactivate these hormones.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And skin to skin and breastfeeding is, you know, really important, you know, great access to that.

Yeah. So on the breastfeeding, I'd be interested to hear just your thoughts on the breastfeeding and the postpartum kind of phase, postpartum rest and co sleeping and how, what are your recommendations for how to navigate, navigate that whole process?

Well, I quite like the Chinese approach to that. I mean if you look at the postpartum period in most traditional cultures, the mother gets at least 40 days of rest and she's tended by relatives and she's kept warm and all she has to do is look after her baby. And I think we really in our culture could take, you know, could really use that as an example and create nourishing, restful postpartum periods for ourselves. And some people call it the baby moon. And I think six weeks is an ideal period. You know, you know, when you've given birth, you've gone through this massive expansion and your boundaries have re blurred in a sort of psychological or could say spiritual sense. You know, you've, you've expanded to let this baby come through and you're in this quite vulnerable state. You know, my sister in law is a home birth midwife in New Zealand. She calls it the golden orb of the baby moon. Like this big circle that's around baby and you know, you want to stay inside that circle and get that nourishment and rest and protection and, and you know, you don't want to make any holes in that by going Out. You don't want to take your baby out. I really believe that six weeks at home is the ideal. Getting tended to and being looked after. And, you know, for me with my babies, the more children I had, the more time I took. And my own experience was that when I really had a good rest after birth, it gave me the energy to get through the first year. It really was the best investment for me. And in Chinese medicine terms, they say that when you rest and, and keep yourself warm after birth, you're actually contributing to a healthy menopause. They take it way, way beyond that. It's a great investment. And look, you know, I think set yourself up, it's really, you know, a really good practice to set yourself up with some, some support at that time if you've got a partner that can be there with you, if you've got relatives that can come and stay. And people love to contribute. You know, in our home birth circle, and I know in our breastfeeding circles as well, you know, there's a roster if someone's having a baby, people bring a meal along or, you know, when you have a blessing way, or a baby shower beforehand, you know, get people to bring meals to put in the freezer. It's much more useful than most of the gifts that you get. So, you know, really set yourself up well for that time. And I know that it's also possible to get a doula, postpartum doula to come and help you at that time to support you. So it's a really, really, really good investment. You know, it's, it's better investment than your honeymoon, better investment. You know, it's really, it's really worth spending time and if you can, spending money on that to make sure you get that rest nourishment. And I just want to say, yeah, I know your hormones are going back to normal and you're breastfeeding and you want to, you know, it's really important in those early hours and days that your baby has a really open access to your breast, has liberal access to your breasts, you know, because what that builds up is your prolactin system and that gives you an ongoing plentiful milk supply. So, yeah, a really, really good investment postpartum.

And then the co sleeping. Can you talk about that for why that might be beneficial and what is co sleeping?

Okay, so co sleeping, if we want to get really technical, co sleeping, and this is the way that James McKenna describes it, and he's one of the gurus of co sleeping, if you like, he's a sleep researcher. He's an anthropologist originally, but he's done research on mother baby sleep and run writes about it. I recommend his writing in his books, by the way. So he defines co sleeping as the mother and baby being in contact with each other through two senses. So that could be they can smell each other, they can see each other, they can hear each other. So for using that definition, you know, co sleeping could mean having the baby in a bassinet close to your bed where you can see and hear your baby. In some cultures, co sleeping means having the baby in a basket that's suspended above the bed. In China, apparently the co sleeping babies are in their own little basket on the the pillow and co sleeping, another form of co sleeping is what we usually, usually think of which is bed sharing. So you and your baby share the same surface. So I'm going to talk about bed sharing generally. I mean, co sleeping is important and for example, we know that the chance of sudden infant death syndrome is reduced for babies who share the parents bedroom. That's a form of co sleeping. The baby's probably what happens in SIDS is the baby, baby's breathing stops and it's almost like they forget to restart. But you know, it's like that if you're sleeping with someone, you tend to get into the same breathing patterns and start breathing together. So the parents provide that breathing stimulus for the baby, for the newborn baby by having the baby within proximity. But bed sharing is really our mammalian heritage. You know, how else could a baby ever keep warm at night if it wasn't snuggled up next to an adult and ideally the mother? Because you know, for all mammals we need to breastfeed. Mammal means mammary glands which is suckling our young. So bed sharing is our mammalian imprint. And there's a whole lot of benefits or exchanges, you could say, that happen between mother and baby with bed sharing. So the baby can smell the mother. We talked about smell imprinting. The baby can breastfeed easily. And as the baby breastfeeds, the baby's actually regulating the mother's fertility. The more the baby breastfeeds at night, the longer the delay until her fertility resumes, which is beneficial for the mother. She's just expenditure amount of resources to the baby. And if she has another baby too soon, that's going to deplete her. It's beneficial to that baby because they're not going to be, they're going to have, you know, the full nourishment and the full breastfeeding from delaying Having another sibling come along. And there's ways in which the mother regulates the baby's breathing. As I said, when the baby forgets to breathe, the mother's breathing regulates it. The mother keeps the baby warm as well, you know, through body heat. So there's a whole lot of these things called mutual regulation that can only happen when the baby and mother are close together, skin to skin. And, you know, it's a controversial topic because, you know, there's people say that it's dangerous. And the trouble with the research is it hasn't really been well categorized. We haven't really looked at safe bed sharing practices. You know, there's things that we know that are not safe. For example, sleeping with a baby on a sofa is unsafe. Sleeping with a small baby, where there's gaps that the baby could become trapped in. You know, like a gap between the bed and the wall, a gap between a. Underneath a pillow. Now, a soft bedding is not really ideal for bed sharing because the baby can, you know, go underneath, get covered up by doona. What do you call them? Duvet? No, comforter.

Duvet. Comforter.

Comforter. But, you know, when people like James McKenna in the US and a woman called Helen Ball in the UK have actually videotaped mothers and babies sleeping together, what you find is that the mother sleeps in a particular situation with the baby. The mother will sleep with, with her, with her arm above the baby, so the baby's in, sort of cradled underneath her arm with her head at breast level and she'll tuck her leg up so the baby actually can't slide down. So when a mother's bed sharing, breastfeeding, not smoking, she hasn't got those excessive blankets. There's not a pillow around for the baby to get stuck under. Then, you know, really, I think bed sharing is at least as safe and maybe even safer than sleeping the baby separately. And, you know, one of the reasons I say that is because it promotes breastfeeding. We know how important breastfeeding is for small babies. So it's important that women don't smoke, they're not on the influence of drugs or alcohol and that. Yeah. And that they breastfeed. And what Helen Ball showed was when she went into homes and videotaped mothers and baby's bed sharing and the mother wasn't breastfeeding, they actually put the baby up on a pillow so that baby could be at eye level because the mother's main connection with her baby was eye to eye. And that's dangerous too, because the baby could fall off the pillow and end up underneath the pillow. And they also. McKenna also found that the mother's actually really aware of the baby's position all night. The mother's tuned in, you know, she'll wake, she'll, she'll rearrange the baby and rearrange herself without even waking up. And there's all these sort of micro awakenings that happen. Mother and baby stimulate each other and that probably makes co sleeping safer because the baby's not going into those deeper phases of sleep, which was where we think probably failure to resume breathing can contribute to sids.

Right. And then also, which I've never heard before, the mutual regulation. So if they weren't sleeping, then they're not regulating their breath as well.

That's right. That's right. And something else to say. And again, going back to our mammalian heritage know mothers and babies are designed to sleep together. Every mammalian mother and baby does it. And if our mothers and babies back in the prehistoric times hadn't slept with, slept with their babies wouldn't be here. You know, put her baby down to sleep separately in the wild and left them, the baby wouldn't be there in the morning. Babies are hardwired to expect to co sleep and expect that mutual regulation. And you know, it's what soothes the baby. When a baby's by itself, you know, from their perspective, from their brain imprint and brain expectation, they're in danger of their life. You know, there's an animal around the corner that's going to eat them. That's what's imprinted into the baby. And those babies in the world that didn't cry and get reunited with the mother didn't survive, you know, you could say selected through evolution to cry when they're separated from the mothers and needs that, you know, needs that company to reduce their stress levels, to reduce their. And to increase their common connection system. My children have cospept for many years and my daughter was about 6. She moved into another bedroom which was opposite. She was on the other side of the wall to where I was. And she said one night she said I woke up and I was so scared I couldn't move. And I said, why didn't you just bang the wall? She said, I was so scared I couldn't even move at all. Who's about four years older than her said, yeah, that happened to me one time too. And it really gave me an insight to how, you know, that that whole system that, you know, children are babies and small children are designed to, you know, to have company at Night. Otherwise they're in great danger of their life. And you know, as I say in my book, that the animal, you know, the monsters that our children see under their beds are real, although probably extinct by now.

That's awesome.

There's a book I recommend she called Our Babies Ourselves that go through some of the sleeping practices and what other cultures do. And you know, children in other cultures don't sleep by themselves. There's always someone to sleep with. And you know, my children slept with each other when they got out of our bed, you know, there were three of them in a bed together and it was really sweet. You go in the morning and be sort of wrapped around each other and.

Aww, that's very sweet. I've never heard that too, of having the children sleep together as you have more children. That's great.

Everybody likes to sleep together. My daughter, who's 18 now, she likes to sleep with her friends too. They all cuddle up together.

That's so sweet. Well, like you said, the skin to skin contact at any phase. Right. Releases oxytocin and that feels good.

And it's soothing. It's soothing to sleep with someone else at night. As Peggy o', Mara, mothering magazine editor, said in one of the editorials, who wants to sleep alone? It's crazy that we have the most small and vulnerable members of society and we say they have to sleep alone.

Beautiful. Fantastic. So I just have one more question and then we'll wrap up. But what would you recommend a woman, a family, a couple, like, what tips or advice or wisdom would you have for them as they step into the new role of parenthood?

Okay. Well, I think I suggest making sure you have a open conversation about things, you know, that you have the space to discuss and talk about things as you go through parenting. Because, you know, what happens as we become parents is our own experiences come back for us all the time. And that's often our default position. Our default. What comes out of our mouth is what our mother said to usually in a dramatic or upset moment. And we need to have the space to talk about that and to talk about our journey as parents and you know, to really be partners in this amazing journey, as I say, through the wilds of parenting. So that's one thing is you really relationship. The second thing is to really trust nature. You know, there's this whole system called Mother Nature's Superb Design that begins, you know, even before conception and go through pregnancy and just really tuning into your baby, trusting your baby. Trust the process. And it's all those things that you said about surrendering, just surrendering to the process and really trying to stay in the limbic system as much as possible, because that's where all these beautiful hormones are. And when we get into our thoughts too much, we get a. We can get a bit worried and concerned. And certainly in our culture where there's so much worry and concern around pregnancy and birth and parenting. So, you know, use Mother Nature's superb design and, you know, get a lot of oxytocin. You know, get lots of tongues and skin and sexual activity and, you know, when the baby's born, hug the baby a lot and carry the baby around. All those things are rewarding and will soothe and reinforce all those things that you're doing with your baby. And, you know, for the woman, you know, trust your body and trust your baby. You know, I like what Jan Hunt says. You know, some people say we want wish the baby came with a manual. And she says, the baby is the book. Look at our baby and they'll tell us what to do. And if our baby's happy, then we're doing the right thing, you know. So, yeah, there's a lot of great resources out there, you know, and actually, the other thing I want to say is, you know, find yourself a micro culture. Find yourself a subculture that supports the sort of parenting that you want to do. And, you know, that might be online, that might be a magazine. When my children were young, I was an avid reader of Mothering Magazine. That really was part of my community, because I wasn't. I wasn't a community where there was a lot of attachment parents. In fact, that wasn't. I never heard of the term attachment parents. I just did what my baby asked me to do, and it turned out, yeah, find yourself a community that really support you and have a great time. You know, if you do it and it feels good and your baby's happy, then you're doing the right thing.

That's awesome. Fantastic. Beautiful. Well, thank you. Thank you. Can you just share where people can learn more about you and find out about your book and your courses and your membership and everything like that?

So my book is called Gentle Birth, Gentle A Doctor's Guide to Natural Childbirth and Gentle Early Parenting Choices. And most of the topics that we've discussed today, actually in my book, the Ecstatic Hormones, information about ultrasound, making wise decisions, co sleeping cord clamping, attachment, breastfeeding, all of those things are covered in that book. So that's available. You can go to my website and follow the links and my website, sarahbuckley.com and I've just set up a new website which will be active probably by the time this interview is up in September, which is called gentlenaturalbirth.com and that's a new website that's a membership website. So I'm really wanting to support mothers, babies, fathers and families through their journey of pregnancy, birth and early parenting. So I'm setting up a membership website where you can sign up up you get a weekly video of me talking about various topics. You can see some examples of that. As I mentioned my preconception advices on those videos, there's I think four preconception videos and I'm just doing my early pregnancy videos. So I'm talking about things like, you know, discomforts of pregnancy, a good diet, looking after yourself, scans, tests. All those things that you need to know will come out every week on a video in your inbox. There's also access to my library, which has got all of those things, including the that preposterous. That prenatal testing chapter that is not the new version of my book. That was in the older edition from 2005. What else? Yeah, there's forums on my website as well. So come and you can use the forums to ask me a question. And also with my membership website, you'll get access to a fortnightly call with me so you can submit questions and I'll talk about various topics that people want to know about. And I'm really excited to be able to support mothers, babies, fathers and families all over the world in gentlemen Natural birth.

Beautiful. I love it and I appreciate your wisdom. I appreciate your. Yeah, just sharing it with your birth of your four children and your process and your. It's just awesome. Your wisdom is amazing. I love your book. I love your energy. So thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Alexandra, and many blessings to you for beautiful birth and a beautiful baby.

Oh, thank you. We hope you 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.