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The Authentic Birth Keeper, Melbourne (2025)

09/12/2023

If I had to some up my approach to birth in one sentence it would be this…

Don’t fight it… don’t resist what your body is trying to do, surrender to the intensity and the sensations… move towards your labour, don’t run away from it

Don’t force it… there’s nothing you need to DO to make your labour start or happen faster or better - and nothing you can do for that matter. You don’t need to stay active in labour… if you’re tired, REST! You don’t need to curb walk, you don’t need to pretzel yourself into a million positions and you certainly don’t need to push when your body isn’t ready to (this is a great way to cause problems in my opinion)

All you need to do is stay in the present moment - don’t worry about how long it’s been or how hard it’s been. Don’t worry about how much longer or how much harder it’s going to get… all of that is irrelevant
All that matters is the here and now

08/12/2023

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard women say they “had to” have a C-section because their baby was either breech or posterior - like the baby just won’t come out in that position? Not true…
Every birth I’ve attended has been different but one thing is always the same… sooner or later a baby will come out of your body..
Babies do the best they can with what they have to work with… they know the shape of your pelvis best and they know how best to navigate it. Yes there are some things that might influence your babies position such as poor posture, sedentary lifestyle, the shape of your uterus and any tension or scar tissue in your pelvis but it doesn’t mean your baby’s position is wrong - on the contrary I think babies are so wise for taking all these things into account when choosing their position… so instead of doing things to try to turn your baby or force them into a more “favourable” position, instead focus on giving them the option to move if they want to through balancing, aligning and releasing tension in the pelvis as well as having good posture and staying relatively active.

15/11/2023

For me, holding space means witnessing someone being consumed by the fire but not getting burnt yourself…
Not inserting yourself into someone else’s experience…
Watching them in their fire walk, knowing that they don’t need you to save them, and reminding them of this when they forget it or don’t believe it themselves…

Women don’t need me in order to give birth - they don’t need anyone - but most women want support, and that is ok, but it’s so important to choose that support carefully. Choose someone that knows that they are not necessary. Choose someone that isn’t going to centre themselves and their experience. Choose someone that trusts you unequivocally, so that when you have that crisis of confidence… when you have those moments in which you doubt yourself, they can point you back to yourself without sabotaging your experience or detracting from your autonomy…

10/09/2023

I seem to be upsetting women with hard truths lately. I don’t post about the system much anymore because it isn’t my wheelhouse. Not my circus, not my monkeys…. But I am honestly so sick and tired of hearing so many in the birth world talk about informed consent and bodily autonomy and completely ignore the elephant in the room - that these things actually don’t exist in the modern industrial birth system and I include homebirth with a registered midwife in that system. Informed consent means being given unbiased information to be able to make an informed decision to either accept or decline something in the absence of coercion - not being given specific information to gain consent for a particular test/procedure/intervention - or not gaining consent at all because something is deemed to be an emergency by the people in authority (because as much as you don’t want to believe it, there is an inherent power imbalance between a birthing woman and her “medical professional” care providers who clearly know what’s best for her better than she does).
When you’re only being told the thing they want to tell you, so you can agree to the thing they want to do - that is coercion
The dead baby card is coercion

And even if you manage to say no - the fight or flight response activated in your body, the adrenaline and the cortisol, all inhibit the flow of your labour - so labour then becomes “dysfunctional” and all of a sudden you’re consenting to the interventions you didn’t want in the first place because now they appear necessary 🙄🤦‍♀️

03/08/2023

💦 “I had to have my waters broken” 💦 ⁣⁣”My waters don’t break on their own”
⁣⁣
Babies do get born with their bag of waters around them still intact.
⁣⁣
This baby was born ‘en caul’ which is the term used for when the bag of waters is still fully surrounding the baby at birth.
⁣⁣
Baby opened its own bag of waters with its arms as soon as its body was born.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
In a physiological birth waters release in their own time.

In the medical paradigm - en caul birth is said to be rare - 1 in 80,000 births 🤯 this is 💯 because of how much we muck about with birth in the system (including home birth)
Augmenting labour by breaking waters to “speed things up”, whereas the births I have attended about 10% of babies are born in their waters.

The amniotic sac performs several important functions during labour - it can cushion the baby from the intensity of contractions, allows the baby to move freely to get into their preferred position for birth, and the fore waters support mechanical dilation of the cervix by bulging through and opening cervix into the va**na - and often the bag of waters will bulge out of the va**na before breaking…

19/07/2023

I was seeing a pregnant woman a little while ago for a pregnancy session and started poking around a fair bit in her emotional world, which is my usual practice.
She started to get a little confused with me doing all this fishing around and asking certain probing questions. Confused to the extend where she asked me if I really do believe in her giving birth?
Its not the first time that I have been asked that question during these intense poking sessions 🎯 and my answer always is the same. Of course I believe in every woman giving birth because that is what she is physically and physiologically designed to do.
However, what does get in the way a lot during birth is the MIND! 🤯

My personal conclusion is that birth is 95% mind over matter.
When the intensity of labour gets really hard demanding everything of you and the contractions, surges, waves... or whatever else you want to call it are hitting you one after the other, its not your body that drops out and says “I cant do this”. Its your MIND... for a multitude of reasons that I wont go into here.

I do believe that we can sufficiently prepare ahead of time for the intensity that labour and birth holds in store for us by taking a close up look at our own mind, examining our relationships (in particular with our mum) and our own internal resources for coping during times of a crisis for example.

My specific poking is designed to identify anything that could possibly be in the way to experience that healing, empowering birth that most women want to experience.

The way we show up for life, is also the way we show up for birth! Why would you all over sudden expect a different outcome at your birth when you have never lived any of those experiences before that you wish to feel at your birth?
Confidence, empowering, calm, strong, triumphant, body awareness... whatever they are for you!

At the end of our session this pregnant woman I was seeing reminded me of her beautiful and deep intentions for HER birth... ✨ she wants a healing birth experience ✨ she wants to come back into her body ✨ she wants to become vulnerable again ✨ she wants to stay focused inwards and connected

Repost

16/07/2023

The breaking apart that occurs in birth is hard… and necessary.
The parts of ourselves that can’t do it come to the surface, testing our resolve, inviting us to succumb to the voice in our heads which tells us we can’t do it.
Guess what… you are doing it. You just need to keep doing it and baby will come. You’re not in control of how long or how hard it’s going to be… the parts of you that yearn for that control and certainty will demand it, and you will need to set those parts of yourself aside. To make room for these new parts of yourself. The parts that understand the surrender of motherhood - and the power in that surrender. There is no weakness in birth, but there is vulnerability - yes it is hard and it is painful… and it is necessary. Breaking apart to be rebuilt - this new version of yourself - strong and gentle, capable and vulnerable, humble and confident.
It’s your fire walk - no one can do it for you. I see you. Keep going. You’ve got this.

08/07/2023

I’ve been seeing so many stories pop up lately of “missed” miscarriages (spoiler alert - there’s no such thing). Or of women having to go to hospital for a d&c because they “haemorrhage” during a miscarriage. And in the vast majority of cases - it just isn’t true. But we never see what miscarriage can look like - so we have no frame of reference for the duration or the intensity… which wouldn’t be a problem if we could tune into ourselves and let our intuition guide us - but we haven’t been doing this - in fact we’ve been encouraged to do the exact opposite - and to instead turn outside of ourselves for direction and reassurance.
It’s exactly the same as birth. We never see normal birth and are conditioned to fear it, and until we can once again normalise a normal process, we’re bound to keep repeating the same mistakes.

07/06/2023

The hours we spend together during your pregnancy is where the growth happens - the transformation. I am a mirror that shows you the parts of yourself that you can’t or don’t want to see. We look at your fears, your limiting beliefs, your power leaks and lay them all on the table to be dissected and understood. We work on your relationship with your partner and work on his preconceived ideas about birth and any fears that are coming up for him. Some things we can move through, and others we get comfortable sitting with. We talk through the tools and strategies you can call on in your birth. And we build your connection to your self and your baby so that when your birth time comes - you know for certainty that of course you WILL do it. That you have everything you need. And also, that if you want extra support, that you can safely ask for it, knowing that you, your partner, myself, and anyone you’ve invited into your birth space is confident in your abilities and knows that you are the leader and everyone else in the room takes their queues from you.

The Authentic Birth Keeper

09/12/2023

08/12/2023

15/11/2023

10/09/2023

03/08/2023

19/07/2023

16/07/2023

08/07/2023

07/06/2023

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