Open Circle: Wellness + Education for Growing Families

04/22/2025

Labor and birth are not only hard work. They are also an opportunity to drop more deeply into connection — with ourself, our birth support and our baby.

03/28/2025

Our next comprehensive series of 7 or 9 classes will begin on April 12th from 4-7pm ET, 1-4pm PT. Engaging and dynamic classes take place live and online classes, combining information, experiential exercises and community building group discussions. Families are welcome to register for the full series at a discounted price, or to pick and choose the individual classes that work best for them. Visit the link in the bio to register or to see the full syllabus of each class.

I am delighted to begin offering online birth education again at Open Circle once more. Don’t hesitate to share your questions in the comment section or via PM — I’d love to answer questions that help you explore whether these classes are a good fit for your family.

03/11/2025

Our next comprehensive series of 7 or 9 classes will begin on April 5th from 4-7pm ET, 1-4pm PT. Engaging and dynamic classes take place live and online classes, combining information, experiential exercises and community building group discussions. Families are welcome to register for the full series at a discounted price, or to pick and choose the individual classes that work best for them. Visit the link in the bio to register or to see the full syllabus of each class.

I am delighted to begin offering online birth education again at Open Circle once more. Don’t hesitate to share your questions in the comment section or via PM — I’d love to answer questions that help you explore whether these classes are a good fit for your family.

01/26/2025

12/29/2024

Pediatrician. Neonatologist. Humanitarian. Father. Human. PLEASE TAKE ACTION

Families of Open Circle - you know what it is to need compassionate, skillful medical care. Please do not give up or surrender to silence after more than a year of what multiple humanitarian groups including Amnesty Imternational acknowledge is a genocide.

Call your representatives, news organizations and medical providers to demand the protection and release of Dr. Abu Safiya, a pediatrician and neonatologist and director of Kamal Adwan hospital in Northern Gaza.He was abducted by Israeli forces from Kamal Aswan hospital yesterday. Link in bio.

02/14/2024

❤️ Love.

What do you think about as you draw your little ones close? Do you feel the soft weight of her body in your arms, the quiet space between you?

👩🏻‍🍼I still feel my son’s pudgy toddler hand in my own, though now he’s 20. I used to call his hands “mitts” for their two sizes to big-ness. I feel their fullness, little velvet pillows of will and adventure, in my palms, even now.

A wonder how it is that we hold and are held in the same instant.

❤️ Where does my love end? And where does yours? Where did it begin? Is this child of mine, any more “mine” than he is yours? Is it different because he came from my depths? Because he nursed my sorrows and my joys alongside the flavors of my last meal?

🦧When he was first born, he didn’t feel like “mine,” WE were like apes, bonobos, bound; of each other. Of the earth. Essential. The mine and yours parts not so important.

“Will you be mine,” is such an odd phrase, when we already are.

I think of all the babies of this world. The ways that they are mine. And I am theirs. The way the children of Gaza call “mama” in my own son’s voice.

❤️ Love.

The heart is a muscle. On this day where love can so easily become the commercial banality of “mine” and “yours,’ may we stop and feel our own belonging, and the belonging of each precious soul.

Please call your reps every day to demand a Ceasefire, End to US Funding of Israel, Resumption of UNWRA funding, and Diplomatic efforts toward release of all Hostages and Political Prisoners

Senator Jack Reed (202) 224-4642
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (202) 224-2921
Representative Seth Magaziner (202) 225-2735
Representative Gabe Amo (202) 225-4911

02/04/2024

My small, inanimate assistants. They have passed through many hands, many arms of families waiting to meet their own babies.

I wonder if with each year, each passing from hand and heart to the next family’s expecting arms, if something of each family’s hoped and fears, dreams and wonderments are retained within my little assistants.

I wonder what the secrets of this small mandala of woven stories might call between us, just beneath the sound of hearing.

Will it be enough, one day, to bind us to our own hearts, and see ourself present in the hearts of others? Will it whisper a reminder that we all come, naked and fragile, brilliant and open, onto to this enormous planet.

I wonder, how to weave our stories such that we never forget our interwoven souls. Or that the strands of our weaving are what carry us all.

🇵🇸Please call for a permanent ceasefire, now. Please call all the people you know back into the interwoven sanctity of life.

There will be pre-addresses and stamped postcards to each of RI’s congressional reps at the studio, which I welcome you to request and add your thoughts to. They need to hear from you.

May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings be free.

02/04/2024

We are here for life. To bow before it’s sacredness and learn to hold it’s returning, again and again, with the stillness of presence and open heart.

And we are here to call the heart that has closed in pain, fear, illusion and hate, back to its own true nature. The reflection of the sea, the moon, each being in our own.

May you join in calling life back into all the broken places.
May all beings be free from suffering.
May all beings be free.

with .repost
・・・
for today’s prayer circle this was my outline. more words came but you are also welcome to use and amplify this prayer. i was so moved by each prayer AND the awareness that we pray to guide, direct and fortify our actions.

01/18/2024

01/08/2024

In the presence of new babies I am always reminded of the vastness of the universe. To look into a newborn’s eyes is to fall into the cosmos. The neurons in their brain like stars in the galaxy, more plentiful than they will ever be again—meaning not yet pruned into a limited shape by their family, culture or experience of life outside the womb. Their body is still more of the fluid world than that of earth or bone—all potential waiting to unfold.

They are vastness and possibility.

I hold them with a mixture of awe and delight, but also heartbreak.

For to be human is the process of taking form, of coming into separateness. The wonder and beauty of being, a name, a daughter, a citizen. The play of knowing a body in this world, a roll, a twist, a somersault. The blessing of being separate so that we can fall into wonder and delight at that which is not us — our mother’s face, the dog’s tail, the physiology of a bird, calculus.

But to be human is also the heartbreak of that separateness—for as this baby will tumble, giggling, so to he will know his separateness through loss. He will scrape his perfect knee, he will long for what is not. He will face illness. His mother will shout at him in anger. He will see that much as people can love, so too they can hate.

She will witness suffering and violence close at hand or oceans away, beyond imagination. Cruelty that makes her question whether the blessing of being of a human and of all the wonder in this world, is worth the cost of a heart broken so many times.

When I hold a small being come to earth I hold the awareness of all of this in my hands.

“There are so many reasons to treat each other with great tenderness. One is the sheer miracle we are here together on this planet surrounded by dying stars. One is that we cannot see what anyone else has swallowed.”

12/11/2023