Born Free Method: The Podcast

In the United States, we universally recommend rectovaginal screening for Group B Strep (GBS) with rare exception. Unless you had a baby affected by early onset GBS disease of the newborn in a prior pregnancy or GBS was detected in your urine during your current pregnancy, you will be cultured for this bacteria at 36 weeks. The result is thought to be good for up to 5 weeks. If GBS is found in urine, you had a prior newborn impacted, or that swab comes up positive, you will be offered antibiotics throughout your labor with the hopes of reducing the risk to your baby. What’s the risk? We don’t really know, but the data that is advertised suggests that 10-30% of woman are colonized, 50% of babies born vaginally to those women will become colonized, and a small percentage of those babies will become sick with early onset GBS disease of the newborn. Of those, a small percentage of term babies might die. The risk is even higher to extremely premature babies.Given these numbers, why not just universally treat every birthing woman with antibiotics? Good question. The answer is that there are downsides to antibiotics as well.In this short clinical episode, Nathan will walk you through the many considerations around the decision to screen or received antibiotics against Group B Strep.

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

[00:02:23] - Intro

Your due date is March 14th. A single, confident, perfectly circled square on the calendar, handed over by a smiling professional with a plastic wheel. And God help us, we believe them. We want a date so badly that we will take one from a cardboard dial, knowing full well that only about one baby in twenty is punctual on their appointed day. When the date rolls past with no baby yet to speak of, people start asking questions. They start to pressure you into evacuating your unborn child from their warm, amniotic universe. Because there’s a new numbers game at play. “Your baby could die if they wait too long to be born”. Childbirth is ripe with opportunity to examine our ongoing challenges in making predictions and ascertaining risk.Why are human beings so bad at judging risk, and why does it feel even harder in high stakes games like childbirth? Fertility, pregnancy, and birth offer a lot of uncertainty. You are forced to make decisions with never a guarantee of outcome. To understand why decision-making is so hard in the face of uncertainty, we have to drag four modern witnesses into the light: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Gerd Gigerenzer. They do not agree on much, but they have contemplated the same wound.

[00:03:50] - The Problem is Not New

The troubles we face in decision-making around risk are not new. In the 1700s, a Scottish philosopher named David Hume noticed that we tend to play tricks on ourselves to uphold our faith in whatever tomorrow brings. The sun has come up every morning of your life, so you assume it will come up again. But yesterday’s sunrise does not guarantee a sunrise tomorrow. Your first pregnancy was easy, so surely your second will be, too. All of your friends and family skated through childbirth, so you’ve got this in the bag. Your Instagram followers are also rooting for you because you “did everything right”. You are betting that biology is a creature of habit, like the bartender who remembers your favorite cocktail. You have no proof that the future will unfold just as it did yesterday, though a streak is a streak, and sometimes that’s the best you’ve got. Philosophers call this inductive reasoning, whereby specific observations are used to formulate a generalized conclusion about the world. This is the process that leads to hypotheses and better research questions. Deductive reasoning, on the other hand, moves from general blanketed observations in order to get clear on specifics. This is the process that is used to challenge hypotheses. The pregnancy continuum and all of its advisors - credentialed or otherwise - often fall into the trap of inductive reasoning, like a moth lured to the flame. The issue is that a flame cannot cast a shadow on itself. A flame may leave you blind to the greater context of life outside of abstraction.

[00:05:17] - Black Swans

For millennia, Europeans had seen nothing but white swans and concluded, with the serene ignorance of inductive reasoning as so often practiced by the “well-informed”, that all swans were white. In 1697 some Dutch explorers wandered into Australia and found black swans, and the whole theory that all swans were white was incinerated. One black swan killed it. Karl Popper built a philosophy on this inconvenient asymmetry: you can never prove an idea true, only fail to break it. Any obstetrician will tell you the same thing in a softer voice. Ninety-nine uneventful deliveries do not make the hundredth safe. This soothing balm makes you less worried about your chances.In 1921 an economist named Frank Knight drew a sharp distinction between “risk” and “uncertainty”. Risk governs over the casino. You know the odds of your roll before you throw. Uncertainty is starting a new company in a bad economy: nobody knows the odds of you succeeding, but they don’t sound great. Fertility sits on the boundary between risk and uncertainty. The statistics are real but is the risk to your own birth truly found in the data? A young, healthy couple has roughly a one-in-five chance of conceiving in any given month, and most get there within a year. But those numbers describe a crowd, and you are not a crowd. You are one person with one body on one road, and the average does not care to learn your name. This is, in fact, the problem with the Law of Averages: nobody is average. You either fall below or above the average of something happening. Keynes made a related point, arguing that no man alive could calculate what interest rates would be in twenty years. Nobody can likewise calculate your twenty-year-old self’s answer to “when should we start trying?” So how do you navigate a dark alley, rife with uncertainty? The ancients had two answers. The Stoics, men like Seneca and Epictetus, suggested sorting life into two piles: what you control and what you do not. You can control what screenings you receive throughout your prenatal care. You can control the questions you ask. You can control where and with whom you give birth. You can control which advice you turn to in improving your chances of conceiving. But you cannot control whether conception takes two months or two years, and you certainly cannot control the outcome of your birth. Spend your effort on the first pile and make peace with the second, like a sailor who has stopped arguing with the ocean. Blaise Pascal, who in 1654 swapped letters with Fermat and helped ignite the modern discourse around probability itself, offered a more practical tool: weigh the stakes. You cannot know if labor will start early. But having all of your ducks in a row costs you almost nothing if you guess wrong.

[00:07:55] - Taleb: The Turkey Knows Nothing

Mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb takes this philosophical discourse straight into Wall Street. But it applies just as well to the maternity ward. Suppose you were a turkey. You are fed every day for 1,000 days by an amicable farmer. Every meal makes you more certain that the farmer is your dearest friend, your guardian angel in overalls. On day 1,001, the day before Thanksgiving, you wake up feeling the most certain about your friendly farmer friend. But later that day, the farmer shows up with an ax.Your observations were on point. But your intuition remained silent about the one event that mattered most. Taleb calls these rare, ruinous surprises to our plans “Black Swans”. By nature, Black Swan events are always perceived as an ambush, because they don’t tabulate into our certainty about life until after they happen. In pregnancy, sudden complication are Black Swan events. Others are pregnancy losses or stillbirth that come without warning, or consider a baby who decides she is ready to come out of her warm amniotic universe 8 weeks early. Most pregnancies go fine, and that is exactly the problem with these events when we apply this framework to the pregnancy continuum. The spreadsheets of the statisticians are filled with data from healthy, unremarkable births. But the Black Swan events fill our nightmares and drive policy. After a tragedy on the maternity unit, the mind goes hunting for a reason, a sign, some “thing” that should have been done, because a story we can blame feels safer than a world where it simply happened. This fallacy is most cruel in maternity care, because in your grieving you go looking for guilt even when there may be none at all.The critics say the whole thing is hard to test because any disaster can be pointed to as a Black Swan. This is what the outspoken, authoritative, alternative health community does really well. And they are not wrong. Even Taleb admits that this point is slippery. In obstetrics, a team of professionals who has seen enough of these disasters no longer sees them as Black Swans, which is still a fallacy in and of itself. But the impact that these disasters has on both birthing families and the staff in attendance to the birth are sufficiently horrific that health care professionals plan accordingly in an effort to reduce their risk to zero. And that is in and of itself another fallacy.

[00:10:08] - Mediocristan and Extremistan

Take 1,000 pregnant women and line them up. How many will give birth more than, say, 3 weeks earlier or later than 40 weeks? Almost every pregnant woman gives birth within a few weeks of 40, and one outlier does not change that average. Taleb calls such a world “Mediocristan”. But a serious complication lives in the tail of the bell curve. It is rare. Wealth works differently nowadays. Add one billionaire to a room of 1,000 people and he owns almost everything. Taleb calls this world “Extremistan”, and he warns that using the neat bell-curve math that governs Mediocristan to predict events in Extremistan is like “walking through a minefield with a map of a golf course”. That is why hospitals do not plan around the average birth. They plan around the worst hour of the worst night: a truly emergent c-section after a previously healthy sounding baby crashes on the fetal heart rate monitor. The baby barely survives, along with the mother, as the father of the pregnancy looks on at both of his loves in their respective intensive care suites. Those who focus on these “worst case scenarios” are not pessimists. They are doing what humans do.

The critics might point out that health care professionals know about odds and probability, but that it is hard with the data you actually have to know whether you are in Mediocristan or Extremistan, so perhaps we can give them a break if they are planning for the tails rather than the average. In medicine this uncertainty carries a heavy cost, because planning for the tail has a price of its own. Defensive caution - in the name of liability, guilt, shame - has led to over-intervention: more surgeries, more monitoring, more cascades of decisions made by a clinician who is afraid of being sued or simply the heartache that comes from losing a baby on your shift. The doctor bears the legal cost of a bad outcome, and the patient bears the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual cost of an unnecessary bad outcome. Neither party is wicked. The incentives are just pointing in different directions.Let us turn to another example. Say a coin comes up heads 99 times in a row. A statistician in a clean white shirt says the next flip is still 50/50, because the coin is uncompromised. A street-hardened fat cat Wall Street trader named Ricki Ravioli with smears of spaghetti sauce on his lapel, on the other hand, takes one look and says the coin is rigged. The statistician is following the rules of the game, like a man who keeps playing poker while the table is on fire. We use the prior results to tabulate odds of future results. But maybe Ricki has a point?Life never hands you the rules. In reproductive medicine, the quoted odds assume things about your body that nobody has yet checked. Epidemiology assumes the coin is uncompromised. Your history, your age, your results so far? Those are the 99 heads of the coin flip example above. Taleb calls this the ludic fallacy, the habit of treating a messy reality like a board game with the odds printed in the game instructions. The statistician is right about the problem as written, and every model in history has been an abstraction. Fine. But the question is how badly the abstraction lies to you, and the cost of guessing wrong becomes the burden of the family.

[00:13:11] - Antifragility

So what do you do when prediction is impossible? The Stoics recommend to stay away from the kind of loss you cannot come back from, and quit pretending to forecast the rest. A bet that is reasonable on average can still be a bad bet if one outcome ends the game, because you only live one life. This is what I see happen to my friends around the black jack table. They keep doubling down because they are on a streak. They could walk away with their winnings, but they place a chip to sit for one more hand. And they lose it all. Casinos are banking on this fallacy.Taleb’s word for this is ergodicity, which is a fancy way of saying that what happens to a crowd on average tells you almost nothing about what happens to the individual. This is why obstetric care obsesses over the catastrophic outcome, even when it is rare, and why a plan that is safe 999 times in 1,000 can still be the wrong plan if the thousandth cannot be undone. This is a good time to begin thinking about the cost of every decision in your pregnancy and childbirth planning. What is the cost if you or your care team guesses wrong? This is why home birth is perceived as irresponsible.Wealth advisors’ practical answer to this vast unknown comes in the shape of a barbell. Put most of your resources somewhere dull and safe, and a small share into long shots that could pay off. In a birth plan, that looks like having a strong preferred scenario and also a prepared emergency fallback: you hope for the calm room and the dim lights, and you also know exactly how to get to an operating room with surgeons. You are armored against the surprise and still free to hope. Taleb calls this “antifragility”. The critics of this method point to Philip Tetlock’s work showing that a small band of financial forecasters really can beat chance, which is awkward for anyone who claims the whole business is hopeless. Such forecasters unfortunately don’t exist in medicine, even if court precedence tries to suggest otherwise.

[00:15:00] - Kahneman and Tversky: The Wiring Is Bad

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were psychologists who spent decades demonstrating that the human mind is a creature of bad habits. A pregnant woman scrolling a birth forum at midnight may land on a horrific viral birth story from a well-known hospital. The brain remembers this, just like the obstetrician who remembers a home birth transfer that ended tragically. With repeat exposure, the brain begins to treat rare event as “common” because the mind judges how likely something is by how easily it can picture it, and nothing is easier to picture than a vivid story.A history of losing bets also molds our decision-making. Offer a person a coin flip: heads they win $150, tails they lose $100. On average they are $25 ahead every time, but many are unwilling to play this game. This is why so many fathers-to-be gets lost in sports betting. Losing hurts about twice as much as winning feels good, so we become averse to loss. After the loss of a pregnancy or child, the fear of going through it again can blind our ability to make rational decisions. It is not stupidity. It reflects a nervous system and emotional body that want to be protected from pain. There is substantial data suggesting that an obstetrician’s decision-making is likewise affected by prior, especially recent “bad outcomes”. The real challenge is that a good story can beat logic. A woman named Melissa is seen breastfeeding her baby on a subway. Somebody might describe Melissa as outspoken and passionate about mothering. Is Melissa more likely to breastfeed her child or is she more likely to be a pro-breastfeeding advocate? Most people choose the second, and they are wrong, because the second group is a smaller group inside the first, so it can never be more likely. It only feels more likely, because it fits the story. We do the same with the external appearance of pregnant women. We look at a fit, young, thin pregnant woman and assume that she will have no complications and exercise her autonomy through a picturesque home birth. We look at someone older and maybe a bit overweight and decide that a bad outcome is waiting. The stereotype feels like evidence. It is just a good plot, and our brains - both midwives and obstetricians - are suckers for a plot.

Kahneman and Tversky qualified this as human error to be corrected. Taleb argues that the fear of loss is a well-preserved survival instinct. The jury is still out as to how this all plays out in maternity care. Interestingly, behavioral research has struggled to demonstrate this tendency universally. The priming studies Kahneman wrote about in Thinking, Fast and Slow did not hold up when other scientists tried to repeat them, and Kahneman himself admitted that the evidence is weak (for now). But do any of these examples ring true for you?

[00:17:36] - Gigerenzer: Blame the Messenger

Gerd Gigerenzer bought Knight’s contrast between risk and uncertainty, but he refuses to accept the idea that people are just hopeless. His optimism arises from an argument that most of what we might consider “bad” decisions is due to a mismatch between the tools we were given in ascertaining risk and the reality of how odds play out in life.

Gigerenzer’s favorite examples come from screening tests, and there are many screening opportunities presented to birthing women in the West. Say a condition affects 1 pregnancy in 500, and a screening test catches 90 percent of affected pregnancies (true positives) but also wrongly flags 5 percent of unaffected ones (false positives). A woman tests positive. What are the odds the baby is affected? Give that question in percentages and many clinicians will say 90 percent. Now picture 10,000 pregnancies. Twenty are affected, and 18 of them test positive. Of the 9,980 unaffected pregnancies, about 499 also test positive. That is 517 positive tests, and only 18 of them are true positives. The real chance is about 3.5 percent. A related trap is the headline that says a risk has “doubled.” If it goes from 1 in 7,000 to 2 in 7,000, it did double, and it is also still tiny. The relative number sells the story. The absolute number should be more relevant to your decision.Where the odds cannot be known at all, Gigerenzer argues that simple rules often beat elaborate ones, because the elaborate ones memorize the past and choke when the world changes. Labor in childbirth offers a clean example. Nobody can predict when it will go from false alarm to “baby time”, so many clinicians teach some variation of a simple rule of thumb: head in when contractions come about 2-3 minutes apart, last about a minute, and persist for about an hour. It is not perfect, but it is a rule a frightened person can actually use at 2 a.m. when there is no obvious answer. This is where Gigerenzer’s and Taleb’s works collides: antifragile frameworks can help to avert disaster while not nullifying risk completely. Despite this contraction pattern guidance, you still have women who arrive on the maternity unit thinking they’re in labor because their contraction pattern meets the clinician’s recommended pattern only to find that it was “false labor” (false positive), but in this case the odds are in your favor that you are truly in labor (true positive). When general probabilities are available, sometimes comparing probabilities is all that we can do to make a decision. This is, after all, a cornerstone of the practice of medicine.

[00:20:14] - Act Anyway: Arjuna, Parzival, and the Duty to Decide

All of this could send a sensible person storming off to bed with arms crossed. If humans struggle with risk ascertainment, and our trusted practitioners are also human, then what is a birthing family to do when asked whether they wish to proceed with a given intervention? Who attends their birth? Who to trust for supportive information and advice? Deciding to wait is also a decision. So is deciding not to decide. Both are bets, and in this territory the clock is part of the wager.Some older stories may be of service here…The oldest one may be the Bhagavad Gita. The warrior Arjuna stands between two armies, bow trembling, paralyzed. He cannot know how the battle will end, who will be lost, or whether any of it is right. His charioteer, Krishna, does not hand him a forecast. He tells him, in effect, to stop negotiating with the outcome. You are entitled to the action, not to the results. Do the work that is yours to do, and let go of the fantasy that you can steer the ending. The Gita calls this svadharma, one’s own duty or calling, and it argues that it is better to do your own work imperfectly than someone else’s work well. For someone facing fertility or birth, that is a strange kind of comfort. You can show up, ask, prepare, choose, and care. You cannot guarantee the result. Whether to try, when, how, or at all, is a decision that belongs to you and not to a relative, a forum, or a spreadsheet.The European romantic epic poem, Parzival, from Wolfram von Eschenbach is, among other things, a case study in how not to handle uncertainty. Parzival has been taught not to ask too many questions, and he remains quiet while standing before an agonizing Fisher King. Parzival stays quiet, swallowing the one question that mattered, a simple question about what ails the man. His silence feels safe and polite but it costs him the grail (for now). He wanders for years to make up for his mistake only to learn from a hermit about the true essence of compassion and right action.Notice how neatly this fits our other witnesses. Taleb says the one who acts must also be part of the consequences (“skin in the game”), which is why informed consent matters and why your voice belongs in the room. His barbell is a structure for deciding without knowing. Kahneman’s loss aversion is felt by the cold feet Arjuna. And Pascal, with his umbrella and his wager, was making the same point from the start: you have to bet, because you are already in the game. Gigerenzer’s clear numbers can be a means by which you could compare probabilities. The story of Parzival adds an additional element that is perhaps the most important of all. What does it mean to do the “right thing”? Parzival didn’t ask the question to the ailing Fisher King upon his first visit the Grail Castle. He meandered for years scorning the sky and Earth for his mistake, desperate for a second chance. But that time spent in contemplation was not wasted. It was during this time that Parzival became capable of asking the question, of learning compassion for others, of doing the right thing. When the opportunity re-presented itself, Parzival was not obeying a new rule that gave him permission to ask the question. He acted from a place of embodiment, and he was moved to do the right thing. His was an act of maturity.Becoming a mother (or father) is scary. The process is mostly out of your control. But perhaps courage is not the absence of doubt. Perhaps courage reflects acceptance of uncertainty. And then doing your best anyways to move forward without having answers to all of the questions.

[00:23:40] - A Voice That Matters

So here is the picture, after all the smoke clears. The philosophers, psychologists, and mathematicians that have been brought forth in this essay fight about whether our instincts are mostly poison or mostly tools. None is fully right or fully wrong. They end up in the same dim waiting room, nodding at the same truth: the goal is not to feel certain, as certainty is never possible in life, especially childrearing. If we can’t hope for certainty, what else might there be? The hope I have for every parent is to make a decision based on your best judgment. You are the sole owner of the outcomes of the decision, but don’t be hasty. Nor can you stay at the bus stop forever. Eventually a decision will be made for you, regardless of your preparedness to decide. Ask your questions. Pack your bags. Have a plan B. Then walk into the forest.The answer that hasn’t changed over the ages is that as a parent (or soon-to-be parent), you will invariably, at some point in time, be forced to make a decision without knowing the outcome. This decision will have to be made without any guarantees. But it is a decision you will have to make from the place of uncertainty, and there is a certain beauty in that uncertainty that you have been conditioned to equate with irresponsibility.A great exercise…Imagine someone tells you that you are wrong.

What happens inside you when someone says that? In our society, we are often incentivized to posture ourselves around certainty, especialy in medicine. After many years, however, I can say for myself that I have become more comfortable with the opposite gesture. I find myself increasingly saying: “I don’t know…yet”. Could this be our task as humans in a world rife with uncertainty? Could maturity and wisdom actually be gauged with our ability to utter the words: “I don’t know”. And to mean those words? Is it a weakness to admit uncertainty without any intention of finding evidence to convince others of the inverse in the future?Imagine a table of voices are assembled to help make a decision around vaginal birth or cesarean. The evidence brought forth by ACOG gets one seat. The physician (or midwife) and their accumulated experience gets another seat. Immediate circumstances take a spot at the table. Conscience gets a spot. And the last chairs go to the well-intentioned mother-in-law and the statistician. None of these voice are fully right. None are fully wrong.A couple is standing at the front of the room. Holding a microphone, offering to hear from these stakeholders. Perhaps the dilemma is that decision-making begins when only one of those tabled voices is permitted to hold the microphone.

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Elizabeth Catlin is a proud CPM and mother of 14 (!!) living in central New York. She was charged arrest twice back in 2018, and we met sometime 2020 when she was officially charged with 95 felony accounts: 94 accounts of practicing a profession without a license and one additional homicide charge over the death of a baby. She ultimately walked away with community service hours rather than a lifetime in jail. This conversation gets to the heart of what ails the midwifery community at-large.

* What toll does a three-year experience with the legal system have on your family and emotional body?

* What does it mean when your community stands up for you, knowing that you aren’t guilty of anything but being an exceptional birth attendant and community member?

* How does this experience change your perspective on the value (or detriment) of hyper-regulation of midwifery through licensure and credentialing?

Liz will be coming with us to Austin, TX, in November 2026 for (likely) the last Born Free Twins-Breech Gathering. She’ll be on a panel with Elizabeth Beachy, CPM, Danielle Kitt, CPM, and Nubian Earth Martin, CPM. Liz asked me after the recording why this might be the last gathering of this sort that I will be offering. First off, I haven’t decided this to be so. But I do wonder how much more juice can be squeezed from the analytical, computational way of attending to births. Certainly, there is value in peer-reviewed literature and hands-on training. No doubt. But what are we missing? Why is the needle not budging? Why do outcomes appear to be getting worse despite the volume of training and education available to individuals who feel the calling towards attending to childbirth? These are the questions I have been sitting with, and more projects are in the works for exploring some of these more immaterial, mysterious motifs. Stay tuned…You can reach Elizabeth by email: elizabethjoycatlin@gmail.com

References from our conversation:

* My first interview with Elizabeth back in 2020

* Arrest the Midwife PBS documentary featuring Liz

* NYCPMhttps://www.nycpmidwives.org/

* A Tale of Two Midwives across Four Centuries

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Joni Edelman is a registered nurse who began attending births when she was 18, then lived out a career in hospital birth, transitioned to hospice care, and then eventually found her way to traditional midwifery. She calls herself a “holistic attendant” due to the reality that terms like “midwife” and “birth attendant” are now the property of the state. That seems like a bold statement, but in effect it means that the state can dictate what a “midwife” can or can’t do, without any consideration perhaps for what birthing families in that state desire out of their care team. This is where the ongoing licensure debate has some teeth. On the one hand, proponents for licensure might argue that licensure offers an avenue by means of which a person trained in the skills of midwifery can practice without fear of being jailed for practice of a profession without a license. On the other hand, opponents of licensure may argue that licensure often comes with unreasonable restrictions to the practice of midwifery, which may be the oldest “profession” in the world alongside prostitution. Way back when, there was no need for labels, licensure, and regulatory influence. A woman doing what is now called “midwifery” would be doing so out of necessity in service to her clan, community, or tribe. She may not have even been charging money (not that that’s a problem), because the tribe was small enough for her to serve this function and have her needs met. She learned her skills through other elders in her community, and, whether she wished it or not, would ultimately become the most experienced living caretaker of birthing women over her lifetime. But nowadays, with human society being as complex as it must be to serve hundreds of millions of people through equality and equity, and with economics of inequality, a midwife must find their place through the myriad regulations and other red tape that would otherwise have been vested to a woman with a calling to this “vocation” through lived experience alone. This has led us to an impasse in our current state of affairs, where high-quality midwives are being prosecuted for deaths for which they aren’t responsible and other credential holders are walking away from tragedies hiding behind the protections of their credentials. My conversation today with Joni attempts to provide some grounding to the challenges of birthwork which are paralleled by the challenging to birthing families who wish to proceed with childbirth with any degree of autonomy. And if we truly believe in autonomy, how does abortion fit into this conversation? We touch on that, too…Find Joni at her website or on Instagram

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on this episode of Born Free Method: The Podcast is Robin Lanier, pedagogical director at the Waldorf School of Louisville. Robin has been teaching children for over 20 years, meaning he’s been working on his own spiritual growth for at least that long. In this conversation we discuss Archangel Michael through the lens of Rudolf Steiner, the story of Parzival the knight, and even tie in some J.R.R. Tolkien to keep things interesting. This is a fascinating and beautiful conversation that is especially important for the work that I bring to the world through childbirth and as a father, husband, and friend during especially trying times.

Here is some important background context…

Archangel Michael has played a prominent role in a variety of the abrahamic and esoteric traditions for ages. Michael can be seen as Christ’s second-hand man. He carries “cosmic intelligence”. As human beings moved toward more independent, earthly thinking, Michael “released” this intelligence to be developed by humans themselves, through free will and reason rather than divine revelation.

Michael is also the adversary of Ahriman, one of the “devils” in Steiner’s cosmology. Ahriman is not “Satan”, per say. Ahriman embodies the reductive materialistic ways of the modern world, with its mechanization and reduction of the spirit to pure calculation and technology. Michael doesn’t reject the material or intellectual world, but wants it infused with spiritual awareness rather than dominated by soulless rationalism.

As a small aside…let’s review some basics of esotericism:

* Lucifer = too much spirit, too little earth (illusion, escapism)

* Ahriman = too much earth, too little spirit (materialism, mechanization)

* Christ = the balance point between them

* Michael = Christ’s “regent” or forerunner in the present age, specifically tasked with keeping Ahrimanic forces in check so humans can find that balance through free, conscious thinking rather than old-style mysticism or cold rationalism

This is important today because Steiner taught that we are living in the “Age of Michael”, a period (he said starting in the last quarter of the 19th century) where Michael’s influence makes it possible — and necessary — for humans to consciously choose spiritual knowledge rather than have it given to them. This is tied to Steiner’s broader idea of anthroposophy as a path of free, thinking cognition of spiritual reality.

If you are new to the idea of materialism and are already doubtful about what has been said about Ahriman, consider what has happened in technology and artificial intelligence over just the past decade, and you’ll begin to see what Steiner alluded to when he spoke to the “Ahrimanic forces” of the world. These are the forces that Archangel Michael is actively working against in order that the spirit of each human is not consumed by earthly forces but rather balanced between earth and spirit, like a cosmic antenna.

We are now entering the season of Michaelmas, which is punctuated - even in medieval times - by a great feast around September 29th, marking the re-embodiment of the ego consciousness into our earthly, vital bodies. This time of year is associated with themes of courage, willpower, and confronting fear (symbolized by Michael slaying the dragon) as inner qualities needed for this age, which explains the deeper meaning of the Dragon Faire for Waldorf children around ages 6-7.

The essence of Archangel Michael also comes through in the Middle High German poem: Parzival, written by Wolfram von Eschenbach between roughly 1200 and 1210, running to about 24,800 lines across sixteen books. The story follows a naive young knight raised in isolation by his widowed mother, who eventually leaves home, is inducted into King Arthur’s court, and stumbles into the mysterious Grail castle — where his failure to ask a simple question of compassion condemns him to years of wandering and further trials before he can return, mature and enlightened, to finally heal the wounded Fisher King and receive the Grail. It is ultimately Michaelic influence through which Parzival finds strength and will within himself to “do the right thing” which brings that which he is seeking within reach.

This theme is relevant to our work as people living within a community, and it’s especially relevant to birthwork, where the birth attendant must support a family sometimes out of impropriety for the rules and procedures of society. This work is a sacred calling, but fully expressing your unique human genius is also a sacred calling, and it is this time of the year that we are impressed with the importance of exercising our will to find our heart center and answer the call.

References from this conversation:

* Parzival: A Romance of the Middle Ages, by Wolfram Von Eschenbach (author), Helen M. Mustard (translator) (Best translation for prose)

* Parzival, by Wolfram Von Eschenbach (author), Jessie L. Weston (translator) (Best translation for poetry)

* The Hobbit And The Lord Of The Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & Free

Medical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Egg meets sperm.

This is what we are told happens for a baby to be born. On closer examination, you will notice that the egg, when rushed by not one but tens of thousands of strong sperm begins to spin. Counter clockwise. Or perhaps it is spiraling, like a whirling dervish, like an ammonite fossil, like the Lakota Sun Dancers around a sacred cottonwood, like the horns of the Ekoi dance mask. The great song of creation is played out through myth, storytelling, and dance across many cultures, from subatomic particles all the way up through the cosmos.

Spirals appear everywhere in nature, including in the human heart, which when boiled and teased apart unravels into a single strip of muscle tissue that coils around itself into a four-chambered structure, the structure of which creates a vortex of blood passing through.

Is your heart merely a pump? There has been sufficient curiosity evoked by the team at the HeartMath Institute, Branko Furst and his colleagues, “Paco” Torrent-Guasp and his contemporaries, and even the brilliant Leonardo da Vinci that the heart has more elegant roles than merely pushing and pulling blood.

You might be thinking: “This is ridiculous. Of course it is one egg and one sperm. Of course the heart is a pump.”

And maybe that is the problem. Maybe there is a problem with the mind (thoughts/emotions).

It is your mind that has led to your partner is dissatisfaction in your marriage or in your bedroom. It is your mind that gets you in trouble when birth politics arise on social media. It is your mind that makes you react impulsively during periods of heartbreak or when a piece of media enrages you.

Do not get me wrong. The mind is valid and important, and the only people without an intact mind are either dead or in an insane asylum.

It is your mind that has taught you to be afraid of the world. Somebody - or some thing - has impressed upon you to be afraid of this or that thing, idea, feeling. Fear must be sometimes turned ON to stay alive. This is not the issue. The issue is that we were never taught to turn fear OFF.

By doing things that scare us, we can learn to relate to fear more effectively. The antidote is embodiment. Embodiment is the consequence of connecting to our feelings in addition to our mind.

Your mind interfaces with your will, with your choices, and with your words, but I suspect that we are far too consumed with “thinking” and far too out of touch with the pull of our hearts. If you were to imagine existing solely through your thoughts and emotions, you would be left with the reach of the artificial intelligence (AI) movement. This abstraction of the human experience should make you feel something, and the notion that we can be human in our reach for mind without heart sounds like living hell on Earth.

The Great Song of Creation

Most of my time is spent advocating for maternity care system reformation, fueled by passion to restore traditional midwifery care to its rightful place as the default care offered to birthing families in the United States.

Birth has long been seen through the lens of Western medicine as a medical procedure, and yet for even longer than our written history permits, females have been giving birth as a biologic imperative. It is true that some babies of the past would have been saved through induction of labor, antibiotics, c-section, and other medical technologies, but that is not my point.

The Sioux nation did not need to rely on a story of immaculate conception to believe in miracles. The beauty of the natural landscape around them was enough. They felt this deeply. Ohiyesa, author, physician, and member of the Sioux, or Dakota, nation wrote about the ways in which the women of his tribe gave birth.

He shares that the mind of the woman does play a role in this process, but it is limited and may surprise you. When she falls pregnant, she meditates daily on a great individual in her tribe who embodies the ideal qualities of the creative impulse of nature, like reciprocity, courage, and patience, in order to impress upon the unborn child the attributes of this great individual. That is where the mind ends. She does not think her way into growing a baby or birthing her baby any more than she thought her way into making love to conceive her baby.

In order to disturb this impression, she avoids personal contact, favoring isolating whenever possible. She practices stillness in the forest. She wanders the prairies alone. She feels everything such that the majesty of Mother Earth can be impressed upon her child. In her heart, she conceives of this child as a reflection of Great Spirit, born from the natural world, “dreamed out in a hush broken only by the sighing of the pine tree or the thrilling orchestra of a distant waterfall”. (Ohiyesa, 1858-1939)

When the day comes to meet her child, she remains isolated, fully embodied with the necessary preparation demanded of this exciting gift. When she hears her baby cry in the darkness, she knows that she has fulfilled her “holiest of duties” as a member of Great Spirit’s song of creation.

Immersed in nature, she is not distracted by questions and concerns of her fellow tribespeople. She is instead showered with the praise of the birds, bees, trees, and flowers beneath her knees.

Contrast this with even the best intended advocates for reform within maternity care, where we are arguing about Georgia’s licensing laws and the ARRIVE Trial.

The Heart Can Grasp What the Mind Cannot

While reading this story, something may have moved within you. You might relate that it brought you joy, or sadness, or anger. Those are emotions.

Forget about thinking…What did you feel?

The heart is the center of your feeling life. The heart is what is moved. The heart is not afraid. The heart does not judge. Fear and judgment are activities of the mind.

Master storyteller Michael Meade describes well the experience of the heart (versus the mind):

“The mind may come to know things through a process of acquiring knowledge and information. The knowledge of the heart is instantaneous and it is revelatory, it is also holistic, and thus it is the primary source of coherence in our lives. While the slightest thing can cause us to change our minds, a life-changing or a life-enhancing moment depends upon a change of heart…Great visions and deep understandings do not come through thinking alone, but rather it is imagination that carries messages between our brain or mind and our heart, allowing thought and feeling to meet. To grasp the truth, we must get to the heart of the matter. To truly know something, we have to know it by heart. To fully express ourselves, we must speak from the bottom of our hearts…And what we need at this fearful time on Earth is the kind of radical transformation that can only begin in the depths of the human heart.” (Michael Meade, Living Myth Podcast, Ep.504, 2026)

A mere pump ca not do that.

A Change of Heart

I was recently blessed with an experience in darkness with Edmund Knighton, PhD.

When your visual cortex is removed from your experience, you get the perfect amount of medicine, with the right amount of spirit, and just enough universe to have a breakthrough in reconnecting to your self. This is the experience of embodiment, which, put simply, is the act (art) of connecting to the experience of your body and heart. You have no idea how much the mind distracts from your inner life until you are blindfolded in pitch black darkness for 36 hrs. That is when the magic begins…

For me, the magic came through dance. I remember lying on the grass and being invited to stand and move to some soft music. Without fear, without judgment, without fear of judgment, I began to move. It was subtle at first, but soon evolved into a kaleidoscopic flow of masculine and feminine energies through my four limbs and my heart. I moved myself to tears, as I felt whole again. I had clarity. I connected with my true essence, which was grounded fully in love. I sobbed not out of sadness. There was no emotion, just flow.

This is why I prefer to make love to my wife in the dark. My mind is removed so that I can be fully embodied in the experience. I can feel everything that she is experiencing. The subtle parting of her lips when I lean over to kiss her. The soft caress of her wet tongue over mine. The quivering of her lower abdomen with slow, deep penetration. The relaxation of her hands, feet, and hips after orgasm as we lay together and feel our hearts connected once more.

We are Missing the Point

Babies are conceived between romantic partners through a cosmic dance of love, where our poles create a microcosmic orbit. The rainbow within us is fully brilliant, and the zygote that results is a codification of consciousness itself.

Consciousness is a big word. The mind is limited - perhaps too limited - in its ability to grasp “consciousness”. And forget what you were told about the brain being the source of consciousness. That does not feel true to me and even some of today’s greatest thinkers have minds that agree with my inner sensibilities.

If we were to rely only on our minds, we would have no way of elaborating consciousness. The mind relies on our senses, and while our senses do interface with our feeling life, they can also distract from our heart center. I learned this from the darkness. Your senses are used to measure the environment, to ascertain safety, but not everything that can be measured is important to embody the essence of who you are.

Likewise, just because something can not be measured does not devalue its importance. You can not measure love or grief or consciousness. We do not even have a clear definition of consciousness, or any clue where it ends or where it begins. The never-ending abortion conversation fumbles this completely. An unborn baby lives in darkness, and likely has no bearing on where they end and their mother begins. This is not a question for the mind. This is a question for the inner life, the feeling life of the mother. How does she know she is pregnant before the butterflies and kicks? I do not know. But she knows in her heart.

What I feel happens with that rotating egg is that the spiraling activity - much like the practice of the whirling dervishes - brings spirit into the newly formed zygote. Can I measure this? Can I prove this? No. But I do not have to. I also can not prove to you that I love my children. I feel it in my heart to be true. And since we do not have a better explanation, that is a truth I am willing to stand by.

If we relied solely on our minds to experience the world, we would have no appreciation for orgasm, romance, grief, or the entheogenic experience of visionary plant medicines.

A lot of human innovation has come from our feeling life, far beyond the world of rights and wrongs.

Consider the classical ayahuasca “brew” of chacruna (leaves of Psychotria viridis) combined with ayahuasca (vine of Banisteriopsis caapi). There are (at least) 40,000 documented plant species in the Amazon rainforest, which is likely a gross underestimate. The number of possible combinations of any of these two plants is around 1 in 800,000,000.

In order for these two plants to have found one another, either two people in the Amazon river basin got very lucky, or the plants directed a human to join them together. Which is more possible? I do not have an answer, but I suspect that - given that the practice of drinking ayahuasca is at least one-thousand years old - something more mysterious is at play, and that this bizarre coincidence is not the byproduct of human mental faculties. Ancient humans, in conference with the jungle, felt their way in the darkness to unite these two allies on behalf of some cosmic influence.

Where are we going?

I propose that, if we have adjusted to the possibility that we as a collective desire birth attendants to support childbirth in order to mitigate risk and improvise safety in a physical process that is anything but safe to the psyche of the birthing family, then we are approaching the conversation about reforming maternity care entirely wrong.

There are calls for more data, better data, more comprehensive meta-analyses, and more measurements to satisfy our minds that we have done everything we can to prevent the death of a member of the mother-baby dyad. I can not responsibly argue against this trend, as this inventory has been a major boon to my practice as an obstetrician.

However, if a woman is not thinking her way into getting pregnant or giving birth, what does it mean to this process if we walk into their birthing quarters in a disembodied state?

We are trying to find answers to birth through our thoughts and emotions, and that has led us to a very narrow passageway devoid of any heart.

When we arrive to a birth, we should be thinking. But we should also be feeling. The medical construct of obstetrics does not lend itself to the feeling life of its practitioners, and many midwives are fighting with bureaucracy to be granted permission to have the same luxury of data and technology that keeps them likewise in their heads and out of their bodies.

The answer is that birthworkers (myself included) should be focusing as much on our inner life as we are searching for papers to support our bias on Pubmed.

This is the only way forward.

Conclusion

I once sat with traditional midwives in South Africa, and I was invited onto their dance floor to cut a rug, and cut a rug I did. They were joking with me afterwards that the words to the song spoke to the inability of white people to move their hips.

Many of us white people were raised in a culture that taught us to be afraid of moving our bodies, to show off our beautiful skin, to speak unless granted permission. As I have already said, this is the work of the mind.

Anybody can dance well, as it is a very natural action of moving these beautiful bodies to the rhythm of music. But this requires us to feel the rhythm. And the same culture that judges us for enjoying lovemaking is equally excited to prescribe you drugs to suppress your “feeling” life. (Think antidepressants, anxiolytics) This same society has outlawed medicines - real medicines, not drugs - that disconnect you from your mind, medicines like ayahuasca, chacruna, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and others.

The remedy for this could be as simple as embracing stillness in nature. Embracing darkness. How do we become re-embodied after a lifetime of ignoring the signals from our hearts? This is my work going forward as a physician.

This is the cornerstone of the upcoming Born Free Twins-Breech Gathering in Austin in November, 2026. I am also organizing a trip to Costa Rica with a handful of birthworkers to do just this with the support of Vocal Transformation and Grandmother Aya.

This is just the beginning, and it is a drop in the bucket, but I will know soon where to go from here.

A Closing Meditation

Embrace your inner life. Surrender to the mysteries of birth. Your mind could use a rest. And your clients are going to love the new you.

You have let Mother Culture create an abstraction of life on your behalf, so much so that large language models (AI agents) are starting to feel very human. AI can never replace your humanity. It can describe emotions, and it can think as fast as (or faster than) we can. But it can not feel. It can not ground itself in loving presence.

The AI revolution is an invitation to consider the cost of losing your humanity as a birthworker, because it can never replace the essence of your heart. You have a soul. You can feel presence. AI agents were not granted these gifts.

There have been calls for a reclamation of the soul of midwifery. “It is the soul that informs the compassion we feel for others and that suffuses the mundane with a sense of the sacred. It is the soul that translates incident into experience, knowledge into wisdom.” (Jane Hope, “The Secret Language of the Soul”)

You were once a baby, existing in the darkness of your mother’s womb. Surrounded by the warmth of her amniotic fluid. As a baby, you needed no help to be embodied. You were fully there. Fully present. Fully alive.

I will leave you with an invitation.

Close your eyes and connect to the sensations in your body. Feel your heart beating. Place a hand on your heart and a hand on your belly. Take a deep breath. Feel your aliveness. Say this with me: “I AM”. Say it again. “I AM”. Take stock of what is going on inside of your body. The weight of your hips on your seat. The weight of your upper eyelids on your lower eyelids.

Breathe.

How does that feel?

Nathan Riley, MD is a dual-board certified physician in obstetrics and gynecology and hospice and palliative medicine. He is also the co-creator of the Born Free Method, an online platform that supports families around the world throughout the fertility through postpartum continuum. Find more support at Beloved Holistics and Born Free Method.

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Most electronic health records (EHRs) were designed for a different era, with clunky interfaces, confusing navigation, and tools that were never quite right for the way you actually work.Sena EHR was built specifically for CPMs and midwives doing out-of-hospital births. That means charting that reflects real midwifery scope, including vaginal breech and multiples. Billing, messaging, scheduling, and documentation in one place. A system that works on any device — even offline at a birth with no signal.In this interview with founder Dani Sigmon, you’ll get the scoop for the latest and greatest EHR platform and what sets it apart from the rest!We don’t typically do promotional podcasts, but Sena EHR is the only sponsor that we permitted at the 2026 Born Free Twins-Breech Gathering. Their support made it possible for us to add an additional scholarship this year, and we are so grateful!

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I chat with Farah Tanis, founder of Restore Forward. For the 2026 edition of their WILD Healing Summit, the theme is “A Harvest of Medicine”. I can’t impress upon you how beautiful this offering is, and it was right up my alley when Farah asked me to present as a speaker.

Here are the reasons that I want you to support this event:

* There are a number of amazing speakers that will presenting online, including - Dr. Mmatshilo Motsei, Iakowi:he’ne’ Oakes, Dr. Neena Van Luven, and more - then it culminates in physical presence on their sanctuary in upstate New York — a feast, a performance, and a “medicine walk”

* The language throughout leans on “walking with” rather than “attending” — suggesting a relational, participatory model rather than a passive audience experience

* The 2026 theme, “A Harvest of Medicine,” ties the event to seasonal/agricultural imagery — suggesting themes of gathering, culmination, and traditional or plant-based healing practices, consistent with the “medicine walk” element on the land

Overall, the ethos reflects: nature-rooted healing, intergenerational and communal participation, and a hybrid of digital accessibility with grounded, in-person ritual, all of the components of a more beautiful world that we know is possible.

My personal presentation is probably the best I’ve ever given. I explore the complex nature of fertility and the limitations of conventional medical approaches. I begin by discussing how modern medicine’s focus on reductive materialism misses important aspects of fertility. I outline my expanded approach to fertility workups beyond conventional reproductive endocrinology, incorporating functional medicine testing, nutritional interventions, and emotional/relational considerations. I challenge the gene-centered view of human biology, discussing epigenetics, intergenerational trauma transmission, and the possibility that water’s properties within cells could influence genetic expression. My presentation concludes with insights about the importance of embodied experience over intellectual approaches to conception and birth, drawing parallels between human fertility challenges and our disconnected relationship with nature.

The 2026 WILD Healing Summit takes place on September 9-10, 2026, online, culminating in an in-person opportunity on their land in upstate New York on September 12th. Even if you can only participate online, please go register at www.wildgala.com.

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Edmund Knighton, Ph.D., is a seasoned educator, clinical psychologist, and somatic movement practitioner whose multidisciplinary career spans more than three decades. He has engaged through various capacities with Waldorf education for over 35 years, once even serving as the president of Rudolf Steiner College. Drawing on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, the channeled material of “Ra” from the The Law of One, and somatic/transpersonal psychology, Edmund offers consulting for individuals, organizations, and families (including my own) committed to holistic growth.

You won’t find Edmund on social media, but you can reach out to him by email: Fifthwanderer@gmail.com if you ‘d like to have his support in your home.

In Part 1 of this series with Edmund, we discussed some of the basics around Steiner’s philosophy, the Waldorf pedagogy, a 3- and 4-fold approach to human wellbeing, and we started our venture into autism.

In Part 2, we dove deeper into “autism” but also offered an invitation to consider the extrasensory gifts displayed by many “autistic” children. We also covered vaccines.

In Part 3, we discussed the significance of the Holy Nights, a time of spiritual reflection and preparation leading up to Christmas as well as the days that follow.

In Part 4, we focused on men. What is men’s work? What does it mean to embrace your feminine? What is meant by femininity and masculinity? What does this have to do with sex, childbirth, and love-making?

In Part 5, we will explore darkness, sleep, and the importance of being “moved” throughout our life. We also go deeper into the masculine and feminine energetics of being (versus doing).

Edmund shares this Rilke poem early in the conversation, and it is really captures quite a bit of what we discussed:

You, darkness, that I come fromI love you more than all the firesthat fence in the world,for the fire makes a circle of light for everyoneand then no one outside learns of you.But the darkness pulls in everything-shapes and fires, animals and myself,how easily it gathers them! -powers and people-and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.I have faith in nights.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

This conversation took place roughly a week before a men’s retreat for fathers that I am hosting alongside Edmund in Idaho this August. This retreat will include blindfolded activities, MDMA-assisted sessions, movement exercises, and integration practices, aiming to foster trust, vulnerability, and deeper connection among these fathers (or soon-to-be fathers). As a preamble to our time together (and epilogue to a recent darkness retreat that I attended in Aspen, also hosted by Edmund), we explored the value of darkness retreats, the role of sleep and dreaming from the perspective of Rudolf Steiner, and the importance of reconnecting with the feminine, being moved emotionally, and experiencing presence and essence beyond productivity. We reflected on masculine and feminine energies, the significance of darkness in opening perception, and the potential for personal transformation through embodied practices and conscious unraveling of inherited identities.

Be sure you don’t miss Edmund’s beautiful reflection on the menstrual cycle and blood as a sensing organ at [00:34:40]

Email Edmund at fifthwanderer@gmail.com (He isn’t on social media)

References from our conversation:

* Check out Be Here Farm+Nature’s event offerings, as Edmund is frequently featured

* All About Love, book by Bell Hooks

* Buddha in Redface, book by Eduardo Duran

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Wayland Myers, PhD, is a clinical psychologist who trained first as a mechanical engineer before pivoting into psychology, a background that seems to show up in how methodically he approaches something as slippery as human conflict. He’s spent much of his career teaching and writing about Nonviolent Communication (NVC), the empathy-centered framework originated by Marshall Rosenberg, and is the author of Nonviolent Communication: The Basics As I Know and Use Them.

Myers’s particular contribution is less about inventing new theory and more about translation, taking NVC’s sometimes abstract language and making it usable in the middle of an actual argument. His core idea is that most conflict escalates because people default to judgment and blame instead of naming what they’re actually feeling and needing. Shift that, he argues, and disagreement stops being a tug-of-war and starts being something closer to a joint excavation whereby two people begin digging toward the same root, rather than digging in against each other.In this conversation, Wayland shares his background in psychology, hospice care, and his introduction to NVC through Marshall Rosenberg, leading to his writing of a primer on the subject nearly 30 years ago. They discussed the core principles of NVC, including the distinction between the “language of giraffe” (compassionate, curious communication) and the “language of jackal” (moralistic, evaluative language). Wayland provided examples of NVC in action, such as a parent-child conflict and a role-play scenario involving a midwife and an OBGYN, demonstrating how to connect by empathizing with the other person’s feelings and needs. The conversation also touched on the challenges of emotional intelligence, the application of NVC in politically charged discussions, and its broader impact on relationships, including parenting. Wayland expressed his hope for the legacy of NVC to be a deeper understanding that all human behavior is driven by a life-serving intent to improve well-being.

NVC is so badly needed in today’s world, particularly in the way that we - as birthworkers - are communicating with one another and other healthcare professionals. We have lost the art of connection, and finding our way back starts with the daily conversations we have even with loved ones.

I use NVC in my marriage, with my friends, and with my children, as Wayland’s work has subtly had a profound impact on parenting and what is now known as “gentle parenting”.

Purchase his very accessible book on Amazon. And check out the Center for Nonviolent Communication for more. He also has a website but it hasn’t been updated in a while.

Be sure to check our role play of an OBGYN and midwife transferring a client to the hospital around minute [00:54:40]

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Born Free Method: The Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

This was a community call hosted within our Born Free Method program. We meet each week and the calls are recorded, and occasionally we are blessed with a guest like Veda Ray. We repurposed this conversation as a podcast, and it covers a wide range of topics that may be relevant to postpartum planning, especially as you might relate to the conversation around a birth certificate. We also talk about social security, trusts, lotus birth, placentas, taxes, and other topics related to sovereignty, which starts when you decide you want to have babies. This is an important one…

Connect with Veda on Instagram and find her offerings for support on these topics at her website.

References from the conversation:

* Ep 193: The Hidden Ledger: Taxes, Debt, & Restoration Of The Living with Govinda Tidball (Alec Zeck podcast)

* https://ourdataourselves.uoregon.edu/topics/birth-certificate-standardization

* https://exittaxclub.com/

* Word Magic: The Powers and Occult Definitions of Words, by Pao Chang

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!

More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Born Free Method: The Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Ashley Mariani is a trauma-informed couples therapist specializing in intimacy and relationship issues that arise during pregnancy and in the postpartum. She is one of those people in the trenches helping couples reorient themselves to sex and relating with the addition of a baby into the mix. This is not niche, this is not unique: every relationship experiences some degree of hardship after birth.

Connect with Ashley on Instagram. Want to work with Ashley? Email her at: contact@mindonline.ca

[00:02:55] - When we get into arguments with our intimate partners (or anybody, really), the unmet needs of our inner child surfaces. This is especially relevant for men, who are often lacking guidance on managing and exploring the underpinnings of their emotional landscape.

[00:06:30] - We are storymaking machines, but are all of the stories that we write about our partners true?

[00:11:15] - Trauma in and out of the obstetrics model. Trauma can be inflicted in the obvious ways but also through dismissive behavior or language by your partner or practitioner. Moderating disagreements between partners around interventions in childbirth.

[00:17:13] - Nonviolent communication and seeking to fill the unmet need underlying every instance of emotional conflict.

[00:25:00] - How does birth trauma impact a couple’s connection/communication? When a partner doesn’t provide an anchor of safety during an act of obstetric violence, for example, this lack of felt safety may roll over into their relationship in the postpartum. Ashley has a very great exercise for couples struggling with shared decision-making as their birth approaches.

[00:35:00] - How can a couple begin to re-engage in penetrative intercourse and other forms of intimacy? (Pay attention men!)

[00:43:00] - Communicating needs to your spouse and prioritizing one-on-one time with a baby in the mix

[00:48:54] - Navigating struggles with the lack of intimacy and feeling of obligation to your partner sexually after giving birth. Men often struggle with feeling “third wheel” energy and appropriately grieving the changes can be an opportunity to flex your masculinity.

[00:52:26] - Intimacy troubles alongside co-sleeping. ALERT: It’s healthy and normal for you not to get right back to your pre-pregnancy sex life immediately postpartum. It could take years!

[00:59:00] - How do you manage being “triggered”, withdrawing, and shutting down in response to your partner?

Connect with Ashley on Instagram. Want to work with Ashley? Email her at: contact@mindonline.ca

References from the episode:

* Nonviolent Communication: The Basics As I Know and Use Them, by Wayland Myers

* Fair Play Cards

* Hear Ashley and others (like Dr. Stu!) speak at the 2026 Reclaiming Birth Gathering

Related episodes:

* What He Never Learned: Repair, Responsibility, and Men’s Silent Longing for Connection with Ted Riter

* From Fighter to Sage: Kyle Kingsbury on Fatherhood and Fitness Beyond the Physical

* Edmund Knighton, PhD (Part 4) - Sacred Polarities: The Ra Material, Steiner, and a Man’s Work in Conception, Childbirth and Beyond

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!

More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Born Free Method: The Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Eric Osborne is the founder of the first legal psychedelic mushroom church in the United States. He has been working with psilocybin mushrooms (and culinary mushrooms) for decades, feeling a pull from without him to continue on this journey despite legal troubles, jail time, and putting his family at risk of losing it all. And yet he persists, because he believes that psychedelic mushroom journeys could be the answer to many of the world’s woes. This passion led Eric to found Psanctuary, where people across the world can find community and engage in ceremonies led remotely by Eric and his team.

[00:20:00] - Why are psychedelics important to the world?

[00:21:05] - Like snakes, mushrooms can be both poisonous and beautiful. What is consciousness? How do psychedelics support reflection on the “big” questions?

[00:40:46] - Could psychedelics deepen your relationship to “God”?

[00:44:00] - Universal laws and codes of the universe exposed through DMT and lasers

[00:47:24] - What role do mushrooms play in the ecosystem and how might this also be beneficial for humans?

[00:49:50] - How have experiences with mushrooms and MDMA helped Eric become a better father?

[00:54:00] - Psychedelics can be confronting to societal mechanisms of control, which is probably why they’re illegal. Sitting in a jail cell with substance abusers who could be saved through psychedelics. The foundations of Psanctuary, the first legal mushroom church in the United States. What if the original eucharist was a mushroom?

[01:13:40] - How to get started using psychedelic mushrooms

https://www.psanctuary.org/

References from the show:

* Danny Goler’s experiments with lasers and people on DMT

* The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

by Brian C. Muraresku

*

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!

More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Born Free Method: The Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

I am so glad that you are here!

There are a lot of birth- and pregnancy-related podcasts, and many do a great job of breaking down the clinical information pertaining to fertility, birth, pregnancy, and postpartum.

This is all fine and good…but I have still have questions despite being dual board-certified as an OBGYN and hospice and palliative care physician.

What is life?Where do babies come from?Does it matter how babies come in to the world?What is consciousness?What is intelligence?What happens to us when we die?These are the types of questions that keep my heart strumming! And every episode of Born Free Method: the Podcast aims to provide a small piece to the puzzle.

Enjoy!

https://www.bornfreemethod.com

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

I met Maryn Azoff and Patrick Surdam through their Vocal Transformation program. Well…to be clear…my wife found them on Instagram and went to Costa Rica on a whim to workshop with them for a week, and it changed her life and mine as a result.

Maryn is a professional singer, and Patrick is a professional musician. Their goal? Help you reclaim what was rightfully yours at birth: your voice.

But their retreats aren’t necessarily a means of getting through to Hollywood on America’s Got Talent, although perhaps that could be the case for some. Their workshopping is a means of getting you out of your head and into your body.

When you are embodied, you have no problem using your voice, standing your ground, and moving your hips.

What does this have to do with birth?

Giving birth isn’t something we do in our heads. It’s a fully embodied experience. And yet…most women giving birth in our country are trying to think their way through this sacred archetypal transformation. When they reach out for support from birthworkers, the latter are also often stuck up in their heads.

What would it mean for the world if the women birthing babies and the birthworkers supporting this process weren’t totally caught up in their heads but rather embodied in the moment?

You can’t think your way into conception. Data can’t love you like your partner. And babies can’t feel safe because of some protocol devised in an Ivory tower. But our culture seems to think so.

None of this is your fault. So don’t do that thing that we all tend to do, where we whip ourselves for “not doing it right.”

When you were born, you didn’t apologize for how loud you cried. You didn’t apologize for coloring outside the lines as a toddler. But as you matured, Mother Culture - the parents, priests, and “leaders” who were there to guide you - compelled you to be small and “think before you speak”.

I have a vision for maternity care, and I suspect that it’s going to very hard to realize this vision if we remain stuck in the “mental” game of statistics, protocols, and procedures. We need to dis-member ourselves and re-member what a gift it is to be alive, to have a voice, to have legs and hips, and to use these tools of expression as boldly as possible.

This conversation is the beginning of something huge…

Please share this episode if anything resonates with you! And go check out all of Vocal Transformation’s offerings if you were inspired by this conversation!

[00:19:20] - Introduction to the professional musicians behind Vocal Transformation; sound is produced by and can harmonize the body (and world); music can help you transcend the material notion of “I”; the voice is your supreme instrument[00:28:41] - The spirits of plants (visionary or otherwise) can help us remember our connectedness to everything and everyone; if we are honest with ourselves, we don’t really know anything with 100% certainty - life is a mystery; plants can reinforce some uncomfortable truths that we’ve been taught about ourselves; dis-membering so that you can re-member; babies aren’t born with a sense of limitations (we edit and manipulate them to be quiet)[00:43:51] - The value of a connection to the Earth (Pachamama) for orienting our questions around the mysteries of life; the value of ancestry and lineage; the United States does, indeed, have a rich cultral heritage through the music that we’ve been producing for 100 years[00:57:14] - Icaros are songs taught to us by plants and that can be then used to call in the spirits of plants in ceremony; these songs can come to us at any time if we are listening[01:08:16] - The goal of Maryn and Patrick for those who attend a Vocal Transformation Expressions Retreat is to find your authentic “song” and to reawaken the body (drop from your head into your heart); Expressions is about “soul” and finding the beatGo check out all of Vocal Transformation’s offerings if you were inspired by this conversation!

Additional resources related to the conversation:

* Masters of the Living Energy: The Mystical World of the Q’ero of Peru

by Joan Parisi Wilcox

* Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

* Tribe of Love (Maryn is a vocalist is some their music is played in their ceremonies)

* One of my favorite songs by Cura Cura, “Dead Man”

Related episodes:

* Maryn’s first appearance on the podcast

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!

More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.Music provided by Cura Cura Music

Born Free Method: The Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Sara Rosser, CPM, and I (Nathan Riley, MD), reunited in Florida for an organizing meeting ahead of the 2026 Born Free Twins-Breech Gathering, which takes place in Austin, TX, November 12-15, 2026. While we were awaiting the rest of our amazing team, we sat down to discuss Sara’s recent home birth to which I was an attendant. There were a number of things that arose that could have resulted in a hospital transfer and probably c-section, but she knew herself and trusted her team. At the heart of her birth was workshopping between Sara, me, and Sara’s midwife, leading to this episode’s conversation around consent, disagreement, parenting, and more, such as vaccines. This conversation also gave us the opportunity to reflect on the value that we bring to our Born Free Method Community members on a daily basis.Follow Sara and Bornfreemethod on Instagram!If you’re currently pregnant, planning to have kids in the future, already parents, or if you’re a birthworker, come try out the Born Free Method for FREE.

[00:04:15] - Nathan attended Sara’s surprise breech birth; building a birth team that you trust; workshopping before hospital transfer

[00:20:15] - we must not let our fear of hospitals delay transfer, especially when a birthing woman senses something is off

[00:27:05] - exercising freedom requires that you also own the outcomes of your decisions (vaccines as a case study); a reminder on what it means for a family to provide consent; when parents disagree about interventions, who gets veto power?; struggling with pediatric decisions

[00:38:00] - you can’t undo decisions related to your child, so you must start working on your parenting styles as soon as you consider trying to conceive; the power of saying “not now” to interventions

[00:48:00] - advice for families risking social ostracization as the cost of exercising their autonomy; don’t presume that you know the position of your friends and family on various

Related episodes:

* Dr. Larry Palevsky: the Pediatrician You Didn’t Know You Needed

* Who Holds the Wisdom? Learning to Transgress Hegemony in Midwifery and Maternity Care

* In the Waters of Rememberance: Honoring an Obstetrics Hero

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. Enroll for your 7-day free trial!More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Born Free Method: The Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Ann-Emilie Augustinus is a Danish midwife or, in her native language, jordemoder, which literally translates to “earth mother”. Ann-Emilie and I connected as a consequence of ongoing limitations to midwifery practice in Denmark. At present, midwives are virtually inaccessible to families in Denmark.

Often European models of maternity care are hailed in contrast to the U.S. models, but from her story, you’ll be able to appreciate that midwifery is collapsing worldwide. In fact, another recent guest - Hadhee Jah, the Last Birthkeeper of the Maldives - shares a shockingly similar story.

How did a people found through Viking conquest and settlement based in freedom allow this to pass in Denmark? This is what we discuss in this episode. We also dive in to traditional practices pertaining to birth, many of which could still be practiced today, but these oral traditions are fading with the midwives.

00:06:30 - The collapse of midwifery in Denmark. What is a person to do if they aren’t permitted (legally) to attend childbirth. Why have the people of Denmark stopped trusting in their bodies to have babies? The modern day witch hunts.

00:24:20 - How did the Danes go from autonomous combatants of authority historically to following every rule passed down by authority figures? Thor, Völva, and more. What were midwives of older times like in Denmark?

00:32:50 - Origins of ljósmóðir (Light Mother), jordemoder (Earth Mother); traditional practices around birth in Denmark; how might the moon affect pregnancy and birth

00:53:56 - Birth and death was a normal part of Danish tradition and why is free birth on the rise? Corruption of midwifery through the legal system.

Follow Ann-Emelie on Instagram.

Related episodes:

* Whapio Bartlett: On Wisdom Keeping, with a Truly Legendary Midwife

* Hadhee Jah: Traditional midwifery is losing ground, a conversation with The Last Birthkeeper

* Carol Gautschi: Confronting Fear (and the Law) in Midwifery

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews.All of this for just $200 per month.

More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

If you feel like homeopathy is baloney, you’re not alone. This was my general position on this centuries-old “science” until I met Rudi Verspoor, one of the world’s leading scholars on the work of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy. In collaboration with Steven Decker, Rudi undertook a decades-long re-examination of Hahnemann’s complete medical system — not merely homeopathy, but the broader framework Hahnemann himself called Heilkunst, meaning “the art of making whole.”As a result of the general failure of existing homeopaths and homeopathic schools to incorporate these insights, Rudi helped found the Hahnemann College for Heilkunst, which provides a four-year program internationally to train practitioners in Heilkunst. Rudi has written and co-written numerous books, including Homeopathy Renewed: A Sequential Approach to the Treatment of Chronic Illness, Homeopathy Re-examined: Beyond the Classical Paradigm, The Dynamic Legacy: Hahnemann from Homeopathy to Heilkunst, Autism: The Journey Back — Recovering the Self Through Heilkunst, and Scandal in Köthen: The Real Homeopathic Love Story, among others.At the heart of Verspoor’s work is the conviction that classical homeopathy, as widely practiced today, represents only a fragment of what Hahnemann truly envisioned — and that the complete system of Heilkunst, with its emphasis on causal prescribing, inherited disease, and the dynamic energy underlying health, offers a far more profound path to healing.Reach out to Rudi’s team if you want to work with one of the best: reception@homeopathy.com

00:13:00 - How Samuel Hahnemann’s work has been distorted over the centuries; sustantive power versus generative power (duality of life force); vitalism has been largely ignored in western medicine; palingenesis versus homeostasis; heilkhunst; physician versus medician; bio-logic

00:34:15 - Law of similars; case study of china bark and arsenic; wesen = essence (everything living thing and thought and diseases has a wesen); Hahnemann’s dilutional experiments that crossed over from material to dynamics

00:49:00 - In the world of dynamics, we can start to treat emotional and traumatic wesens; how did homeopathy become a practice of merely palliating symptoms? Why hasn’t homeopathy performed well in randomized control trials? Remedies for chronic miasms; remedies for “being pissed off”

01:17:30 - Vaccination versus immunization drawing from Steiner and the history of small pox inoculation; vaccinations ultimately weaken the immune system; original antigenic sin; homeoprophylaxis

Reach out to Rudi’s team if you want to work with one of the best: reception@homeopathy.com

References from this conversation:

* Rudi’s paper on chronic miasms (free after you create an account)

* 1796 white paper on homeopathy by Hahnemann

* THE DYNAMIC LEGACY: Hahnemann From Homeopathy to Heilkunst - An On-going Study of the Meaning in the Writings of Samuel Hahnemann within the Context of the Dynamic System of Thought Leading Thereby to a More Powerful System of Cure for Disease

Related episodes:

* Of Yarrow and Men: the Seasonal Alchemy of Huma Decay

Born Free Method: The Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews.All of this for just $200 per month.

More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Hadhee Jah is an Ayurvedic postpartum doula and birth sovereignty advocate originally from the Maldives, whose work bridges ancestral wisdom with the modern experience of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum recovery. Rooted deeply in her Maldivian heritage, she has dedicated her life to reclaiming traditional approaches to motherhood and postnatal care.Hadhee’s path into birth work was profoundly shaped by her own birth story. During her labor, she experienced a deep spiritual connection with her grandmother — a transformative moment that awakened her commitment to honoring the wisdom carried across generations. That personal experience, along with the challenges she navigated in her own postpartum journey, became the foundation for her calling.Drawing on Ayurvedic principles and Maldivian communal birth traditions, Hadhee champions practices such as warm oil massage, belly binding, and nurturing postpartum rituals that prioritize the full recovery and emotional wellbeing of new mothers. Central to her philosophy is the belief that the postpartum period is not merely a brief recovery phase, but a sacred, lifelong journey — a perspective she describes as “birth sovereignty,” guiding women to birth and mother with fierce self-trust.Hadhee has spoken extensively on the importance of community-based, grassroots maternal care, advocating for mothers to reclaim their autonomy within healthcare systems. She advises women on choosing the right midwife and navigating hospital environments to create empowering, personalized birth experiences.She is the author of the book, Postpartum Is Forever, in which she draws on her Maldivian heritage to present a vision of postnatal care rooted in ancestral wisdom and Ayurvedic tradition. The book argues for viewing postpartum not as a medical milestone to complete, but as an ongoing dimension of a woman’s identity and health.Connect with Hadhee through her website, Instagram, and Youtube. Purchase her book HERE.

00:06:45 - Birth is completely medicalized in the Maldives, but there used to be a rich history of traditional midwifery. Traditionally, it was typical to “warm” the women postpartum for 40 days. This wisdom is still being passed on secondarily, “the wisdom wants to find somebody to carry it forward”.00:12:36 - What did traditional midwifery used to look like in the Maldives? The way in which babies come into the world holds great import for the future of the world. You are gifted with the experience of giving birth!00:23:28 - What was the impulse that provoked policy change around midwifery in the Maldives and what lessons might be learn for the future of midwifery care in the United States?00:27:55 - Hadhee’s free birth, and why she ended up in the hospital despite her baby being born happy and healthy00:43:00 - What are the detriments to childbirth of a woman feeling watched or observed?00:47:02 - Ayurveda, belly binding, and yoni steamingConnect with Hadhee through her website, Instagram, and Youtube. Purchase her book HERE.

References from the conversation:

* The Last Birthkeeper (Hadhee’s 10-minute documentary)

* Train with Hadhee’s teacher to become an Ayurvedic postpartum doula

Related episodes:

* Carol Gautschi: Confronting Fear (and the Law) in Midwifery

* Who Holds the Wisdom? Learning to Transgress Hegemony in Midwifery and Maternity Care

* In the Waters of Rememberance: Honoring an Obstetrics Hero

Born Free Method: The Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews.All of this for just $200 per month.

More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & FreeMedical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe

Carol Gautschi is a midwife with over 50 years in practice, and she has walked a very unorthodox path.

Like many, Carol herself was plagued by fear of birth from an early age. She was sexually and physically molested separately by two different doctors in her first two births – and also given grossly inaccurate information postpartum that caused breastfeeding delay and hindered bonding. These experiences strongly planted seeds for the need of global reform, moving her to sense the sacredness and vulnerability of the moments during, before and after birth. Those moments had been stolen from her. She decided to hire a midwife for her third birth. The time spent with this midwife transformed her, helping her see that labor is wondrously spiritual, powerful, and a profoundly healthy force.

She believes that women are being robbed by a society that does not see to care about the uniqueness of this time, this right of passage, and that not treating it with tender, sensitive respect, women are doing themselves harm– more harm then we can imagine. From that moment on she believed that birth was the highest place a woman can go in her body on this planet. For Carol, becoming a midwife was a metamorphosis. She has served families as an empirical midwife and doula or Monitrice since 1978, a deeply humbling honor.In this conversation, we dive in to the many fears prohibiting quality midwifery care and birth support, from the law to our own traumas. Connect with Carol through her website or by email: classicalmidwife@gmail.com .

00:01:43 - Carol’s midwifery beginnings (and what makes her so special). How does it feel to be called an “elder midwife”? Carol shares that she originally didn’t even like women at the time that she was being called to midwifery. Carol was drawn to this work through abuse she experienced at the hands of an OBGYN in her own births.

00:13:30 - Birth story of a baby born into a toilet after an exam revealed the baby wasn’t even engaged to the cervix.

00:1710 - Developing a healthy relationship with fear. A story of a large baby, episiotomy, and divine intervention. We can holding space for birth, we are acting on behalf of the Holy Spirit. At some point, every midwife has to make the decision not to allow the spirit of fear to drive their behaviors.

00:40:40 - Many “believers” misrepresent Christianity and Jesus (Yeshua), and this inauthenticity of Yeshua’s teachings is a great source of fear that has no place in childbirth.

00:44:35 - How is fear shaping modern midwifery care? Jacob’s contension with God in the Bible as a source of direction when faced with a dead baby. Ethical versus lawful care. Fear versus discernment.

00:58:10 - We have a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws. To whom do we owe our obligation? What happens when the legal system hits back? Honesty and integrity always win. As a midwife, you have the right to refuse care to people who aren’t doing their best to take care of themselves.

To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews. All of this for just $200 per month.

More ways to work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Clear & Free Medical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at https://nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe