Hi, I'm Madison.
A woman who learned to trust life more than the stories we've been conditioned to believe through embodied pregnancy and birth.
It was 2019. I was working as a medical Speech-Language Pathologist and I had just heard my first freebirth story...
All my mind could say is, "What do you mean this woman birthed her baby in the middle of nowhere, in a snow storm, in a yurt, with only her partner and her dog? Did she just say midwolf? What the actual fuck. She's nuts."
I laugh now because my body knew something then that my mind wasn't yet ready to accept: this is for me. It was as if my bones were vibrating in resonance and remembrance as she spoke her story, but my mind was saying, "this is insane."
I listened to the entire season of freebirth stories over the next few weeks. I cycled between amazement and awe, and the story of I could never do that.
I put birth down for a few years and didn't think anything of it. I got married in 2022, and in 2023 my husband and I were willing to welcome a baby into our lives.
A short two months later, we discovered I was pregnant with our first baby and suddenly I felt life around me expand. All of a sudden I became aware of how important it was to protect, cultivate and respect the relationship I had with my body. Because here I was, this vessel carrying literal life, a soul manifest in flesh. Nothing was more important.
Holding this intuitive knowing, nothing about medicalized birth made sense for me. It felt hardened, stiff, almost suffocating. So this was the start of my journey in learning how to understand 1) what my heart was asking of me, 2) being aware of the actions I was making in my life, and 3) attuning to my body's signals about those actions: were they in alignment with my heart's truth, or were they a part of an old story I was still living in?
From the very beginning there was one belief that carried me through: women were divinely created to create, carry, and birth life. If we weren't, I wouldn't be here today. Humans have been walking Earth for at least 300,000 years, and the western medicalized birth model has only been in practice for ~150 years. I was choosing to bet on the 299,850 years of birthing without it.
Now, since then I have had a second pregnancy and birth, I've self-studied in birth, philosophy and spirituality, I've wavered on the spectrum of nuance and ideology, and I've finally come to understand that at the end of the day there is absolutely no "right" or "wrong" answers when it comes to living life, let alone decisions about how a woman births.
I've heard stories of women having completely embodied hospital births and I've heard stories of women having traumatic freebirths. The underlying current in these stories is that though yes, context can matter, it's not everything. What's more important is a woman's relationship to herself, to her decisions and how she shows up in the experience itself.
I've found that women who walk in embodied awareness and presence through the lens of creation, energy moves and life unfolds. This is the divine blueprint.
I've personally experienced two beautiful freebirths. I've learned to walk in curious dialogue with my body, following the somatic signals it provides and sitting with them, willing to ask what story is my body living in in this moment, and is it a story that is true for me or is it something that no longer resonates with my heart and soul. That is the beautiful journey that I seek to facilitate in relationship with other curious women. To walk with them in their reclamation as co-creators of their lived experience.
My first freebirth was journeyed primarily in isolation and my experience postpartum mirrored that. I felt a large sense of tension, resistance, and friction in my emerging motherhoood. My second freebirth softened me. It opened me up to the idea that these incredible, biological and spiritual transformations require community. A sister or wise women there to hold your hand along the way, to believe in you just enough so that you begin to believe in yourself even more. Someone who is able to ask purposeful and deep questions that will leave you knowing that you are the writer and orchestrator of your experience. You hold all of the power, not anyone else. Someone who can help you wade through the noise of all the stories that have been unknowingly prescribed to you, and guide you in discernment to find your heart's true center.
My mission is more than pregnancy and birth support. It's to help women reignite the fire in their hearts, to bring awareness, language and connection between the sensations their bodies express and the actions they take in life, it's to be a constant companion in discourse of curiosity, it's to be a partner of play in this game of life, and it's to breathe life into and aliven joy in all that is.
