At the end of this series on the effects of birth, I wanted to share an episode about how wonderful birth can be, and the effects of that on a family. In The Aware Baby, Aletha Solter talks about doing what we can to prepare for birth, and I wanted to offer some examples of that through this conversation with Carly Facius who is a Registered Midwife, International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, and holds a Master of Primary Maternity Care and is an Aware Parenting instructor. We both send you so much love and compassion to women who have had a traumatic birth and invite you to listen in to yourself and whether you might need to pause at any time. Please reach out for support if you do choose to listen and feelings come up for you. Carly shares her own background and the effects of that on seeing the beauty of birth – her mother is a midwife and was when she was a child, and actually was the only midwife in a very small country town. We talk about how we would all be seeing birth a lot if we lived in a healthy culture and what a difference that would make in this culture if we did. Carly shares about her experience of living in Bali and how birth there is an ordinary everyday event, and the cultural differences in terms of birth and how many people there often are with the birthing woman. She also shares about her own experience of giving birth, going in with the background and the positive imprints she had. She also talks about the power of being willing to receive support, and what an opportunty birthing can be for us in that. She shares about what it's like coming into parenting a newborn having had a powerful, transformative birthing experience. I share about my experience of birth and what a beautiful start it was to be practicing Aware Parenting. Carly shares about the expansion of capacity to tune in to your baby that can then happen and all the after effects of empowering births. We also talked about how important it is for parents who do have a stressful or traumatic birth to be so deeply compassionate with themselves when the whole process goes a bit awry. Carly explains that a lot of the common challenges in the early weeks and months often aren't as evident when people have an empowering birth experience. Birth can be a deeply transformative experience, both for women who give birth, but also to be alongside the birthing woman, or be an adoptive parent, there are so many ways for transformation to occur. Carly also talks about how she supports parents so they are more likely to have a powerful and transformative life experience, particularly in terms of undoing conditioning around knowing and asking for what they need and understanding how powerful they are. We also link this to Aware Parenting and helping children stay connected with their inner knowing and Carly talks about how we can model that to them while we're pregnant with them. I share about the birth video I watched hundreds of times before giving birth and Carly talks about inviting parents to focus on what they want and are willing for before birth. We finish talking about birth being an opportunity to see how powerful we are, to deeply reconnect with and trust our bodies. You can find out more about Carly and her work at www.seedpodfamilies.com or at https://www.instagram.com/seed_pod_/