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 nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe
