In this week's episode I am honored to share my conversation with one of my teachers, Qiddist Ashé. Qiddist is a traditional midwife, alchemy educator, teacher of inside-out liberation, and co-founder of The Holy Well (previously known as The Womb Room). With a decade of experience in the world of female health and spiritual formation, she takes a deeply relational approach to facilitating transformation in bodymind, spirit, and the world. Her work is in service to the knowing that women in their aliveness create more liberation in the world.

In this episode we get into:

• The many lives, selves, and gifts that she embodies in this current lifetime as a medicine woman, educator, and farmer
• How Black speculative fiction informs her current work as a midwife, women’s health care practitioner, and land steward
• The true meaning of the word “APOCALYPSE” and the creative potential that exists when the world as we know it burns to the ground
• The audacious stance that freedom, joy, play, curiosity, and liberation are available to us at all times
• Antinatalist rhetoric within the environmental movement that blocks women’s ability to envision a future family through means of guilting, shaming, and degrading the sacred role of motherhood
• The contrast between the environmental movement of the Global North and the land/water protection and stewardship of traditional indigenous peoples

• How her work with the Black Oregon Land Trust that aims to reweave the inherent and beautifully necessary RELATIONSHIP between humans, animals, plants, and waterways
• The eugenicist methods of forced contraceptives that are still used—to this day—to control the populations of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, poor White, and immigrant communities
• The “existential okay-ness” that is required by an authentic midwife and medicine woman in order to walk alongside women through any experience that they are having in their lives
• The ceremonial work of midwifery and how we can revitalize the power of ritual and prayer in our health care offerings + practices

May this episode bring you as much joy and inspiration as it did to me!

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