I am so pleased to be able to speak with Chelsea Connor on the podcast - The queen of nuance, @houseofnourishment on Instagram, deep thinking woman here for joy, for nourishment, for self reflection and exploration. We talk about all the forms and flavors of nourishment; food, connection, nature, and so much more.

And while good food is only a part of the story, it is absolutely vital. Food is so much more than just like a tool for shaping our body. It is the basis of everything - our brain cannot function, our nervous system cannot be grounded, at ease, and out of that survival state without the proper nutrients that we need in our diet.

Not only are we trying to nourish ourselves in this new world where there’s so much technology, toxins, EMFs, and general bad news bears, acting against our nourishment, we’re also kind of dealing with a whole childhood of Lunchables, purple ketchup flavored with who knows what a microwave waffles made enriched with iron shavings - a real lack of real food nourishment. There’s so many layers to our symptoms, our bodies and what’s going on with our health and our culture, and I am so happy to have talked to Chelsea about it.

We Discuss:

* The push-pull of posting, sharing about your life and potentially even “health advice” on the crazy interwebs. The balance of sharing valuable content on line in your wheel house, and showing up as an imperfect, multidimensional human

* How Chelsea did a radical thing and *gasp* decided to go for a walk during the first few days of her bleed instead of just resting and her journey with intense menstrual pain.

* The overall personal development movement from creating rules for yourself to scaffolding of nourishment. And how we can build foundations before we can move on to the building blocks. We need to nourish before we can fine tune, start eating 3 meals a day before lifting weights every day.

* What self care from a grounded, resourced place looks like. When your body feels the inspiration and spark to begin to change things instead of knowing what you need to do because that’s what you’ve been told

* Chelsea’s transition from crazy fast city life to her nervous system allowing for more space, quiet, and slow. It’s not all easy and smooth!

* Her engagement!!! And how her difficulty, her resistance to imagining a beautiful engagement ring turned into an analogy for receiving goodness in life. How can we open to receive more than we believe is possible for us, more than we believe we deserve.

💐 Subscriber Content

* Chelsea’s SIMPLE NOURISHMENT Fall/Winter PDF cookbook.

* I can’t believe I didn’t know I could make epic hashbrowns at home for breakfast until this cookbook. I also love the teriyaki drumsticks, dandelion root chai, so many good ones. And I can’t believe I haven’t tried the caramelized onion roast beef sandwich recipe yet. There’s also a list of seasonal produce, budgeting tips, and meal and snack building resources.

🧡 You can upgrade your subscription right here.

🍯 Connect with us:

* Find Chelsea on Instagram

* I’m on Instagram - @nurtured.grove

* Website - nurturedgrove.com

❤️‍🔥 If this resonated…

* Comment here in the comments!

* Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

* Share this episode with someone who needs to hear it

* Tag me on Instagram with your takeaways: @nurtured.grove and @houseofnourishment

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherwisdom.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Mother Wisdom, I watch the pendulum swing between victimhood, radical responsibility, and the seductive (and harmful, in my opinion) idea that you were simply an “energetic match” for your birth experience.

Was it random? Was it cosmic? Was it preventable? Was it what you really wanted deep down in your subconscious?

These are the uncomfortable questions so many mothers, women, humans grapple with, especially when things don’t go as imagined. And especially when you’re on the internet in the alternative health, quantum blah blah blah, corners.

This episode is a meditation on making meaning from what has happened, rather than obsessing over what could have been. On taking responsibility for the choices you made, not claiming you’ve masterminded the entire universe around your subconscious.

I talk about the damage I perceive can come from telling women they “attracted” their birth experience, how spiritual bypassing hides behind personal growth language, and how to hold the complex truth that sometimes things just happen, without slipping into blame or victimhood, or on the other side, playing God in your own life.

In this conversation I explore:

* The illusion of control and the reality of chance

* The harm in “you manifested this” narratives around birth

* What radical responsibility actually means (hint: it’s not about controlling the uncontrollable)

* Acknowledging both randomness and deep intelligence in the unfolding of birth. And life. And mothering.

* Exploring the many threads that may influence birth: fascia, trauma, nutrition, ancestry, biomechanics. But perhaps most importantly, the humility of not knowing.

* How to take aligned responsibility without ego

* The mental gymnastics we do to avoid feeling what is or was (as I watched myself do when I was late the other day) and the invitation to come back to presence

* Turning difficult experiences into wisdom, not through spiritual bypassing, but through embodied reflection and integration

💐 Subscriber Content

* The lovely little, or not so little (it’s 37 pages!) Placenta Birth Guide - women centered, mother powered placenta birth videos, all about cord burning, traditional understandings of the spiritual significance of the placenta, a placenta burial ceremony ‘recipe’.

* A delicious bundle of guided meditations for the childbearing year including….

Relaxation Meditation

Settle into our bodies, becoming still, and just be in this moment and in our experience.

Birth Visioning Meditation

A guided exploration into your birth portal and the divine vision you hold for yourself, as well as listening to any messages your baby may have for you.

Releasing to the River Meditation

A fear release meditation. Exploring relaxing our grip on fears or anything else that may feel heavy in this process of preparing for birth.

Opening to Receive Meditation

Made with postpartum in mind. Opening to the energies of receiving, and an opportunity for you to tune into any mantras or reminders that may come through.

🧡 You can upgrade your subscription right here.

🪺 Mentioned in this Episode

* Free Mini Placenta Guide

❤️‍🔥 If this resonated…

* Comment here in the comments!

* Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

* Share this episode with someone who needs to hear it

* Tag me on Instagram with your takeaways: @nurtured.grove

🍯 Connect with me:

* Instagram - @nurtured.grove

* Website - nurturedgrove.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherwisdom.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the first episode in this new chapter of the podcast, Mother Wisdom.

In this intimate and nourishing conversation, I’m joined by Dr. Suuzi Hazen - mother, doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, farmer, and founder of Mother’s Best Liver Pills - for a deeply embodied exploration of what it really means to nourish ourselves through pregnancy, postpartum, and beyond.

Based on her knowledge of TCM and our own real life experiences (both in nourishment and true self care, and the mistakes and missteps we made) together, we un-peel the onions of maternal depletion, body image, nutritional wisdom, traditional weaning (this may not be what you want to hear!), morning sickness through the lens of TCM (turns out, there are actually things you can do to support yourself through it), and the very real tension between self-sacrifice and self-honoring as mothers.

Dr. Suuzi shares her two wildly different pregnancy and birth stories, from a morning sickness fraught pregnancy ending in a near death experience and emergency cesarean to a pregnancy of eating well and truly supporting her body, and a fully natural VBAC. These threads continue to play out in how she learned to support her body in motherhood through food, boundaries, and traditional practices.

In this conversation, we explore:

* What does white label actually mean?

* Suuzi’s two radically different pregnancy & birth experiences:

* Her first, shaped by severe morning sickness and undernourishment, a castor oil induction, and a near-death emergency cesarean birth

* Her second, guided by nourishment and a deeply supporting her female body, ending in a straightforward VBAC

* How intermittent fasting to lose the ‘stubborn baby weight’ and long term depletion led to a total metabolic crash, and how Suuzi slowly nourished her way back to life

* Why these “crashes,” as brutal as they are, can be thresholds into the Wise Woman tradition — into slow, into simple, into nourishment, into the spiral of healing.

* The tension between intuition vs. intellect in motherhood: Do I follow what my body knows, what my spirit knows... or what I think I know?

* TCM insights on morning sickness, tandem nursing, and child spacing — and why many traditional cultures built in space for maternal recovery

* The facades of health (and motherhood, and life) we see on social media, and the dangers of trying to recreate someone else’s life without tending to our own foundations

* What our current breakfasts look like and why sustainable, gradual nourishment is a much better route than drastic change.

* My own shift from vegetarianism rooted in community acceptance over my bodies messages to an ‘ancestral diet’ that supports my body, family, and values

This episode reminded me of the gentle wise woman nourishment as the path of motherhood and womanhood - not getting overwhelmed by information and comparison, but focusing on our nourishment and the soup in front of us. Can we let it be simple?

Giveaway + Subscriber Bonus

To celebrate this first episode, we’re giving away a bottle of Mother’s Best Liver Pills!Here’s how to enter:

* Become a paid subscriber here on Substack (either $5/mo or $40/year)

* Leave a comment on this post

That’s it.

(Yes, this is still a very small Substack, so your chances are pretty dang good.)

Even if you don’t win, paid subscribers get access to a discount code for all of Dr. Suuzi’s products including her Lucky Duck Electrolytes and liver pills.

🧡 You can upgrade your subscription right here.

Resources & Links

Dr. Suuzi Hazen

* Website: mothersbestliverpills.com

* Instagram: @drsuuzihazen

* Her podcast here on Substack, or wherever you listen to podcasts, Women's Bodies

* TCM Morning Sickness Reel Series (It’s a 4 part thing)

* Pregnancy and Breastfeeding Reel

Mentioned in this Episode

* Armstrong Sisters’ discussion of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment

If this resonated…

* Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

* Share this episode with a mother or friend who needs to hear it

* Tag us on Instagram with your takeaways: @nurtured.grove and @drsuuzihazen

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherwisdom.substack.com/subscribe

In a world where blogs are written by AI, I turned to the flowers for inspiration. Walking in my favorite field, I’m starting a new chapter in this podcast. Welcoming in Season 4 with the bluebirds, mushrooms, an abundance of native wild flowers, and a fresh air blowing through this podcast.

If you’re looking for chronology and logistical details, head on over to the Mother Wisdom Reintroduction - regular edition.

If you’re wanting to be infused by the smells and colors of my dreams for this space, you’re in the right place.

Moving forward, I’m going to co-create bonus content for each episode available for subscribers, so if this corner of the universe fills you up, consider being a subscriber for only $5 a month.

Mother Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherwisdom.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to Mother Wisdom, a space for stories, musings, and medicine from the heart of motherhood.

Here, we walk the spirals of fertility, birth, postpartum, and the becoming and unbecoming that is motherhood continuum.

Orienting to wisdom and intuition, softness and strength, practical and magical, relationship and autonomy, physiology and mystery, personal and collective.

I’m Maible Coughlin — Here for the wisdom of our bodies, our babies, our motherlines, the earth, and the sacred web of all mothers - past and present.

Our exploration is in making the collective map, not exact directions and never medical advice. Make your own choices, and Trust your own wisdom.

As Wise Birth Radio was ready to round a corner into season 4, we blossomed into Mother Wisdom. I’m your host, Maible Coughlin, postpartum care provider, mother, dishwasher, laundry folder and tomato sauce canner, student midwife and soon to be womb continuum care provider.

On this podcast you will hear about the depth and breath of the experience as woman, as mother, and human. Connecting with the wisdom of our own bodies, lineages, and the archetypes of Mother in all her forms, I am here for grounded, nourished, powerful women.

Subscribers will receive access to bonus content for each episode, whether that is deeper conversation, giveaways and discounts or further resources, as well as my collection of guided meditations for the childbearing year, and other things I will create.

Mother Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Related Episodes & Additional Resources

* Stay tuned for Mother Wisdom Intro - the ‘Unhinged” Version aka Let’s ask the flowers about it)

* Lindsay Courcelle - Myofascial release training

* MA School - hands on, hands in pelvic work

Community

* Become a Mother Wisdom subscriber - This is the most impactful way to support the show, for only $5/month

* Sign up for the newsletter - (monthly-ish, actual good stuff, no filler nonsense just for the sake of marketing.)

* Follow me on social media - @nurtured.grove

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherwisdom.substack.com/subscribe

Dr. Suuzi Hazen is a mother, wife, farmer and founder of Mother's Best Liver Pills, the one and only handmade, non-white-label, California-sourced beef liver supplement. Suuzi is passionate about supporting women and mothers to fill their own cup, so they can enjoy life with vibrant energy and a resilient spirit. She combines her background in traditional Chinese medicine with an understanding of bioenergetic health in service of the female body. Years of farming and raising dairy goats has also brought gritty awareness of what it takes to bring forth life from the earth.

We talk about:

• What does white label actually mean, and what makes Mother's Best liver pills different?
• Loving women by sharing liver! The feminine urge to nourish your friends.
• The through-line of trusting intuition and and the signals of the body over dogma and rules.
• Suuzi's first pregnancy experience with intense morning sickness leaving her unable to eat well, leading to undernourishment, excessive weight gain, swelling, and ultimately her birth experience with a castor oil induction leading to a wild near death experience, and an emergency cesarean.
• Her completely different experience in her second pregnancy with morning sickness management, a nourishing diet, and a simple pregnancy and birth. Nothing is random - there are track set down through our inheritance and the ways we care for ourselves, and ways to nourish and balance our bodies to prevent or avoid pregnancy and health consequences.
• Suuzi's top health tip: eat 3 healthy nourishing meals a day!
• That tension between our inner voice (our body's voice) and mental understanding - and how to follow your deepest knowing when its time.
• Suuzi's journey with intermittent fasting for weight loss as a mom of young boys which led to a deep yang depletion and gaining weight - into metabolic collapse
• If fasting isn't great for most women's metabolism, how does spiritual fasting fit into this picture?
• What it takes to crawl back out of the hole of complete exhaustion
• Our current breakfasts- and suggestion for a slow ramp up instead of jumping in with three feet.
• Seeing facade and creating. That without even building foundation
• Breastfeeding and pregnancy from a TCM lens - an uncommon perspective.
• Gentle wise woman nourishment as the path of motherhood and womanhood - not to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by information and comparison, but focusing on our nourishment and the bowl of soup in front of us.

I hope you enjoy, and join our podcast subscribers for a discount on Suuzi's product, and to enter a giveaway fro a bottle of liver pills!

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Mentioned in this show-

 

Suuzi's Instagram

Mother's Best Liver Pills

Her series on morning sickness from a TCM perspective

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Thanks for listening!

If you’re enjoying our show, please leave us a rating and review!

If you have anything you want to hear more about, or any questions you'd like us to address, please reach out at [email protected]. We welcome your feedback. 

 

Follow us on Instagram @nurturedgrove for more musings and information on holistic pregnancy, physiological birth, and intuitive motherhood.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Honestly, this is the kind of episode you can't write a description for.

Our beautiful friend Ixchel Prisma talked with us today about the depths and beauty of her second trimester loss with her spirit baby, River Nova.

This story goes back at least a decade to her initial connection with a baby spirit. Ixchel has spun lead into gold, experiencing death and grief in pregnancy as a profound portal to herself. To her own growth and connection to spirit. And to a greater understanding of the workings of spirit baby connection and soul contracts.

--------------------------

You can find Ixchel -

 

Her beautiful song - Birthing Spiral

All of her music on Bandcamp

And Spotify

And her beautiful floral earrings!

------------------------

Thanks for listening!

If you’re enjoying our show, please leave us a rating and review!

If you have anything you want to hear more about, or any questions you'd like us to address, please reach out at [email protected]. We welcome your feedback. 

 

Follow us on Instagram @catskillsbirtheducation for more musings and information on wholistic pregnancy, physiological birth, and intuitive motherhood.

 

Check out our online, comprehensive birth education course Wise Woman, Sacred Birth to go deeper into self responsibility, trust and connection with your inner self, and knowledge and wisdom of the biological truths of the childbearing year, and connection with other beautiful mamas.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherwisdom.substack.com/subscribe

When asked about their postpartum plan, so many women say "Well, my husband is taking 3 weeks off work...". While thats great (although we'd be more into all fathers being given paid paternity leave for at least a month), that alone should not be your postpartum support in an ideal situation.

We talk about:

• How we envision the ideal postpartum time to look and feel
• How sinking into this design can allow the blessing of a different time perception and brain wave state to come aboard. A delicious, relaxed, healing, state.
• Postpartum is designed to be slow - we need to have enough support to hold the energy of slow
• Partner needs slow as well! Mother can't fully relax if everyone around her is running around and feeling hectic.
• Fathers need also need time to integrate as well! This is a huge transition for the whole family.
• Father's can’t be doing constantly and expect to also have space to feel 
• The theory of everyone in the postpartum time needing two layers of support
• Creating healthy fatherhood begins with the birth of the father!
• It's often more difficult, but extremely important for men to practice dropping from a space of doing to a space of being
• Sometimes new fathers experience a crash as way of slowing down. We need postpartum support to allow them to stay present.
• Your next tangible steps spelled out to creating sacred space for both parents postpartum

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Mentioned in the show:

 

Our Postpartum Planning Guide

Rachelle Garcia Seliga of Innate Traditions

Birthfit postpartum program

Wise Woman, Sacred Birth

A few of our relevant previous episodes:

Manifesting Your Ideal Postpartum Time

Your Motherhood is For You - with Nicole

The Vital Energies of Receiving in the Postpartum Time

--------------------------

Thanks for listening!

If you’re enjoying our show, please leave us a rating and review!

If you have anything you want to hear more about, or any questions you'd like us to address, please reach out at [email protected]. We welcome your feedback. 

 

Follow us on Instagram @catskillsbirtheducation for more musings and information on wholistic pregnancy, physiological birth, and intuitive motherhood.

 

Check out our online, comprehensive birth education course Wise Woman, Sacred Birth to go deeper into self responsibility, trust and connection with your inner self, and knowledge and wisdom of the biological truths of the childbearing year, and connection with other beautiful mamas.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherwisdom.substack.com/subscribe

Postpartum care provider and educator, mother to 4, this postpartum was probably perfect, right? Beautifully, postpartum is an ever deepening, ever challenging, ever incredible spiral into yourself. With the opportunity for new lessons, new messages, and new challenges each time. Sara and I had a lovely walk and talk about her fourth postpartum after the birth of her son, Akiva.

We talk about:

• She hosted her first nesting party at 36-ish weeks pregnant. (Highly recommend.)
• Boundary medicine in postpartum time!
• Yes, everyone wants to see the baby, but it’s so important for you to protect your energetic bubble.
• You are so sensitive and so vulnerable in this time, so while you need so much support and love and care, you also need to be discerning with who is in your space.
• How her husband, Z, and her three kids mentally prepared themselves for her to be resting and less available for many weeks.
• Sara’s top baby gear recommendation (vacuum snot sucker)
• Her baby, Akiva, made milk (curse of the midwife?)
• Sara’s relationship with her own body! This is so strongly passed down the matrilineal paths, often in a not so helpful way. Sara opens up about her own relationship with her body and body image, and how she is choosing to teach her kids to relate.
• Sara’s early menstrual cycle return
• And what she’s been doing starting at a few days, postpartum to care for her body, heal, and feel strong.
• How we can have an understanding of the ideals, while also flowing with the realities of life.

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Mentioned in the show:

 

Our Postpartum Planning Guide

Nicole's incredible offering - rooted

Our podcast episode with Adrian Dimatteo

Restore Your Core - postpartum movement

 

------------------------

Thanks for listening!

If you’re enjoying our show, please leave us a rating and review!

If you have anything you want to hear more about, or any questions you'd like us to address, please reach out at [email protected]. We welcome your feedback. 

 

Follow us on Instagram @catskillsbirth for more musings and information on wholistic pregnancy, physiological birth, and intuitive motherhood.

 

Check out our online, comprehensive birth education course Wise Woman, Sacred Birth to go deeper into self responsibility, trust and connection with your inner self, and knowledge and wisdom of the biological truths of the childbearing year, and connection with other beautiful mamas.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherwisdom.substack.com/subscribe

Agreements:

- I am not obligated to do dishes

- I will avoid lifting heavy things

- I will be mindful of eye contact, and utilize tools of energetic protection

- I will avoid heated discussion - most things that I think NEED TO BE TALKED ABOUT RIGHT NOW actually don't...

- I give myself full permission to not cook if I don't feel like it

- I will keep my body, especially my feet, head, and womb, warm and out of the wind.

 

I also talk about:

-How I've begun very organically scheduling my life around my cycle. I don't think it would have made sense if I had just started off with a calendar or a plan because someone else told me to do it...

-How I'm feeling these energies of outer and inner spring. The challenges for an Aries and the beauty of it

-I finally understand what drawing a line in the sand is actually supposed to mean! But does it really make sense?

-The concept of creating an energetic red tent for myself

- Exploring the idea of marking the end of bleeding like a mikvah from the Jewish tradition

 

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Mentioned in the show:

 

Fertility Friday podcast

My favorite Indie Birth sweatshirt

My favorite fiction - Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Our curated fertility/cycling book list

------------------------

 

Thanks for listening!

If you’re enjoying our show, please leave us a rating and review!

If you have anything you want to hear more about, or any questions you'd like us to address, please reach out at [email protected]. We welcome your feedback. 

 

Follow us on Instagram @catskillsbirthcollective for more musings and information on wholistic pregnancy, physiological birth, and intuitive motherhood.

 

Check out our online, comprehensive birth education course Wise Woman, Sacred Birth to go deeper into self responsibility, trust and connection with your inner self, and knowledge and wisdom of the biological truths of the childbearing year, and connection with other beautiful mamas.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherwisdom.substack.com/subscribe