There are birth stories and there are birth in a stream stories and today on the podcast I'm super chuffed to be able to bring you one of the latter. It's an incredible birth story and one that you might well have seen, or at least heard about.

Today I'm sharing Simone's amazing fearless birth in a stream. You might well have heard of Simone's birth because she's been all over the internet in the last few weeks. WHY? because the video of her birth in a stream has amassed over 54m views on YouTube!

Not seen it? here it is...

Simone's birth in a stream

During my conversation with Simone - and it's THE longest interview I've ever done - we talk about so much more than her birth in a stream. Thanks in part to her background as a doula and a therapist who specialises in helping women to overcome their fears of birth. But not only that, it's a wonderful birth story that needs to be told, and that is a story in its self given the viral nature of the video. So we don't only talk about pregnancy and birth, but we talk about what it's like having a viral video that goes stratospheric.

The birth in the stream is Simone's fourth birth, so we spent some time talking about her previous births and how she came to want to birth in nature. Simone cites her source of inspiration being Elena Tonetti's film Birth as we know it which shows Russian women birthing in the black sea; the minute she saw that film she knew that's what she wanted.

A fearless birth

Simone is a therapist who is a practitioner of The Journey method for emotional clearing and as such she has been undertaking her own journey of emotional clearance for many years. Her training as a doula also gives her a great foundation of birth education and together this provided a powerful combination of fearlessness that she could carry into her birth. She also carried out a ton of research into her birth options that ultimately ended with her birth in a stream. But that's not to say she didn't have fears - every birth is different - so we talk about her fears and how she reacted to them and dealt with them.

I love feeling empowered both intellectually and emotionally about stuff

One thing that is interesting is that Simone talks about how we as pregnant women are highly sensitive, and how this means that sometimes the fears that we may be experiencing are not our own; they're other people's fears. She talks about how she was able to pick up on other people's fears during the birth and how she would have appreciated someone to provide emotional support to others that were present, as she found herself absorbing some of these fears.

This is particularly interesting for us to note given how many people may be present at our own births including health care professionals, and who may have birth fears that have not been processed or cleared. It can be all to easy to feel fear, but for that fear not to be personal - but unless you've undertaken lots of emotional clearance work, it's not easy to tell if the fears you have are yours or not. I recall in my last pregnancy, that a fear of birth came up for me. I knew that I wasn't fearful of birth and so when I went within, I realised that this fear was my baby's and not mine. So you see, the fear might not even be where you expect!

Pregnancy Brain

Simone talks a lot about the patriarchal society that we live in, and how disconnected we are from nature and the things that sustain us. Part of this discussion is around the male and the female energy and how our thinking is all too often dominated by left brain thinking, and so when our pregnancy triggers some right brain thinking, some people find it disorientating and label it as pregnancy brain. But it's not!

Pregnancy brain; it just means your left brain isn’t dominating your thoughts now and that you have an opportunity to tap into your right brain.

I love how she talks about this!

Consciousness of Birth

As Simone was approaching her birth she had the in...