Latest / Homestead And Heal Podcast / Ep 16: What’s Really Affecting Fertility? Chinese Medicine, Stress & the Modern World with Kristin Hauser

Transcript

Ep 16: What’s Really Affecting Fertility? Chinese Medicine, Stress & the Modern World with Kristin Hauser · Homestead And Heal Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Homestead and Heal.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Scott.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a farm in Vermont.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: Our lives revolve around growing food and medicine, working with the body, and trying every day to live in deeper relationship with the earth.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: And now we're welcoming guests to our farm for intimate retreats where they can slow down and feel deeply into this earth-body connection.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Our bodies are part of it.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Our healing comes through it.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Through conversations with herbalists, farmers, body workers, and people walking unconventional paths, we explore what it looks like to step outside the modern paradigm and build lives rooted in connection, healing, and reciprocity with the earth.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, welcome back to Homestead and Heal.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so excited to be here today with my friend Kristen Hauser.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: I got to know Kristen, I think once I started to make my business online, Kristen came into my awareness pretty quickly because she has built up a business supporting women and women's health.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm not sure exactly how I came to know you, Kristen, but we've become business friends, sharing ideas with each other.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: And since we're both working in women's health, but in different kinds of sectors of that, it's been fun to talk about our training programs and mentorship and learn from each other about what's working.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: And because really becoming an entrepreneur, especially in health, I feel like we just have to trial and error so many things.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: So it's been a joy to know you over these last few years.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I would love it if you could just introduce yourself and tell everyone just a little bit about yourself and your work.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Kristen Hauser.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a mother of four.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I know Lindsay and I really connected over being mothers in the business space and health space.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I got started quite a while ago, probably 15 to 20 years ago, in the world of birth and yoga.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I was a prenatal yoga teacher.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then I transitioned slowly into Chinese medicine.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So as I was studying Chinese medicine, I was doing birth work and teaching.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I got into acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and I started working specifically with fertility.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I was under, when I graduated, I was working under a mentor for a couple of years and I was seeing a lot of cases.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I was working in a bit of a higher volume clinic, and we were working with women who were pursuing natural fertility, but also women kind of more in the medicalized environment around fertility.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: So IVF, I was going to IVF clinics for transfer treatments.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was doing a lot.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was exposed to a lot of different things in the fertility space.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of led me into questioning a lot of those practices and seeing how it impacted women's bodies in the way of really changing how they felt about being in their body, how they how they felt about their sexuality, even.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, okay, this isn't making sense.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to conceive, they're feeling really sexually shut down, and their pelvic health is really not in a good place.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so that led me to studying somatic sex education and weaving in functional medicine.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so over time, my work has shifted a lot.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: But generally, I work with women's health fertility through postpartum and specialize in really helping women who want to conceive naturally and then training other practitioners in how to integrate this work into whatever field they're in.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: So whether they're a body worker or another acupuncturist, a naturopath, but they're wanting to include kind of the Chinese medicine side of things into what they're doing.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: So fascinating.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm curious, I kind of want to just get right into this because it's such a big topic, but I feel like I hear a lot online, mostly in social media, how fertility rates have decreased.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I've never actually looked into it, like the actual science behind that.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know, I would love for your take on how much you think it is lifestyle choices, well, all the things really.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: I know that's a huge question, but would you speak on that just a little bit?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the way I see it is if we think about how quickly society changed with industrialization and yeah, even going further back and just agricultural revolution really, and things change so quickly that our physiology is lagging to keep up with those changes and adapt to the modern world.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you can look at that as different stressors.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So we have bio biochemical stress, we have more emotional stress.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that really impacts fertility rates.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's a little bit too much emphasis on how it impacts women and not quite enough emphasis on actually the sperm rates are really going down over the last 50 years as well.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it is really a 50-50 issue.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I would say overall, what we're seeing reflected in our bodies is just what we've asked at our adaptive strategies to do.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we can, we're resilient as humans, we can definitely do it.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a matter of the timeline and also addressing some of those things and making actual changes so that you can thrive in the modern world.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm curious, are there doctors?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so much more oriented to women.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: Are there men who are doing similar work to what you're doing, like holistically for men?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there are.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's it is, of course, harder to find, but there are like naturopaths, and I have another colleague who's in Chinese medicine that works with men and he's a man.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, there are.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think it just hasn't maybe been as widespread.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: But again, it's like I'm such in my own lane.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: So of course I'm gonna notice more people in the women's health space, but I do think more men's health practitioners are like addressing the sperm side of things for sure.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Gotcha.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like in just like people that we know or stories that we hear, which like again, like Lindsay, it's not like something I've really looked at the numbers much, but it does seem like such a common story.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: People dealing with infertility sort of issues seems like it's so widespread.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's an interesting point that you made, just how fast our lives in our world has changed and just how we're like lagging behind on adapting to that.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I feel like there is like a known thing that sperm counts have fallen drastically over the last whatever 50, 100 years.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: But I still feel like what we hear about mostly is like through the lens of women's health.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I wonder, that's just curious.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's because women do give birth, right?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So we just naturally associate reproduction and fertility is more a female health issue.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is like everyone who comes to me, I'm asking again and again, okay, has your partner had a semen analysis?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: You should you shouldn't be going through all these really intense procedures or steps or testing if the male partner is also not tested.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like the topic is one of the most basic, simple tests you can do.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it is something that I still have to remind people about.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is I think women's bodies are a little more impacted by the changes than men's.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying men's aren't at all, but the way I've related to that over the years is that women's bodies are reflecting what's going on the earth plane.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if we see a lot of chemical exposure, and I live in Kansas, I know Lindsay lived in Kansas as a young child, and just thinking of the glyphosate use here and how the monocropping and all of that and how it destroys the soil.
• 8:43
  unknown: Yeah.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's okay, then we look at the women's bodies and we see that the endometrial lining is not as thick or it's not as well resourced nutrient-wise.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so we see this reflection between these two things.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like they're totally disconnected.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that is how I've related to it over the years.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to see uh like a I'm thinking of Weston Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, but like a fertility of the world book like that.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Rather than looking at people's teeth like fertility health in places where diet and exposure is different.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: I just think it would be so fascinating because obviously we live in a globalized world, but certainly there are some places and some people who are I think glyphosate is a perfect example.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know, should we explain that for people who might not know what that is?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: I think so, probably.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Probably.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to explain a little bit about that?
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Roundup is an herbicide.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's an herbicide that's being that's been being used.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was patented in the 40s as a boiler cleaner.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it was developed to clean out heating systems.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really good at grabbing onto all sorts of minerals and holding tight to them.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: But it also short circuits this, I should remember the name of it.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's a metabolic pathway in plants that it short circuits, and so it really effectively kills plants.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's what it's been repurposed for.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: For killing the weeds that are growing in the cornfield.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: So but then in the 1990s, this basically the big GMO technology was they found some soil bacteria that was resistant to.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't quite understand how this mechanism works, but basically they engineered this organism that was resistant to this, the damage from this chemical, and they engineered it into a bunch of commodity large-scale crops.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: So they're Roundup ready.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Roundup ready.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're Roundup ready.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: Meaning that you can spray your fields and everything that has not been genetically modified to be Roundup ready gets killed while your crop stands strong and doesn't get killed by it.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was like a major giant change in the way food is grown, starting in the, I think in the mid-90s.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: Mid-90s, I think, yeah.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so ever since then it's been like just massive, enormous amounts of this chemical sprayed on on a lot of the food that most people in the West eat.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's it's like we almost can't, we haven't even really seen what the effects are of this, obviously, because if you're born in the night in the mid-90s, you're only what, 30?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Is that how that so those women might be the ones that are whatever.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of younger women are having babies too, but that might be the kind of more common time to be having babies.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: And who knows how it affects that.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, I was just going to say that yeah, having grown up in Kansas and having my parents still live there, and they live really in the heart of, I would say, those huge fields.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a really interesting thing for me to experience now here in Vermont, where we certainly have GMO crops being grown, but they're like within our town, I don't know that there would be any within Shrewsbury.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, but people spray it in the driveways.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: People use it like privately.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, it's not in the massive doses that you get.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Vermont is a little bit protected from that type of agriculture just simply because of its terrain.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have it's not flat.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have hundred-acre fields.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: We certainly don't have 500 or 1,000 or 10,000 acre fields.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: It just doesn't lend itself to that type of agriculture generally.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Which is a blessing for us here.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like we could go down this path for a long time, but there are so many other things I'd love to talk with you about.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: So we always love to ask about where you are right now.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: And you're in Kansas right now, right?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: I am in Kansas right now.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: So just curious like what's happening in eastern Kansas right now, or what it looks like, what you're noticing, what plants you're noticing, and anything you feel excited about outside in the living natural world.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're just hitting peak, kind of late-ish summer.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's the the things are starting to dry out, but it's actually raining right now.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And lots of things are in bloom.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of chicory around.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I have my echinacea outside that's blooming right now.
• 13:35
  unknown: Yeah.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: I literally just picked some chicory as I walked into the office and gave it to Scott because it's just so beautiful.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm loving it so much.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: I've been looking for a patch that's not so close to the road.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: I really need to plant it on our farm because we don't have it growing there.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: And everywhere that we have it here is just like roadsides.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: It does love to grow right by the side of the road.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, we haven't our sunflowers haven't bloomed quite yet, but I know that's coming in the coming weeks.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been a really rainy summer for Kansas standards.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Everything's still quite green.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Usually towards this time of year, it starts to dry out unless you're watering all the time.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it's been hot, but nice long days, and we're outside a lot.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: The kids have been outside all the time, so it's been really great.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: So then we would be curious to ask you a little bit about your childhood.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like I I'm curious actually, did you grow up in Kansas or elsewhere?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in Kansas, yeah.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: Nearest nearest to where you are now or yeah.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: So right now we are between where my parents live.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: My parents are divorced, but I grew up about 20 minutes from where I live now.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I we grew up with horses and goats and all kinds of animals.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I grew up riding horses competitively, actually.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a big part of my childhood.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: We spent a lot of time outside.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: We had four-wheelers and just doing all kinds of things as a kid, a kid.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: I had two younger brothers, so I was the oldest of three.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I spent a lot of time in the barn taking care of my horses, riding.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: I was very involved with that.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: That was like what my world revolved around for many years as a young girl.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Can you see the aspects of that lifestyle that kind of brought you to where you are today, both in your mothering and in your women's health work?
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: When I think about it, I think about going out with my mom and starting to learn how to ride at a really young age.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, like I had a horse at five years old, and she taught me how to ride and just taught me like how to take care of something.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think riding actually gives you a lot of body awareness.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, I didn't know.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't like, okay, I'm learning body awareness and learning how to be in my body more, or anything like that.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: But it's just like a natural thing that happens when you have a connection with a horse and you're learning how to ride.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I can remember I'd love to go out and ride bareback at times and like just have the halter on the horse.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I just felt so confident as a young girl looking back at that.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I really think it was from riding.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I can see now how, and of course, it's like looking back, it's easy to see that trajectory, but I can see how I always felt really comfortable in being outside.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: I felt really comfortable with power, like understanding how power worked, like because I had big horses and they had a lot of energy, and I had to figure that out without domination, if that makes sense.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you're with a horse of a certain size, and I was barrel racing and riding competitively, it's like you're not, you can't dominate an animal like that.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: You have to learn how to work with the power and not be afraid of it.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm like, wow, that was actually a really cool way to understand my own power and be able to even translate that and like inviting women into their own power.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's like the underside of what I do.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, I'm not like leading with that always, but it's like really understanding that as a girl, I can see how that allowed me to be questioning authority and making decisions that weren't necessarily the common path.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it's something I do think about a lot because I think of my daughter, and I'm like, okay, how can I incorporate this into her life, even?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Whether that's through horse riding or something else.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: But just that embodied sense of yourself from a young age, I think really makes a difference.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's also so interesting because there are so many different kinds of equestrian sports, and like our neighbor across the road rides dressage, and obviously that's very different than barrel racing.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: But I can especially see how I don't know that much about barrel racing, but I can especially just imagine how you are flowing with the energy in a very different way than certain types of equestrian sports.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: And that just I gave me like full-on goosebumps because I definitely think of you as someone who empowers women.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: And you do have that the questioning of authority and questioning of societal norms in a way that is that helps women feel empowered because we've just it's been taught out of us.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's such a beautiful.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's a I I love imagining you as a young girl or woman learning how to barrel race and work with a horse in that way.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: It seems really cool.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always curious if that do you think also that some of that is just innate to you, whether you rode horses or not?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: Would you have questioned that?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: I I think about that all the time.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, I do think some of it is just my sole path.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: You could say your sole curriculum is like, okay, this is the trajectory you're going on.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: And regardless of what kind of experiences you have, it's going to be oriented around this particular theme.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I do think there is something to that for sure, in terms of we come here, we have different experiences, depending on what our kind of soul trajectory or in Chinese medicine, one of my teachers just refers it to as like, what is your soul curriculum?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: What are you here to do?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so depending on that, it's like that's what you're filtering your experiences through.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it's definitely part of it.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder, because I wonder that for myself.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: I just think of like how I was different from my siblings in that similar sort of way.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Of like by the time I was in high school, I was like really questioning status quo and authority and all those sorts of things.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not really sure what the source of that was.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: You did, I think, maybe have a bit more of that earth connection really anchored in by that age where, which is not the overculture.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: No, yeah, you're right.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: The overculture is more of that just study, not that you weren't you were a good student, but study and get a job making a bunch of money, as opposed to like when you have that kind of deep earth connection, you ponder and think about what is the point of all of this.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I don't know.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think that's part of it.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Question that I got some of my questioning authority from my parents for sure, because my dad's a chiropractor.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: He was really questioning the medical system and stopped vaccinating us as kids and was like teaching us a lot about that.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I had that frame, and then my mom also is always questioned the government.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's I was filtering through that as well.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, okay, did my my soul choose to come to these parents because that was part of the experience that I needed or whatever?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Now I'm even more curious about kind of ancestors, like how far does your family go back in Kansas or do they?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: Because there is this, I'm thinking of just Kansas at the time of at the time of slavery and abolition, and there were lots of competing forces there and lots of this kind of libertarian or yeah, just questioning authority.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like that that's a Kansas thing.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: Some people might not know that, but I'm curious if you see that in your further back family.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, people often turn.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me Kansas is in the South.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, no, Kansas is not in the South.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think you need to check your history or your orientation to that.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, my family has really been rooted here, like very farming type of culture in my family lineage on both both sides.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: So my mom's side comes a little bit more from the Missouri side, but that was more recently.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then my dad's side, I actually knew all of my great-grandparents, or no, I knew three of four of my great-grandparents and met, or yeah, I should say three of no, four of maybe eight, I guess is the way that would work.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I knew them.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: I like saw their farm life, had interactions with them as a young girl, which I think is really cool.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And my great-grandfather, no, my great-great-grandfather on my dad's side purchased land in Kansas that's like still in our family.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I, from what I can tell, especially my mom's mom, who passed away a couple of years ago, she was really into genealogy.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so she had put together a family tree on that side of the family, like that goes way back.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so that side of the family had been in Kansas for several generations.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: And generally, we've been in the US since like the 1800s, if not earlier than that.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, there's a no one really leaves Kansas either.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that was that's been something that I've navigated because I've left Kansas several times.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, there's a lot of roots here, you could say.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm curious because I know you're splitting your time right now between Costa Rica and Kansas, and just curious about the what you've noticed about kind of the flow of your life and your work and your mothering in these very different places.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think this is something I'm really in dialogue with my husband about and just internally with myself, because for me, I feel like Kansas gave me this great foundation growing up.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like it has been really good for me to leave and go and live in different places and have different experiences.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so now I'm in this dynamic with my within my family of okay, I want my kids to have this connection to this place that I grew up, connection to my parents who are very rooted here.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, it's like there is this huge experience of a world to have.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And living part-time in Costa Rica has allowed us to really connect more deeply as a family as a family unit, right?
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we go have this new experience and meet these new people, or my kids try a new school, etc.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's like we're really leaning on each other.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just such a, like you were saying, it's such a radically different environment.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's going from rural, we don't live super rurally right now in Kansas, but it's flat, big sky.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then we go to Costa Rica where it's dense jungle environment, ocean, the animals are different, the air feels different.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a very different place.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: So we've done this now for two, we're going on our third year, and it's gotten a lot easier, the transition each time.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so our day-to-day structure stays the same.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's when our meal times are and schooling and things stay pretty much the same, but our activities shift.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I find that I am personally more nourished in the jungle environment or in when we're in Costa Rica.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so my mothering's actually a little bit softer than it is when we're here in Kansas.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the environment I feel is intense in both places in different ways.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: But in Kansas, it's like the land and even the houses are not set up to have this kind of indoor-outdoor lifestyle or to be really immersed in nature day to day.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you built your own house, you could make it that way in Kansas, but we're living in a home that we purchased.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're in Costa Rica, it's just this natural flow of you're just outside more by default, and there's a lot more indoor-outdoor living.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that I really love.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's great for kids as well, just to be in nature as much as possible.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, like, what do you?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just I'm curious, like what facilitates the uh it not being that way in Kansas about your house or about the way is there not enough shade or no?
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: We have no, we have shade, but just thinking usually in the in homes in Costa Rica, there's an outdoor kitchen, for example.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: And here we have a grill and that kind of thing where we could be outside, but it's not, yeah, we're it's as easily facilitated to just be outside cooking a meal and eating outside.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: And but I think it's possible my dad, he has an outdoor kitchen at his house and he's really into circadian health and all of that, and they're getting ready to move and rebuild, and so they're structuring their house to have more of that indoor outdoor living, but you don't see it as frequently.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: Even when we first moved here from California, so we also had a little bit more of that indoor-outdoor living in California, and we moved here, and we were like, everyone is inside like all the time, even in our neighborhood.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's like there's only one other family.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Luckily, they're the our neighbors who have their kids outside all the time.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: But there's so many kids in this neighborhood, and we never see any of them.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I'm like, that's so sad.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: They're inside on iPads, or I don't know what.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just making assumptions perhaps.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm like, gosh, it's it's a very safe area.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that's an issue.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that really surprised me at first.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: And you grew up more rurally than where you live now.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: But do you feel like some of it is just the digital?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like I think maybe it is the digital age.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or yeah, because when I when I grew up, we didn't have neighbors.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: We lived on 20 acres.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: If I wanted to play with a friend, it was like riding your bike a long distance or asking your mom to take you.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: But we were outside a lot as our little sibling group, if that makes sense.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just think of this a lot, just for kids and for adults.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like the fact that when we grew up, smartphones and the internet didn't exist.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: By necessity, your time was spent so differently.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because collectively, if we think of the amount of time we spend in front of our screens, it's just like it really is a brand new world that we're living in.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so from my point of view, just tragically like unfortunate that people spend so much of their life in front of the screens.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I know there's also like there's promise and there's positive things.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm meeting all these friends of Lindsay's that she's met through this world of Instagram and online stuff, and wonderful people that are doing awesome work.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so I know that exists.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're speaking with someone a little bit later who's this agronomist, and he grew up as an Amish farmer and built this really amazing company, and they've just launched an AI tool, an AI agronomy tool.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really, he made a case for it and it's really powerful.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been using it a lot and learning a lot.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd never want to paint things as black and white, but the amount of time that we spend on the screen, as opposed to the experience kids had in the summertime.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: I lived in a neighborhood right here in Rutland that our neighbor's house was like 15 feet away.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: The houses were that close, but we all had backyards and there was little pieces of woods in between here and there.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: And my father was so oriented towards hunting and fishing that I got a lot of time out in the actual wilderness.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: But even if I didn't have that, it was just our time was spent outdoors because what else were you gonna do?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I see that in our kids, Ella is 10, almost 11, and almost entire days, lots of days this time of year are spent outside.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas for Ella, and I don't know if this is just constitutionally as well, like she has some access to an iPad.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: She reads a ton, but she's just much more likely to be inside.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say that, yeah, just witnessing those differences too.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_02: I'm always in huge inquiry around this for running a business where I am using social media, where I'm online, especially now that Ella's getting older and I can see her tending towards just we don't have super strict limits around technology yet because we haven't really needed them.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_02: But I can see that we're getting to the point that we need to actually define these rules because I can see her sometimes going and like picking up the iPad.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: I think out of boredom habit, like she sees me doing it.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's by design.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, of course.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's like thinking about it.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And all of this technology, all of the social media, all of it, their business is to have you engaged as long as possible on the screen.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's really insidious and it's really easy to slip into this rhythm of wanting to.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: And as a parent, it's interesting because, for example, like Ella, one of the things she would pick up her iPad for is listening to a book, which I'm like, okay, it is hard to keep up with her insatiable reading, either to go to the library or to buy physical books.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm like, okay, some amount of audiobooks is great.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: And the same with the other thing she does often is she uses a drawing app.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: And the alternative is Remy, literally a hundred pages in one day of hand-drawn different iterations of dragons and animals.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm just like, oh my gosh, this is so much paper.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's hard sometimes.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Us trying to navigate what to keep and what to recycle, and then the house is just filled with paper.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: But I feel like the I have the sense of, yeah, both when I was in the one time I've been to Costa Rica, but also we've as a family gone to Puerto Rico.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: And just the fact that your morning temperature for the entire year is such that you can just get up and go outside barefoot and experience your morning in that way.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas here, that's definitely what our summers are like.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm immediately out on our back porch getting morning sun with my cup of tea or whatever.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: But there's a lot of the year that I'm not immediately or that we're waking up in the darkness and 20 degrees outside.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a very different experience with getting outside.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: And though I do love being outside on winter days, it's obviously not the same as like how it would be in a posterica.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: We're not like having an outdoor kitchen in the winter.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, maybe this is not that interesting to people, but when you're talking about the indoor outdoor setup, I was thinking about the house that we used to live in until we moved almost two years ago.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: It'll be two years, September 1st, to the other house on our farm.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: But in that other house, our table, we had this beautiful outdoor deck that sort of wraps around two sides of the house.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: And out of the other side was like a greenhouse and gardens with a little stoop that was nice to spill out into.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: But our table was on like the back side of the house, like opposite from where the kitchen was.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: And there was like you had to walk around the hall and then walk.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was like 40 steps to get out to the table.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I always wanted to put a door like straight out because there was a window instead of doing this big walk around, because it's so funny how just those little things.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, our kitchen, we have a sliding door that spills out onto our back deck.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just like actually facilitates such a different experience because we're just like inside outside, like it just spills out onto our back porch with such ease.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like just bringing dinner out, those 40 steps back and forth.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I want milk or blah blah blah.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: The next thing you have to go get.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: And you end up as a parent, like you don't really sit down, you're just like back and forth for half an hour.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: Those small things, yeah, those small things really make a difference, I found.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: And in yeah, especially because when we go down to Costa Rica, we're renting different houses, and it's been an interesting experience because you get really refined in, oh, this works, this doesn't work.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't, if I built a house, I wouldn't have this or I would have this.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I've really turned over in my mind a lot around, and this is something my husband and I are in dialogue about too, is okay, we're going into another culture and we're living there, and like neither of us are from that place.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we relate to this place?
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean about us and all these people who are doing this right now?
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're in that kind of tension around it in some ways, because of course, we don't want to see the exploitation of the land there.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to see the exploitation of the people in any capacity, and the prices have gone way up because so many people have been moving to Latin American countries in the since COVID, basically.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, like what I come back to is can I just allow myself to love it the way I love it?
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: Do I need to make a big story around is it a moral, is it morally right?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is it morally wrong?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: I just love it there.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: And can that be okay?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is that enough for me to be like, yes, we're gonna go there again?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I just love the way I feel there, and like that's enough for me.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that's absolutely enough.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: And it everything like we're talking about with screens, it's like everything is so nuanced.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: We just we can have these deep thoughts and reflections, and it can just be enough to just love it.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, I love that you said that and described that because that's something that I'm always curious about, like people that are doing this sort of thing.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: And also, I know for myself, like I can just drive myself into inaction or by just thinking too deeply on anything.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like Lindsay and the kids want a cat.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't really want a cat for a hundred reasons, but one of the big things I hate the idea of having an indoor animal.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think it just sounds like mean.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like it doesn't sound right.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: If we didn't let the cat outside.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then if we let the cat outside, then there's like the concern of like killing birds.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I don't think we need to talk about all the reason that you don't let it be.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, but I'm just like saying like this is a type of thing.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: I love that you're just saying settling on that you're doing it because like it feels good for you and your family.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: And also in the back of that is you're going there with at least that awareness of like not wanting to displace, not wanting to.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: So, like that probably carries through in the way that you live down there and the decisions that you make.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I will just say on this cat topic, that I was, it was the one message I received in my journey with Hawthorne, a special like plant medicine journey I did with Pam Montgomery years ago, was that our family needed a cat.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: So for me, it's like a deep knowing, and I'm just waiting for Scott to come around on it.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it's yes, I think it it can be the type of situation where when we it's like you think so much about something, and then suddenly you do it and you just are able to know that like we talked about, like everything is an experiment.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_02: You just have to try things, and you may then be stuck with a cat for 12 years that you're regretting or not.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: Or it might be the best decision you ever made, which is where I lean towards.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: My kids also really want a cat, which would be very complex for our lifestyle.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I see there's a lot of value of having animals in around the home, in the home.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not as clear, but I do think kids having interactions with animals is really sweet.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, totally.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: I've been, I just have to say one more cat thing, which is I have to do a whole episode.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: Invite a cat expert on.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_02: No, I just I have to say that I've been doing my pelvic alchemy program, and two of the women in my group have had their cats in the room as we're doing the journey, and inevitably their cats end up coming right up on their heart space or moving down to right above their womb as we're doing the journey.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm watching it on the Zoom screen like, oh, cats.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: I okay, so I'll just say that.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's just when I get into it.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: I had to get into it because it's just I haven't I've forgotten to tell you that so far.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, we'll announce our cat in a future episode.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you need to have the cat at your training as well.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe an office cat that could be a solution.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know how well that would work.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: Have you seen the the horse healing?
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like these it's so cool.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: I really want to experience that.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: I do too.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: And there's also women who work with horses as part of the healing.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: A dolphin craniosacral training.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_02: Someday that's on my bucket list to go and receive craniosacral therapy from a dolphin.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how can you not be?
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a business write-off.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: Scott's like, what are you gonna do with that?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe there's like a rat program to face your fears.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: Oh god.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you guys had a rat issue, right?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: Or one it's to be determined whether we are now dealing with squirrels.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now we have some squirrels that are coming into the house.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's there's definitely trigger challenges.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh wow, okay.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: Lots to do on that.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: But no rats at the moment.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_02: Which is great.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: Not that at least not that we're experiencing.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, they're not because they're not getting into anything.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: Off of this random topic we've gone to.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'm curious if you want to share anything about, I know you did a lot of work in the birth world, but just if you can see those, that calling towards now working in fertility, like any of the steps along your journey that really led you down this road and wanting to focus here.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_02: Because it is a pretty, I would say it's in my mind, it's a really unique focus.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe not unique, but it's like midwifery in that like you really need to have the right constitution, skills, all the things to be able to hold women and men as they are working through fertility.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I know you've had lots of success with the women that you've worked with, but also to be able to hold women as they have potential miscarriage or continued struggles with fertility.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm just curious, yeah, if you want to speak on kind of what led you down that road.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's like a deeper kind of spiritual journey, you could say, that I went on.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: So my parents separated when I was 14.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that same year I also lost my paternal grandmother.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I went through this big kind of rupture.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I to clarify, I lived with my dad after that point.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I was living with all, I was 14, having just gotten my period, and I was living with all boys.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: I went through this big rupture with my mom, and I didn't really have that kind of female or feminine presence.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, I didn't know at the time that I really needed that.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: But through that rupture, like it reflected in my body.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so after the first couple years of my menstruating years, I started getting a lot of pain.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of took me on this path of figuring out why that was happening and knowing that I didn't want to turn to hormonal birth control.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: So then it was about uncovering the physical layers.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: So whether that was like nutrition and just how I was living day to day, and also the deeper psycho-emotional layers around not trusting myself because I didn't trust the females in my life or it had this rupture with other women in my life.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so going through that process that included a lot of grief, that included just a lot of questioning things.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, that is kind of what led me to Chinese medicine because Chinese medicine has a very clear way of seeing how the psychoemotional impacts the physical.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's a lot around grief actually when you work.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Women's healthcare that maybe isn't talked about a lot.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I think if you don't you don't have a relationship with grief yourself, it can be really challenging then to be sitting with women who do have losses and have complex hormone challenges just because of the modern lifestyle or whatever.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's really just that journey that I went on from probably age 16 to 24 or 23.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that kind of allowed me to then bring that forward for others.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: And as you train women to become practitioners, is that is like working with the grief something that you talk about quite a bit or teach about?
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I teach about the womb heart channel.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: And in Chinese medicine, that is how we can somaticize or we can store trauma in tissue.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because in TCM or in Chinese medicine, it's like the body is trying to protect the heart.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like the heart is the emperor and needs to be protected.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like you don't want any external, what are called in Chinese medicine, pathogens to penetrate the heart space.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: So part of what we do as women, and men, of course, have their own unique way of doing this and systems in place, but we can take something that comes in as a shock to the heart and it goes and it's stored in the womb space.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I in an ideal situation, it's like we're able to transform that and release it through menstruation, through steaming, through other practices.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: But when that doesn't happen, it's like we can develop fibroids, we can develop polyps, we can develop pain, endometriosis, PCOS, like all of these things.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think how helping women who are practitioners understand that and understand how this also is mirrored in the vagus nerve and the nervous system, like in our modern understanding, it does provide a framework of, oh, okay.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I can work with the emotional side of what's coming up, the grief in a body-centered way.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I do think, yeah, it's essential.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a really important part of the process.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the training I provide, it is like a professional training, but it's also like a developmental mentorship because there's a lot of trainings.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a lot of you can take a training, maybe it's recorded pre-recorded, or it's when you get a lot of information, and that's good.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's necessary to have a foundation of knowledge, of course.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of the women who come to me, they're like, I have a lot of knowledge.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: I have a lot of information, but how do I fully integrate it and translate it into what I'm doing day to day?
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that's where that's just where I am really good at bridging that gap and helping kind of show women, okay, this is how you can do it.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I've done it in person, I've done it online, I've done it in a lot of different settings just because with motherhood at the center of what I do, I've had to adapt around that.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of the women who come to my training or mentorship, they're thinking with that in mind as well.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they're not mothers yet, but they're like, I want to be set up so that when I do become a mom, like I can still work, it can be flexible, I can adapt to the needs of the family.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that's where I can really help women orient to women's health in a way that works for them.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's so beautiful and exciting.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'm excited for any of the women who are going through your training.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm curious if you'd speak just a little bit more about grief.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_02: This is the next journey and topic that we're covering in my pelvic alchemy program, which I feel very similarly to you.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_02: This is, I think, just absolutely what can cause so much stagnation in the womb space and the pelvic bowl.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think so much of it has to do with our heart.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm just curious with your work, would you speak a little bit more to how you would have someone tend to their grief?
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_02: Is it a combination of herbs and acupuncture and just bringing awareness to it?
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_02: What are all the things that you would look at?
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I tend to take a more somatic approach, actually.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: I do think there are great acupuncture points for for processing grief, especially when you work with the lungs.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: So there are ways to do that.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: I don't work in person as much anymore, or at least not in this phase of my life.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: So right now, like if I'm supporting someone one-on-one through a miscarriage or through some other challenging experience that's bringing up a lot of grief for them, I really enter through the body.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that might look like helping them orient to their environment, like just really finding themselves where they actually are and orienting internally as well.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: So being able to sense where the grief is, what it feels like if it has a texture, if it has a color, and also pendulating.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the pendulation is a practice from somatic experiencing and other somatic modalities, but it's the idea of you can feel that grief, you can feel the sensations with that, and you can also sense something else present in the body, or something else that maybe feels like at least neutral or even good.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's through feeling good, actually, that I think we're able to transform or alchemize the grief.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like this process of back and forth.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, the grief is still there, yes, and we're noticing it.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: And what else is present for you?
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it's like you feel protected or you feel there's a presence even outside of yourself, or there's something holding you.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many things that happen in that kind of space where I'm like, I don't know exactly where it's gonna end up, but like just guiding the person to that next, okay, what's the next step?
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: What are you feeling now?
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that process, I think, can really allow grief to have space without out overtaking, right?
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: Without feeling because some I think the fear around grief is I'm gonna feel it and I'm never gonna not feel it.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's just I if I go into it, I'm never coming out.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's like this dance of like, it's there and something else is also there.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one way.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: Other ways are like doing grief rituals where there maybe is a process of writing a letter, or it depends on the situation, and then offering it back to the earth in some capacity, whether that's through burning, through burying, through something like that.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: I also love the practice of just speaking it to a tree, to the ground, even face down, that kind of process.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: Herbally, yes, there's of course a lot of ways to work with grief.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: I really love for women at least, vaginal steaming.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a great way to process emotions that come up throughout the cycle.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just something that you can do every cycle.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like an ongoing relationship that you have to that, where you're like, okay, what is this?
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: You can reflect, what has been going on for me, this cycle?
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: How can I just sit and be with that in a way that feels also good because I'm like steaming and it's nice and warm.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's really beneficial too.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's all amazing.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I agree with every I support everything that you said, and especially that pendulation and the yeah, just the interoception and extraoception and really that spectrum of grief and love.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: If you can't, if you can't feel the good, like you said, there it is really challenging to work with grief.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_02: So it feels really important to be able to bring that awareness in.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: That sounds too really part of the important piece is just creating a space where people are more consciously in relationship with their grief.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because I feel so often, at least here, people are really trained to just push it down or not look at it or just put it away.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, it doesn't go away.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's there.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's really interesting.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody that I've learned a lot from and just found to be really wise.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: Martin Practel, do you know?
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know who that is.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: He's got this really amazing story, but he ended up living in Guatemala for a lot of his adult life and working with the medicine people there and just inherited this whole or was taught this really deep tradition.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: Wrote this beautiful book called The Smell of Rain on Dust.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: The Smell of Rain on Dust.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: I have heard of the book, yeah.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just basically looking at what Lindsay was just saying.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like, grief is the partner of love.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, like to love deeply, like grief will be part of the equation because impertinence is the only given and all that sort of thing.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: But he, the first time I ever saw him speak, he gave this long lecture and was just talking about the state of the world and his view, like the the things that are not going well in the state of the world are really just a product of hundreds and maybe thousands of years of undigested grief because we push it down, because we don't relate to it in a healthy way, it's just piled up to the point that we're out of relationship with the earth and out of the like relationship with each other in a way that makes sense.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, really interesting stuff.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_02: And grief is so complex too, right?
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like when you're growing up, maybe the first time you learn the word grief or think about it, it's when someone dies.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: But obviously, there are like a million different ways that we can feel grief, even just watching our children age, the grief of losing a friendship, the grief of the complex world events, the grief of the world, there's just so much there.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, so many other examples too.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, that's beautiful that you work with that.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_02: That makes so much sense to me.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's just such an important aspect of fertility.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: It is, yeah, for sure.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: I'm curious, just as we're closing up, if there's anything that you're really excited about that you want to speak, speak to the universe, anything new in your work or your mothering or your son's four teeth that will hopefully fully come through.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think so, yeah.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: I just turned 40 a couple of months ago, and I am sensing this kind of new evolution of the work I'm doing, which is stepping more into the practitioner work than I have even in the last few years, because that's been growing over these last few years, and now it's coming more to the forefront.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just thinking about things in a different way, I think.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: Of okay, how do I want these next years to look?
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: And how can I really simplify what I'm doing so I can go deeper into each of those things, right?
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like if I'm gonna be doing the fertility work, how can I really make it the most potent and really a deep, well-rounded offer or well-rounded container for the women who are in with me?
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I'm thinking about the practitioner training in the same light of okay, if I this is something I want to develop over the course of 10 years, let's say, you just think about things a little bit differently when you look more long term, I think.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that is really where I'm at.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think I did a lot of experimentation because I got my acupuncture license in my late 20s, and I knew I wanted to work with women's health.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I went right into that.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_00: But having I had four babies in my 30s as well.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there's just a lot of shape shifting and experimentation and what works, what doesn't, the market changes, COVID, like all the things.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: And now I just feel like, okay, I want to let things settle a little bit more and think, okay, where can I really have an impact that's in my particular lane of genius or with my particular skill set?
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's been exciting and new for me, even though it's interesting because I'm trying to think of it as it's something I'll be doing in a repetitive kind of way.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: But because I'll be repeating it, it's like I can go deeper into what I'm offering each time.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's very exciting.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: I feel that entirely similarly too.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like as I'm going to be 43 this fall, and I'm just loving my 40s and loving it's both there's just this under underscore of depth that I feel like is so natural at this age, at least as a woman, I can speak to that.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's my experience.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then just the like just not willing to tolerate things that are out of alignment to a very, like, it's very quick to realize the misalignment.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's not necessarily that quick to shift because of life and how it is.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_02: But it's like as soon as you see it, it's like, oh yeah, like something has to change because this is not quite right.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I appreciate that so much.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: Something we like to ask people is best advice you wish you would have received earlier on on your path.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I think just to trust that it's all happening, that it's all coming, develop a deeper sense of trust on the path and the twists and turns that can come.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, just like staying grounded in yourself as much as possible.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's great.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_02: Beautiful.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so I feel like we could talk to you forever, and we will wrap it up by if you want to just share where people can find you online or otherwise.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: The easiest place is my website, wombmedicine.com, or on Instagram at Kristen Hauser.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: Just my name, pretty straightforward.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, amazing.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much, Kristen.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_02: This has been really inspiring for me.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I'm just really grateful to know you, have you as a friend.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: Great to meet you.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, great to meet you, Scott, and thanks, Lindsay.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_02: If you loved it, please help us spread the word by subscribing to this podcast and leaving us a review.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_02: For more information about our work, visit homesteadandheal.net.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're wishing you the life of your dreams, one that feels deeply rooted, fully alive, and connected to the earth beneath your feet.