Latest / MyMaine Birth / 131. MyMaine Birth: The Free Birth Society Scam, Nya's Story

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131. MyMaine Birth: The Free Birth Society Scam, Nya's Story · MyMaine Birth

• 0:00
  Nya: And it suddenly all clicked and I was just like, oh yeah, this whole organization is just not what they say they are.
• 0:08
  Nya: It's just as simple as that.
• 0:12
  Angela: I'm Angela and I'm a certified birth photographer, experienced doula, childbirth educator and your host here on the my Maine Birth podcast.
• 0:21
  Angela: This is a space where we share the real life stories of families and their unique birth experiences in the beautiful state of Maine, from our state's biggest hospitals to birth center births and home births.
• 0:33
  Angela: Every birth story deserves to be heard and celebrated.
• 0:37
  Angela: Whether you're a soon to be mom, a seasoned mother or simply interested in the world of birth, these episodes are for you.
• 0:45
  Angela: Welcome back.
• 0:48
  Angela: You're listening to episode 131 of my Main Birth.
• 0:53
  Angela: Today's guest is Naya, and she has already shared her two main birth stories on the podcast.
• 1:00
  Angela: You can check out episode 2 and episode 29 to hear her birth stories, but today Naya's here to share about her experience with the Free Birth Society and also about what her views are on birth now, after taking some time to decompress from this oppressive community.
• 1:18
  Angela: Hey, naya, welcome back to my Main Birth.
• 1:24
  Angela: Hi, thank you so much for coming back and joining me again as a guest on the podcast.
• 1:31
  Nya: Well, thanks for having me.
• 1:32
  Angela: I'm stoked to be here To jump into our conversation today.
• 1:36
  Angela: I'd love to have you start by sharing a little bit about, like what were your views on birth growing up and maybe some stories that you heard about birth when you were younger.
• 1:46
  Nya: Yeah, so I was born in a hospital and I always knew my birth story growing up, or like parts of it, because I was my mom's first birth and it was very traumatic for different reasons reasons.
• 2:07
  Nya: Um, I was taught I, my mom, had a birth that was like 20 something hours and I was taught that that was unusually long.
• 2:11
  Nya: Um, now I know that that's pretty much normal for a first time birth and so that right off the bat it was like, from the beginning, your mom's birth with you was all messed up, right, like it was wrong, it was way too hard, it was not good, and she talked to me, you know, in more detail about what the birth was really like and what contractions were like, which I appreciated, like she actually spoke with me in detail about this throughout my life growing up.
• 2:41
  Nya: But the big themes of my birth were that she felt me swaying in the birth canal and believed that that was wrong or bad or dangerous and so they had to use this suction thing.
• 3:00
  Nya: It wasn't a vacuum, it was not like the vacuum machine.
• 3:04
  Nya: It was back in the 90s.
• 3:05
  Nya: They had this thing that looked like a toilet plunger basically, and they would like suction to the baby and then pull the baby out, and so they did an episiotomy, they did that, they did all of those things, but she didn't have any drugs, so it was considered a natural birth and I remember growing up feeling like proud that my mom had a natural birth.
• 3:28
  Nya: But all of these other things happened right, they pulled me out by the head, they cut my mom and they found that I had a nuchal cord, and so of course that's like.
• 3:43
  Nya: The huge story of my life is like you weren't even supposed to be alive, like, thank God, we have the doctors there to pull you out because of this nuchal cord.
• 3:52
  Nya: You were going to die blah, blah, blah, um.
• 3:55
  Nya: And then she had her doctor, was a male doctor and she her doctor um forcibly pulled her placenta out before it was ready and then didn't check to see if all of it was out.
• 4:12
  Nya: And so mom and me went home and weeks later, two weeks later, my mom bled out and passed out on the floor while I was two week old baby, just on the couch and fainted and lost consciousness and was like bleeding to death.
• 4:29
  Nya: And it just so happened that my grandma walked in and called an ambulance and her life was saved.
• 4:35
  Nya: But she to this day believes that that was just a fault of the doctor for not doing the uterine sweep after pulling the placenta out.
• 4:49
  Nya: That, you know, after they pull a placenta out, they often will insert their whole arm into a woman and sweep the uterus for any remaining pieces of the placenta, which is just insane to me, because a placenta should never come out in multiple pieces if it's being birthed naturally.
• 5:06
  Nya: And so the fact that that's a routine procedure is really sad and it shows me that they were obviously pulling the placenta out way too early and and it was probably incredibly painful for her if that's the case.
• 5:19
  Nya: And so, all of that being said, she, my whole life, was feeding me the story of like, thank goodness, you know, thank goodness for the medical system, when, in reality, I'm able to look back now and see how, like, the medical system completely sabotaged her birth.
• 5:34
  Nya: And so that was like my core story of birth.
• 5:39
  Nya: And then, of course, throughout life, I'm fed other stories, mostly through my parents, um, of traumatic hospital births and blah, blah, blah and um, you know, we had a conversation once I remember I was quite young, like in middle school, about home births.
• 5:56
  Nya: I don't remember how it came up.
• 5:58
  Nya: But my mom had a friend who was like a close family friend who had lots of kids they're like a homeschool home birth family and she had like five kids and one of them they had to transfer to the hospital or I don't even know if they had to right, but like they transferred to a hospital during a midwife's attempted home birth.
• 6:16
  Nya: And all of a sudden my mom was like that's the problem with home birth, like you never know and like you might have problem with home birth.
• 6:25
  Nya: You never know and you might have four successful home births but one of them you might be almost dying and blah, blah, blah.
• 6:31
  Nya: And thank God they got to the hospital on time and so that was my imprint and my story.
• 6:39
  Nya: Then my best friend from childhood, high school, got pregnant right out of high school at 18.
• 6:46
  Nya: And I was in college on the mainland.
• 6:49
  Nya: We live in Hawaii.
• 6:50
  Nya: I was in college on the mainland when she was giving birth and she gave birth in a hospital.
• 6:54
  Nya: But she approached birth in a way I had never heard about before, in a totally natural way.
• 7:00
  Nya: She labored for a long time and it was not like pathologized.
• 7:05
  Nya: She moved around a bunch, she was up and in the shower and in the tub and on a yoga ball and, like you know, had more freedom than a lot of hospitals will allow.
• 7:16
  Nya: They like asked her permission about breaking her water and she said no, and all this stuff and like there was a lot.
• 7:24
  Nya: I had never heard of a birth like that, you know.
• 7:26
  Nya: And then she started pushing while standing up and she like pushed uncoached and, um, just like had her baby in a much more physiological way.
• 7:38
  Nya: And so, and I remember my mom was at the hospital waiting and was like freaking out about how long it was taking, and I was texting my friend like while she was in labor and she was like, yeah, it's fine, like it's just taking a while.
• 7:54
  Nya: So that kind of shook me.
• 7:56
  Nya: I was like, oh okay, so there's like this whole other world of birth where birth is like not people aren't like afraid of birth and it can just take a long time and you can like do whatever you want in labor.
• 8:10
  Nya: Um, I don't really know how I came to this, but somewhere along the line, um, I guess because in college I got exposed to more like natural living principles and and I became a yoga teacher and got really into like the new age world, which is full of people living naturally and birthing at home and and eating well and just more like conscious, healthy lifestyle living.
• 8:38
  Nya: That was something that I wasn't super exposed to growing up though we always were very healthy.
• 8:43
  Nya: There wasn't this like organic crunchy life, right.
• 8:47
  Nya: So I got exposed to that in college and I got more and more and more committed to that, to the point where I remember having conversations like at the end of college being like if I got pregnant right now, like I would probably home birth.
• 9:02
  Nya: And then I had a friend in college who did get pregnant near the end of college and she had a home birth with a midwife and I remember feeling like worried for her that she was having a home birth.
• 9:14
  Nya: Um, but it was an incredibly um, normal birth, except for the ways that the midwife intervened and I that was my first moment of realizing that midwifery could have been bad in any way, that, like, middle midwives can also sabotage birth, and so that kind of blew my mind and that friend I moved away and that friend sent me some podcast episodes from the free birth society and was like this is a friend of mine, they were like mutual friends, they were close friends, um, she's like.
• 9:51
  Nya: This is a friend of mine.
• 9:52
  Nya: She just started this podcast, um, a couple years ago and it's really good and it's about women who are giving birth totally unassisted.
• 9:59
  Nya: And the first episode I listened to was a woman who gave birth to twins and she didn't know they were twins.
• 10:07
  Nya: She didn't have any prenatal care so she didn't know she had twins and she gave birth by herself in a bathtub in Costa Rica and she gave birth to the first baby and then was like, oh, I guess this is the placenta, and the second baby started coming out and they were both totally fine and everything went normal.
• 10:26
  Nya: And I remember listening to that story and being like, whoa, my worldview is shattered.
• 10:31
  Nya: So that was before I had kids.
• 10:35
  Nya: So I was listening to free birth stories before I had kids.
• 10:38
  Nya: What year did you say?
• 10:40
  Nya: What year did you say, say, 2019, 2020.
• 10:45
  Nya: Because I got pregnant in the summer of 2020 for the first time.
• 10:49
  Nya: So it was like 2019, like right as I was leaving Oregon and moving to Maine, and then I got pregnant and I told this story on your podcast before my husband suggested that we free birthed and I was like, no, I'm not ready for that.
• 11:12
  Nya: So I actually was listening to the Free Birth Society podcast throughout that whole pregnancy, but I was specifically avoiding any episode where it seemed like the midwife sabotaged the birth, because I was hiring a midwife and I didn't want the bad vibes.
• 11:26
  Nya: What was true is that I didn't want to be confronted.
• 11:31
  Nya: I didn't want to be confronted with the risk that I was taking.
• 11:35
  Nya: I just wanted to believe that my midwife was not going to be like any of those other midwives.
• 11:39
  Nya: So I didn't even listen to those stories.
• 11:41
  Nya: Obviously, I wish I had.
• 11:42
  Nya: Not that my midwife did anything like sabotaging or anything like that, but it's clear to me that I was having some cognitive dissonance through that whole pregnancy.
• 11:53
  Nya: So it was like a slow burn transition.
• 11:55
  Nya: But I definitely went into my own births with a serious amount of prior medical programming that I was still undoing, and then also all these free birth stories and just trying to like reconcile that and and it just took time.
• 12:09
  Nya: It really just took a lot of time.
• 12:12
  Angela: Yeah, so when did you start thinking about taking the radical birthkeeper school?
• 12:17
  Nya: So I I had been kind of like following free birth society on Instagram and like consuming some of their podcasts.
• 12:25
  Nya: Then, after I had my daughter, I was like so stoked on home birth and just like really into it.
• 12:31
  Nya: I immediately started taking an online doula course and I just took the quickest, shortest, cheapest course I could because I knew like I'm super educated on this.
• 12:45
  Nya: I was doing all my own research.
• 12:46
  Nya: I don't need to pay a ton of money and do this big, long school.
• 12:49
  Nya: I can just get a certification and start attending births.
• 12:53
  Nya: And I really wanted to just be at births so I did that.
• 12:56
  Nya: And that was when I attended the two hospital births as part of my getting certified Um, hospital births as part of my getting certified Um, and those like they went totally normal in a hospital.
• 13:11
  Nya: There was nothing like incredibly traumatizing about them, but they were traumatizing for me to witness.
• 13:14
  Nya: Uh like watching, after having had a home birth that was mostly very, very hands-off and mostly like very-supported to then see what normal, natural hospital birth looked like.
• 13:27
  Nya: I couldn't handle that.
• 13:29
  Nya: So after that I started re-evaluating and it was probably within weeks I don't remember the timeline exactly, but it was probably within weeks of attending that second birth that I saw a post on Instagram about the Radical Birth Keeper School and I was just like I have to do this.
• 13:46
  Nya: This is where it's going to happen for me, and I absolutely would not have done it if I hadn't gotten the scholarship.
• 13:55
  Nya: So I got a large part of my tuition taken care of and that was a huge game changer for us, because we didn't have the money.
• 14:04
  Nya: I was still at home with a 10 month old baby and my husband was our only income, so there was, yeah, that that all I believe.
• 14:14
  Nya: I truly believe that, like God put me in that school, um, for a reason, and I believe that I was meant to be a midwife, a traditional midwife, not a licensed midwife.
• 14:24
  Nya: You know what I mean.
• 14:25
  Nya: So I have a lot of gratitude for that school and what I learned there.
• 14:31
  Nya: I have a lot of gratitude for the friends I made there and so much of the personal work and development that I did there.
• 14:38
  Nya: I have often credited that school and the education I learned in that school for being part of the reason why I was so comfortable three birthing my second child.
• 14:49
  Nya: I do think that it would have happened that way anyways, even if I hadn't taken the school and I would have taken my education more in like a DIY kind of way, but it definitely.
• 15:01
  Nya: It definitely kickstarted me onto a certain path that I am very, very grateful for, even though my views of the school itself and the organization have changed since then.
• 15:15
  Angela: Yeah, so you had your beautiful free birth, and it was shortly after that that you started getting a little bit closer with the Free Birth Society.
• 15:24
  Angela: Is that right?
• 15:26
  Nya: Yeah, so I free birthed.
• 15:28
  Nya: I have always like ever since I graduated from the Radical Birth Keeper School I was always like inching closer to the inner circle.
• 15:36
  Nya: I often was the one they wanted to pick for things like public roundtables or Zoom discussions or testimonials.
• 15:43
  Nya: There were opportunities for being a leader position inside of their private membership and I often got picked for those kinds of things and leading calls and things like that.
• 15:55
  Nya: So I was getting closer and closer to being an inner circle.
• 15:57
  Nya: And then, right after we moved to Hawaii so it was like three, maybe like five months after I gave birth they were advertising a position for a social media manager and I applied and got the job.
• 16:15
  Nya: It was originally to be for the Matriarch Rising Festival Instagram page only, but once I got in it was clear that my skills would have been better used in the Free Breath Society group and so I shifted away from MRF into FBS and I still did work for both, but my role was always shifting and growing and changing because I had a lot of various digital marketing skills and I think I worked there for a year and a half and in my time working there I grew to be like a core member of the team.
• 16:54
  Nya: I was like a go-to person for many, many things and I watched almost every other staff member rotate in or out and change multiple times where I stayed, and then I also watched women who were in leadership positions in the membership either get kicked out or moved out and rotated, and again I was one of the few.
• 17:19
  Nya: That was consistent.
• 17:21
  Nya: And I heard throughout that time a variety of drama stories about all these different people and why they all left for different reasons and how free birth society and Emily Saldeo were always the victim of it and and consistently at the effect of all of these different people supposedly randomly choosing to leave, and so that was like raising red flags for me the entire time.
• 17:54
  Nya: Obviously, the turnover rate of just employees and leaders was like alarming and unusual, like truly unusual for a business that's successful.
• 18:01
  Nya: And I've worked with other successful companies and corporations and I worked in corporate America for a little while and the turnover rate was unusual and the way the business was run was disorganized, to say the least, and I know I'm not speaking out of turn saying that.
• 18:17
  Nya: I know Emily Saldana would admit that herself that there was a level of disorganization that was not serving her or anyone, and that made my job harder but it wasn't a big deal.
• 18:30
  Nya: But the red flags stacked over time and about halfway through my time working there maybe even sooner I got saved.
• 18:39
  Nya: I got saved by Jesus and my perspective on a lot of things really changed.
• 18:48
  Nya: Obviously, my perspective on the new age stuff radically changed, but also my perspective on moral issues like abortion, moral issues like dishonesty, moral issues like feminism and matriarchy and like hatred of men and and things like that all radically shifted.
• 19:15
  Nya: And at the same time I started seeing how on the staff there was like pretty consistent um, teasing and making fun of and even hatred towards christians and women who submitted to their husbands, and I was both of those things and it was like a in in moments.
• 19:39
  Nya: There were moments where it felt like a mean girl club towards those kinds of people, towards traditional Christian values, women who submitted to their husbands, and there was just this energy of like, growing energy of like oh, I don't think I really belong here.
• 19:55
  Angela: That was around the time where you went to Matriarch Rising Festival, right?
• 19:59
  Angela: And this is in 2024.
• 20:00
  Angela: So your time was there as the end of 2023.
• 20:03
  Angela: And now we're getting into 2024, right.
• 20:06
  Nya: Yeah, so I went to Matriarch Rising Festival like the month or the month after I got saved and I remember leading up to that, I was supposed to teach a yoga class and I was not a yoga teacher anymore and I was actively renouncing and rebuking yoga from my life and I was just praying and being like what do I do?
• 20:29
  Nya: Like I don't want to let Emily down, I also don't want to miss this, like it seems like a really cool, beautiful experience, and like we already bought plane tickets and all this stuff.
• 20:40
  Nya: So I just said God, please protect me from any evil or demonic energy while I'm there, and I really believe the Lord protected me.
• 20:49
  Nya: I brought my Bible and I read my Bible every single night and I stayed.
• 20:55
  Nya: I like went to bed early and missed the largely nefarious things that went on after dark by both staff and attendees, and I just kept to myself and I did my job, which was capturing social media content.
• 21:12
  Nya: So I was like on the outskirts, watching but not participating a lot of times, and when I did participate, I felt like God was guiding me to participate in the things that I was okay with and it was amazing I would be capturing content of an event and then, right as the event was starting to get into goddess worship or talking about other gods or doing like weird pagan rituals, I would get a text or like a walkie talkie call being like hey, naya, like we need you in this area or like we need help on this thing, and I would literally get pulled away.
• 21:57
  Nya: Or, like you know, it would be like, okay, I just finished capturing all the content I need.
• 22:02
  Nya: I'm going to move on to something else.
• 22:04
  Nya: And then I would see that they were like doing pagan worship and I'd be like, oh, good thing, I'm leaving, you know.
• 22:09
  Nya: So God literally always pulled me away at the perfect time and really protected me.
• 22:18
  Nya: I also had some like really interesting moments of seeing clearly the, the spiritual danger of participating in a hodgepodge of random religion practices and worshiping gods from other religions that you don't even really know about, because it's all spiritual and feels good and um, and just the reality of meeting men and the.
• 22:53
  Nya: There were some serious issues at that festival with the water, like the water that I don't remember exactly what happened, but like the whole land lost water, lost all water flow.
• 23:08
  Nya: At one point they had like a pipe issue or something, and so who do you call to fix that?
• 23:13
  Nya: Men, right, like that's who plumbers and electricians are and everything.
• 23:17
  Nya: So, like Emily Saldea's husband and all the husbands of like the core staff were there helping set this thing up, and then they would all like go and hide for three days, but then, as soon as something serious there was, like a serious issue, we had to call men to come and fix it and, of course, everyone was incredibly grateful for the men and their help and whatnot.
• 23:38
  Nya: But, like it was the moment for me of like this is a fake pretend world that is not reality and it's not healthy and it's very disrespectful of like we're just going to go play matriarchy and play feminine goddess until we need you and then we'll call you over and you do what we say and then we'll send you away again and make what we say.
• 24:04
  Nya: And then we'll send you away again and make fun of you and disrespect you behind your back and act like for three days, act like single women, act like we don't have husbands.
• 24:16
  Nya: There were women walking around in clothing or lack of clothing that they would never walk around in public with for lack of respect to their husband and I'm like, okay, I know that that's not just about other men seeing your body.
• 24:32
  Nya: No one women or men should be seeing your body like that outside of your marriage.
• 24:39
  Nya: And another aspect to this is that there were like plenty of lesbian women there.
• 24:45
  Nya: So like, how safe are you actually in a circumstance where there are people there who are sexually attracted to you and you're doing all of this naked stuff and like twerking and you know?
• 25:02
  Nya: So it the the, the veil was being lifted of like this is not what they say it is and it's not reality and it's it's um, at the very least it's a silly game.
• 25:16
  Nya: That is, in my opinion, a waste of time and not necessary for your health and wellbeing.
• 25:23
  Nya: It is not necessary for your health and wellbeing-being, it is not necessary for your health and well-being to spend three days in the woods along with a bunch of stranger women doing just pleasureful activities and at the worst it's spiritually dangerous and a great way to get sucked into genuinely satanic and demonic practices.
• 25:44
  Nya: So I kind of walked away from that feeling like thank God for protecting me, but also I don't ever want to do that again.
• 25:53
  Nya: But I was still on staff with Free Birth Society and there was already talks about like what my role was going to be at Matriarch Rising Festival next year, because I'm like keeping all this to myself and fear that I'm going to lose my job, which paid me very, very well and really took care of our family, and so there was like a lot going on in me at the time.
• 26:14
  Nya: Sorry, I just went on like a huge tangent, but I feel like that's important.
• 26:18
  Nya: I had a lot of Christian women texting me or DMing me, being like do you think Patriarch Rising Festival is safe to go to for a Christian woman?
• 26:25
  Nya: And like, okay, it was safe for me.
• 26:28
  Nya: God protected me while I was there, but he protected me by removing me from things repeatedly.
• 26:34
  Nya: So, like, do you really want to go into that environment as a Christian woman?
• 26:38
  Nya: I would say probably no.
• 26:41
  Angela: So now, after the festival, that was sort of the summer leading up to when MMI started for the first round and you were a big part of their copywriting Is there anything that you want to share about leading up to that, about like writing the copywriting for what seemingly was a midwifery school or at least similar to RBK?
• 27:01
  Angela: Yeah, so we can skip this if you don't want to no, that's okay.
• 27:08
  Nya: Um, yeah, it is.
• 27:10
  Nya: We can totally talk about this.
• 27:12
  Nya: It just makes me sad to think about um because I believe that I played a big role in some seriously immoral things.
• 27:24
  Nya: After being saved by Jesus and after knowing the difference between right and wrong, I was so threatened by and afraid of Emily Saldea and afraid of losing my job.
• 27:41
  Nya: But even more than my fear of losing my job, just my fear of like being rebuked by her or arguing with her because she's such a strong personality which is amazing in many ways but it made me afraid to stand up for what I felt like was right and that was in the works.
• 28:10
  Nya: I was one of the core people who was like being talked to about what MMI was going to be, about how we set this up.
• 28:20
  Nya: Um, there were some.
• 28:21
  Nya: There were frequent conversations around like where, what direction FBS is going to go.
• 28:27
  Nya: At one point I had suggested that FBS cut all of their programs except for the Complete Guide to Free Birth and the Radical Birth Keeper School and just go all in on those things, because those are like the core of the company and everything else was kind of extra and unnecessary and so, anyway, that that, obviously that suggestion didn't happen but, like I, was one of the core people that was helping come up with ideas and being talked to about how we should go about this, about how we should go about this.
• 29:12
  Nya: So when the idea of MMI got presented, it originally got presented as an idea of a round two of the RBK school, like a level two for graduates.
• 29:22
  Nya: However, marketing-wise that would not go over well because that limits it to only people who have taken RBK school and that's a lot of time and energy and money to put into something that would have a very small pool of applicants.
• 29:37
  Nya: So it needed to be made into something that anyone could take but would still present as higher level than RBK school.
• 29:48
  Nya: At the same time, I felt that there was a greediness and an unwillingness to let go of anything that was currently going on.
• 29:56
  Nya: So to me it would have made more sense to just get rid of the RBK school altogether and say that, like, this is the new and improved version.
• 30:05
  Nya: But that wasn't about to happen because of this sense of like well, this still makes us money, so we need to keep it.
• 30:14
  Nya: And of course, my job was to translate those conversations into appealing marketing for the people.
• 30:25
  Nya: So obviously I knew that the primary reason why all of this was happening was to make more money, but I'm not going to say that Right.
• 30:36
  Nya: So I wrote things, um, like all the different benefits that a person would get from doing these schools and what is the difference between RBK and MMI, and all this stuff, when truly at the core of it this was the basis of all the conversations was FBS needs more money desperately.
• 30:55
  Nya: And so, like, what can we do to charge more?
• 30:59
  Nya: And I'll never forget, like a clear conversation where it was said, conversation where it was said I need to find a way to make way more money while offering way less.
• 31:21
  Nya: And at the time I felt like I was in between these two worlds, where on the one side, I was hearing the Holy Spirit being like that's wrong.
• 31:25
  Nya: Since when did we ever, as a human species, say I deserve more for giving less?
• 31:34
  Nya: That's wrong.
• 31:36
  Nya: Call it money mindset, call it abundance mentality, I don't care.
• 31:42
  Nya: That's wrong.
• 31:43
  Nya: We shouldn't be trying to get as much as we possibly can for as little effort as possible.
• 31:50
  Nya: So much about birth, who changed my life and who also, like, helped me to heal a lot of my poverty money wounds, so that I actually was making really good money and building a business that I cared about and all this stuff and was like, well, she's very financially successful, like maybe I should take her, you know, and just like encourage that.
• 32:24
  Nya: So I ended up not saying anything in that moment.
• 32:25
  Nya: You know, and just like encourage that.
• 32:26
  Nya: So I ended up not saying anything in that moment.
• 32:29
  Nya: But that was the basis of MMI.
• 32:32
  Nya: It was how can we make as much money as possible doing as little as possible?
• 32:54
  Nya: So the goal was to take was to like have less and less live screen time for the teachers, more, um, repeated content and and all of that.
• 32:57
  Nya: So there were there was a whole project by the staff to like essentially take the videos and content and stuff from the radical birth keeper school, download them and rebrand them and then upload them into MMI.
• 33:10
  Nya: So I knew I was not the one doing that, but I knew that's what was going on and I knew that it was literally just getting copied from one program to the other.
• 33:23
  Nya: I also knew that there was genuinely other things added to it, like the mentorship pods.
• 33:29
  Nya: There were going to be guest speakers teaching other things.
• 33:33
  Nya: There was more written content and stuff like that and a lot of videos were re-recorded.
• 33:40
  Nya: But the scripts were reused, so scripts were copied and then videos were re-recorded with the same scripts, with a little bit of changes, you know.
• 33:49
  Nya: So like on the backend it was a new program but it also took a lot of copy information and it was not by any means I don't think worth the amount of money that was charged for it, and I also, as a mentor, was.
• 34:14
  Nya: I remember when I took RBK that like mentorship thing was just part of it, and then they for the next few years took that part away and then when they added it into MMI they were like here's why we're charging extra, when just a few years ago that was part of the much more affordable program.
• 34:38
  Nya: So all the while I'm getting promised this big paycheck at the end of my time being a pod mentor in MMI and I was loving doing the mentorship.
• 34:55
  Angela: But before you became a mentor in MMI, how many births had you attended?
• 35:01
  Nya: So I attended the two hospital births and then I attended four sovereign births in person and then I um like video support long distance for two other births, Um, and I'd had my own free birth in that time.
• 35:17
  Nya: As far as, like other ways of support, I did prenatal education, Um, and so I was doing free birth education and I did, I think, three or four rounds of my group free birth education course and I had like 10 to 20 people in each round and I was working pretty intimately with each of those couples but obviously I hadn't attended their births at all.
• 35:45
  Nya: A few of them ended up transferring to hospital, basically for personal reasons, but just about all of them went on with free birth.
• 35:54
  Angela: I feel like a lot of information and knowledge going into it as a pod leader, but some of the other pod leaders didn't have as much like and that's when I was like trying to choose like which pod I wanted to be and I'm like which one has the most like experience with birth, you know.
• 36:11
  Nya: Yeah Well, and also for sovereign births is not a lot and I've always been, or tried to.
• 36:19
  Nya: I feel like I've always been honest with like I have attended a handful of births.
• 36:23
  Nya: I've never tried to posture myself as, like this, mega experienced birth attendant, um, but I also know that the leaders of the whole school were not actively attending births, maybe like one a year of like a close friend and one or two a year and I.
• 36:47
  Nya: I worked there for over a year and a half and there were two births, one of which two births that she attended, one of which she didn't get there until like right after the baby came out, and they were very casual, they were like good, close friends.
• 37:04
  Nya: So like this, like the, I believe that that at one point in time both Emily and Yolanda were actively attending births as their primary job, and maybe Yolanda, more so than Emily, was like actively attending births for a long time and has definitely attended more births than I have.
• 37:24
  Nya: But all the claims and the writing that I did about like we're actively attending, blah, blah, blah, it's not true.
• 37:32
  Nya: Like I, I, she, she texted her staff every single time she went to a birth to let us know if she wouldn't be on that day, and it happened twice in the whole time I was working there.
• 37:43
  Nya: So I know, I know that there was some deception around, like the experience of the staff in general and the experience of the pod mentors.
• 37:52
  Nya: Quite, a few of the pod mentors were just other members of the Free Birth Society staff because we didn't have anyone else to do it.
• 38:00
  Nya: So like there were members of the Free Birth Society staff who had never attended a birth, never had a free birth themselves, but had been involved with free birth society for a long time and so they knew about it and blah, blah, blah.
• 38:13
  Nya: But like that, I found myself taking liberties to my pod group um, maybe beyond what I was supposed to like.
• 38:25
  Nya: I was really supposed to just be a discussion leader.
• 38:28
  Nya: Maybe beyond what I was supposed to Like.
• 38:29
  Nya: I was really supposed to just be a discussion leader and I found myself really taking liberties and correcting people on things that they were maybe learning from the school and being like, hold on, like that's not realistic.
• 38:39
  Nya: Okay, like I've been to a few births, that is not realistic, um, and like it.
• 38:46
  Nya: I think the core issue that I felt like in the schools, um, was that there is, there's.
• 38:54
  Nya: Whether this was the school's intention or not.
• 38:57
  Nya: What was received was this black and white of like.
• 39:06
  Nya: This is what safe birth looks like and as long as XYZ happens, there won't be emergencies or complications.
• 39:16
  Nya: Here's like five primary emergencies that will happen, that can happen, and what to do in those situations.
• 39:24
  Nya: But since I took the RBK school, I've heard many, many, many stories of like admittedly incredibly rare circumstances that fall outside of those areas, and so I think the gray needed to be talked about more and I think that that created serious problems, and I think that that created serious problems.
• 39:54
  Nya: I also think that they're just the reality of it.
• 39:56
  Nya: Being an online school made it impossible for people to learn that intuitive gray nuance that you really only learn from being at a birth.
• 40:03
  Nya: Like.
• 40:05
  Nya: Nothing can replace the fact that sometimes, when you're at a birth, someone will just feel that deep gut feeling of like something is not right here and we need to transfer, and that should be respected, and I don't like that.
• 40:26
  Nya: In the schools, what was taught was if you, as the birth keeper, are feeling that, it's probably because you have wounding and you have internalized trauma and you have a medical mindset and you're in fear and you don't trust women, this whole generation of birth keepers who are showing up to births and fully ignoring their intuition because they believe that the only way to be at a birth safely is to say nothing, do nothing, interrupt nothing.
• 41:03
  Nya: And I have just learned that it can't be that way, like I thing.
• 41:13
  Nya: And I have just learned that it can't be that way like I.
• 41:14
  Nya: You know, I, I at a recent birth, I attended, like I followed my instinct and intuition and I got to know this mother very, very well and I felt that at times she was not moving enough.
• 41:24
  Nya: I felt that she needed to move a little bit more and she actually also vocalized that which was great, and she was like I think I should be moving more and I don't think it would have been right for me in that moment to be like just do what feels good, because what felt good in that moment was not necessarily what was going to be good for her.
• 41:51
  Nya: And that maybe that's the overarching theme here is that the difference between the new age belief and Christianity is that you cannot rely on your feelings for everything, you cannot rely on what feels good for everything, and you can't just walk into a birth and say I'm going to trust this mom to just do what feels good, because, first of all, birth doesn't feel good, okay, so like that's one part of it.
• 42:23
  Nya: But but there needs.
• 42:26
  Nya: If a mother is hiring someone to be at her birth to guide her and shepherd her, that guide and shepherd needs to be confident enough in that mother and all of her unique, intricate, gray qualities and things that make her unique and her different, and what her diet looked like throughout pregnancy and all these different things, and then also very, very, very confidently educated in birth and to be able to intuitively, I believe, through the Holy Spirit, only combine those things to provide suggestion and actual support.
• 43:06
  Nya: Suggestion and actual support.
• 43:09
  Nya: And I told my friend whose birth I was attending I feel very, very confident in birth and I feel very trusting in birth.
• 43:22
  Nya: But if I feel, because that, if I feel that deep Holy Spirit nudge, that something isn't right here, I will tell you that and I will let you know that I think you should transfer because I think it would be morally wrong of me not to, and I think so.
• 43:40
  Nya: All of that, you know, is starting to like combine in me of realizing that the school is is not being presented truthfully on the marketing front and I knew that, um, they are not teaching.
• 43:56
  Nya: They're not.
• 43:56
  Nya: It's not possible to teach the fullness of attending a sovereign birth without being in person, person, without actually apprenticing under someone, and there was no God.
• 44:11
  Nya: There was no God.
• 44:14
  Nya: There was just trust women, trust women, trust women.
• 44:17
  Nya: And that I'm not saying that like you shouldn't trust women, but I believe that humans are easily deceived.
• 44:28
  Nya: They are easily feared out of and tricked out of and deceived out of truth, and so I believe that a person should trust God, not another person as their holy compass, as their holy guidepost.
• 44:49
  Nya: And in order to do that, you have to get right with God and you have to be clear that the voice you're hearing is the one true God, not a pantheon of other workers of Satan.
• 45:01
  Nya: So that was like the spiritual crux of it.
• 45:07
  Nya: On another personal level, I had no idea when marketing and helping create this course, that there was a whole section on abortion.
• 45:18
  Nya: I felt like that was incredibly out of integrity for the message of the three birth society, which is all about preserving life in a non-traumatic way.
• 45:29
  Nya: It makes no sense to me that they would suddenly be advocating for murdering life.
• 45:36
  Nya: And that was a light bulb moment for me of this corporation is not what they say they are.
• 45:44
  Nya: They are not supporters of life, they are supporters of matriarchy at any cost.
• 45:55
  Nya: So as long as the woman is in charge, autonomous, gets her way and doing things, naturally nothing else matters.
• 46:06
  Nya: And it was around the same time that nancy lucina released her story of consciously choosing to allow her baby to die so that she could free birth, and I believe that that was a very unique story.
• 46:27
  Nya: I'm not saying that if your baby dies in a free birth, that you did anything wrong.
• 46:32
  Nya: Sometimes that does just happen and it happens in all birth environments.
• 46:36
  Nya: But in Nancy's story there was a clear moment of choice where she very much knew that she could have gone to a hospital and they would have had support systems to likely save that baby's life and that's the whole point of emergency systems and she instead chose to birth at home, knowing that there was just about no chance her baby would survive at home, so that she could have a peaceful, intact birth experience.
• 47:09
  Nya: And so I'm reconciling the reality that they are advocating for and teaching women how to murder their babies with herbs, like who cares what it's with right, it's murder for the sake of matriarchy.
• 47:28
  Nya: And then they're promoting this story of a woman who actively chose to allow her baby to die when she had a clear pathway to saving her baby and enough time to do so, and I just couldn't get behind it.
• 47:42
  Nya: I just could not get to that point in the curriculum where I had to leave the discussion on abortion.
• 47:48
  Nya: I was like this is not going to happen.
• 47:50
  Nya: There's no way.
• 47:51
  Nya: I either I'm going to get up there and tell my pod that I radically disagree with what the school was teaching and risk being fired, or I'm going to quit.
• 48:04
  Nya: And then, right at that same time, the big Reddit thread all about exposing free birth society exploded and, to be honest, a lot of the things in that Reddit thread were things I already knew and was just okay with.
• 48:23
  Nya: Regrettably, I had desensitized myself to and become okay with over time Things about Emily Saldana's personality and stuff like that that were more just like trash talking.
• 48:35
  Nya: I was like, whatever, I've been dealing with that for a year and a half, it's not that big a deal.
• 48:39
  Nya: And there were things on that Reddit thread that were complete, flat out lies.
• 48:43
  Nya: I know that.
• 48:44
  Nya: I know that for a fact, and there were things that I knew through the grapevine that were finally being publicized and I was realizing a more whole truth of some of the personal issues that happened with other women on her land.
• 48:58
  Nya: So that was the big final straw for me was hearing the more full, deep story of what happened with these other women that were on her land or in her community and why they all left in droves years prior.
• 49:14
  Nya: And it suddenly all clicked and I was just like, oh yeah, this whole organization is just not what they say they are.
• 49:23
  Nya: It's just as simple as that.
• 49:26
  Nya: At that point I had already stepped back from my work as copywriting and doing other work for Free Birth Society and I was just doing the MMI mentorship, mostly because I was getting completely overwhelmed and I was working like 70 hours a week.
• 49:46
  Nya: Now, granted, I was getting paid very well, so I'm not complaining about the work-to-pay ratio, but it was still too much and the standards were incredibly high and incredibly disorganized.
• 50:00
  Nya: So I found myself crying and feeling like a failure.
• 50:05
  Nya: I felt like I was failing this incredible organization that I looked up to all the time.
• 50:10
  Nya: I was getting criticized pretty heavily and the reactions when I would make mistakes, tiny mistakes in the scheme of life were horrible.
• 50:24
  Nya: There were a few emails that went out with a totally wrong subject title that I hadn't gotten approved, or she had told me to change the subject title and then I accidentally didn't, and then the email went out and the way she spoke to me when that happened was like if I had killed her dog.
• 50:46
  Nya: You know what I mean.
• 50:48
  Nya: Like I, she, like the anger and the annoyance and the frustration and the belittling.
• 50:55
  Nya: And then there was always, every time I made a little mistake like that, which, admittedly, was like somewhat often okay, like I was not perfect and I made lots of little mistakes well, when you're working 70 hours a week and you have two little kids, I mean, come on like yeah, exactly so, like it was, I was not being set up to succeed.
• 51:18
  Nya: in many ways it was just too much work.
• 51:21
  Nya: I was working at like 2am often, and so, in addition to that, she was like frequently like kind of looming this sense of like if you can't get this together, I'm going to fire you.
• 51:34
  Nya: And so I was always afraid, always anxious, always like fearfully submitting to whatever she wanted, in fear of losing my job.
• 51:43
  Nya: Job and because she paid me so well, that was like even more scary, you know.
• 51:53
  Nya: So there were, there were so many elements of that, so I stepped down from my work and I was just doing the pod mentor.
• 51:55
  Nya: But I didn't quit that because I was.
• 51:58
  Nya: I signed a contract saying that I would only get paid if I completed the entire school.
• 52:03
  Nya: So there was no um like monthly pay or prepay I was giving, I was committing to a year's worth of work without getting paid till the very end?
• 52:16
  Angela: do you think the other mentors, the pod mentors, were in that same financial situation where they all got paid at the end?
• 52:23
  Nya: yes, I know that that was the case.
• 52:24
  Nya: That was the same contract everyone signed.
• 52:27
  Nya: So when we all decided to leave, it was novelling that we would make $0 for the work we'd put in and we were all like, okay, with that right.
• 52:42
  Nya: We signed contracts agreeing to that.
• 52:44
  Nya: We knew what we were getting into and we knew what we were leaving.
• 52:47
  Nya: And as frustrating as that is and as selfish and unethical as I feel like that is on Free Birth Society's part, I feel like at least they were transparent about it and I can understand from a business perspective why they would have done that because they've had such crazy turnover that they needed to put something in place to ensure that they wouldn't lose people halfway through the year.
• 53:12
  Nya: But the reason why they have such high turnover is because of all the other issues I mentioned just rampant personality issues and greed and dishonesty, from what's behind the scenes to what's presented to the public.
• 53:29
  Nya: And money, money, money, money greed.
• 53:32
  Nya: You know what I mean.
• 53:33
  Nya: So that, like we all, decided to leave.
• 53:39
  Angela: We were talking with other mentors during this time.
• 53:42
  Nya: Yeah, so I came to the decision to leave independently and I was talking to one other staff member who was my friend, who I kept in touch with long after she left Free Birth Society and largely because she was also coming to Jesus at the time.
• 54:02
  Nya: So we were talking a lot about the Bible and things like that and I was just confiding in her and talking to her about my desires to leave and she said, well, there's a whole bunch of other people who are also planning on leaving.
• 54:13
  Nya: Let's connect you guys.
• 54:14
  Nya: So I got connected to a handful of other pod mentors who were planning on leaving and they they wanted to kind of leave as a group all at the same time time, largely to preserve the individuals from like all the blame being put on one person, right.
• 54:41
  Nya: So like if I left independently it would look like I had this, I had like something wrong with me, right, and there would be possibly like a social backlash against me.
• 54:45
  Nya: And there were other people who were significantly closer to Emily Saldaia and the Free Birth Society who were very afraid of what would happen upon leaving.
• 54:58
  Nya: And so all of us leaving around the same time made that feel a little less like you know, like there would be no one person to blame.
• 55:08
  Nya: If that makes sense, it wouldn't be like there's one person spearheading this movement, and the reality is is I have no idea how those other people came to decide to leave.
• 55:17
  Nya: I don't think most of those people had what I was experiencing, which was this like long term lead up of putting various pieces together and personal issues like religious differences and stuff.
• 55:32
  Nya: Like I.
• 55:32
  Nya: I left largely because of religious differences and beliefs and they, I think, largely left because of like the stuff in the reddit thread and like personal issues that were coming to light.
• 55:45
  Nya: But we all decided to leave at the same time.
• 55:49
  Nya: There was talks of all sending some mass email or something, and I was like I don't want to do that.
• 55:59
  Nya: I prayed for hours and I wrote Emily a heartfelt email that truly came from my spirit, saying I believe what you're doing here is unethical.
• 56:10
  Nya: I believe that you're sinning against God.
• 56:14
  Nya: I have some very stark beliefs that differ from what you're teaching here and I cannot serve my God while continuing to be here, cannot serve my God while continuing to be here, and I believe that on a personal level, you have sinned greatly and I really, really pray that you find God, and I pray that you will always know that you can come and talk to me if you ever want to repent and choose a new kind of life.
• 56:50
  Nya: And I meant all of that wholeheartedly.
• 56:52
  Nya: And if Emily ever listens to this, I still mean that and I would still do anything to be her friend and supporter and I would defend her with all my heart and soul if she decided to truly repent of all sins, personal and professional, and follow christ and commit to running her business in a genuinely ethical way, with serving people, not serving herself, as the first and foremost priority serving, serving God, not serving herself.
• 57:28
  Nya: And I got a pleasant, kind response back that was loving and kind and sweet and sad, and that was it.
• 57:43
  Nya: I was, completely, from that point, on no contact.
• 57:45
  Nya: I did get a lot of people asking me questions on Instagram at that point, and so I ended up blocking all of her accounts on social media because I just wanted to be able to speak freely to what I knew and what I experienced, without worries that she was watching me and things like that.
• 58:05
  Nya: I know that there have been legal action taken against people who've spoken out, and so I didn't.
• 58:12
  Nya: I really wanted to just be honest and leave on a personal note but not not share anything like not not share things with people.
• 58:24
  Nya: I had a lot of Christians coming to me and being like do you think it's worth taking the RBK school?
• 58:32
  Nya: Or blah, blah, blah.
• 58:32
  Nya: And I honestly like.
• 58:36
  Nya: My honest answer to all of that is I don't know.
• 58:39
  Nya: I don't know Because one I don't know how those programs have changed since I stopped working there.
• 58:45
  Nya: Those programs have changed since I stopped working there.
• 58:49
  Nya: The RBK school that I took is not what it is now, and so while I can say that that school changed my life and taught me so much, I don't know if that's how it would be for a person now.
• 58:59
  Nya: On another level, I don't know if it's worth learning all that in that environment for the kind of world that you'll get sucked into right.
• 59:11
  Nya: When the truth of the matter is and Emily and Yolanda will be the first to say this you can learn everything you learn in the RBK school from books.
• 59:21
  Nya: I mean that so wholeheartedly from books, and like devoted research and scientific study, but like they don't have access to anything unusual.
• 59:34
  Nya: They have worked very, very hard to compile and gather information and teach it in a really inspiring wonderful way and obviously live classes and real mentorship and community makes it a very different experience than just reading books.
• 59:52
  Nya: But if you are dedicated, especially as a Christian, to wanting to serve women in birth or free birth yourself and you don't want to get involved in all that the free birth society is, you absolutely can learn everything they teach from books and deep dive personal studies.
• 1:00:10
  Nya: And I would always recommend, if you're planning on attending a birth apprentice under another birth keeper in person, like attend births with a unlicensed, sovereign birth keeper that you trust, who is a Christian as well, or whatever, and like let them take responsibility for the birth while you witness and debrief with them, and like that's how.
• 1:00:37
  Nya: That's how real midwifery they've all you know they always talk about traditional midwifery and passing the torch and traditional midwifery that is how traditional midwifery was always taught was attending births in real life with an experienced, wise woman.
• 1:00:52
  Nya: And so, going back, if I could change anything about my birth work journey, it would be that it would be like truly apprenticing under someone.
• 1:01:05
  Angela: Yeah, that's really interesting and so so true, like you're absolutely right that the witnessing and learning from other birth workers that have been doing this longer than us, like in person, is so important, mmi, I know for me at least I really wanted the information.
• 1:01:31
  Angela: It was pretty clear to me that I was going to have to pursue an in-person apprenticeship to get those hands-on skills, but at this step I really just wanted to get the information.
• 1:01:38
  Angela: So I'm so happy that I ended up finding Wapio's program.
• 1:01:41
  Angela: I had not heard of her before and I enrolled in February in her year-long birth keeper programs, which has all of the information that I, at least, was hoping for from MMI.
• 1:01:54
  Nya: I think another aspect to all of this that I haven't really spoken publicly about is that one of the biggest selling points of both the RBK school and the MMI school has always been even if you don't want to attend births, we will teach you how to run a successful online birth business, and I know maybe four or five people who actually have done that since doing those schools, and I know that a lot of that is because people don't truly know how to take the things they learn and apply them in a successful way, or they aren't applying them wholeheartedly or they just haven't figured out their online presence yet, or whatnot.
• 1:02:36
  Nya: I still mentor people on growing social media accounts and I know that you can give all the right information in the world and sometimes people just won't really do it.
• 1:02:48
  Nya: So I'm not saying that that is a fault of them, but I will say that just about every person who did grow a successful online birth business was heavily criticized behind the scenes by free birth society for plagiarism.
• 1:03:09
  Nya: In some cases there were actual plagiarism, like there were people who literally just copied the whole complete guide to free birth and then resold it as their own birth course.
• 1:03:24
  Nya: That is not cool.
• 1:03:26
  Nya: I think that's really, really unethical and sinful.
• 1:03:31
  Nya: But there were also.
• 1:03:32
  Nya: The majority of the smack talk was like oh, we just made this post all about the placenta.
• 1:03:42
  Nya: And then look at this RBK grad over here is now making post-hobby placenta.
• 1:03:46
  Nya: It's like, okay, you are in one of the most specifically niche industries of all time.
• 1:03:56
  Nya: You are the leading successful person in it and you are making money off of teaching other people to do exactly what you do.
• 1:04:07
  Nya: And now you're getting mad that they're talking about the same topics you you talk about, but there are only so many things to post about.
• 1:04:17
  Nya: If your niche is free birth, you know what I mean.
• 1:04:21
  Nya: So like there was this.
• 1:04:24
  Nya: There was this disconnect of like we need to make as much money as we can off of teaching other people to be little versions of us, but then we're also going to get increasingly protective and fearful and angry when they actually succeed.
• 1:04:42
  Angela: It's like when they did the directory the directory.
• 1:04:54
  Nya: Yeah, and I was also in great influence during the time that that was being created and I very much understand a paywall, mostly because that program was not set to make hardly any money and it costs a lot of money to create a program like that.
• 1:05:07
  Nya: They had to hire custom app developers to develop that website and they had to pay all of their staff to work on it all the graphic design so they had to make some kind of money on it.
• 1:05:19
  Nya: So I understand that and I also understand that, with the truly sensitive nature of being an RBK, you need to protect your information from being seen by just anyone.
• 1:05:32
  Nya: And some.
• 1:05:34
  Nya: Karen, whose whole desire is to go on a website like that and get RBK information and report them, isn't going to pay money to do that.
• 1:05:43
  Nya: She's going to see a paywall and be like man.
• 1:05:46
  Nya: It's not worth it.
• 1:05:46
  Nya: But if it's free, then suddenly anyone can go in there.
• 1:05:59
  Nya: Anyone who has an issue with birthkeeping can go in there.
• 1:06:01
  Nya: I understand that.
• 1:06:02
  Nya: I still think that it's yet again another instance like let's just find more ways we can make money and position it as a service to the community, when, especially when, all of these new additions to their business were things that they once convinced people they didn't need.
• 1:06:25
  Nya: So, like when they were just selling RBK school, they convinced people that they didn't need a full year long midwifery program.
• 1:06:37
  Nya: They can just do this 12 week RBK school convinced people.
• 1:06:51
  Nya: I remember them saying this in my RBK school like you don't need to even have an online presence, you don't even need to have a website, you don't need to be listed anywhere.
• 1:06:55
  Nya: Like just build community in real life, do your village prenatals, do your women's circles, and like that's how the work will come.
• 1:07:03
  Nya: And that was true for me.
• 1:07:04
  Nya: Like I was never listed on a directory and I was always getting business.
• 1:07:08
  Nya: And then all of a sudden they're like but here's the directory and like here's why you need it.
• 1:07:14
  Nya: So they there's.
• 1:07:18
  Nya: There's a lack of long-term vision in their marketing plan, obviously, and they have a very devoted following who has been watching them all this time and I think honestly, like their following just started putting the pieces together of you haven't been honest with us.
• 1:07:34
  Nya: You know, you, you, you.
• 1:07:37
  Nya: It's one thing if you're some big white collar corporate, wall street person and everyone knows you're going to be dishonest because your whole vibe is just making money.
• 1:07:49
  Nya: It's another thing when you're like I am a spiritual lover of women, I love babies and women.
• 1:07:59
  Nya: I care for them deeply.
• 1:08:00
  Nya: I cry when they're hurt.
• 1:08:02
  Nya: I do this work because it's humanitarian and I don't want to see them hurt but then you're like consistently lying to your audience all along to make money.
• 1:08:11
  Nya: That's even scarier than like the Wall Street tycoon, in my opinion, because that is like borderline psychopathic or sociopathic.
• 1:08:24
  Nya: It's very, very strong cognitive dissonance.
• 1:08:29
  Nya: For someone who who, um, teaches and preaches about cognitive dissonance a lot, you know it's scary.
• 1:08:36
  Nya: And while I don't think it's right to necessarily like call free birth society cult and I think that that's like kind of a ridiculous statement, I understand why people use that word because of the like energy that the leadership there gives off.
• 1:08:54
  Angela: So what are your views on birth after leaving?
• 1:08:59
  Angela: And kind of decompressing from all of that, like what are your views now on birth?
• 1:09:05
  Nya: Yeah, well, you know it's a great question because this woman, this friend that I recently served, was, you know, my very close friend as I was going through untangling all this, and she got pregnant shortly after and was like I want you to be there but like your views on birth really changed, and so I was like actively reconciling all this while I was helping a pregnant woman and going to her birth and I will admit that like this whole thing shook me really badly and I was afraid.
• 1:09:43
  Nya: I was afraid to attend a birth because I felt like I had been in ignorance in some ways and that I had all these thoughts of like, oh my gosh, maybe I didn't just get lucky, maybe I have just been lucky that I've never attended a birth with a bad outcome, or that I've never needed to intervene, or blah, blah, blah.
• 1:10:05
  Nya: And attending this recent birth, where it was just like so straightforward and wonderful, um, reminded me like, okay, birth does work, birth works.
• 1:10:16
  Nya: That is an underlying truth.
• 1:10:19
  Nya: God designed the female body to birth.
• 1:10:24
  Nya: You can call it sexist or whatever you can call it mean to women who don't have children, but I believe it's true.
• 1:10:33
  Nya: God designed us as women to give birth and be mothers, and so there are built-in systems in our bodies to make those things work, just like he built in our ability to breathe, and no one is walking around wondering if they're too broken to breathe.
• 1:10:53
  Nya: I guess there are people who are, you know, people who believe in things like asthma, but at the same time I see very clearly now that we live in a fallen world.
• 1:11:10
  Nya: The earth that God designed for us originally and the bodies that God designed for us originally were fully free from disease and death and sickness and imbalance.
• 1:11:20
  Nya: They were perfect perfect bodies and perfect earth.
• 1:11:23
  Nya: When the first sin came into the world, that sin energetically tainted everything, including the human body.
• 1:11:33
  Nya: It doesn't mean that the human body is broken or that God's original design has changed, but it means that our body has the capacity to get sick and die At the same time.
• 1:11:48
  Nya: God wants us to preserve life, not by any means possible.
• 1:11:55
  Nya: God sent Abraham to sacrifice his own child for the sake of proving his love to God, but God saved the child in the end, because God preserves and cares about life, especially the life of an innocent child.
• 1:12:26
  Nya: By God.
• 1:12:27
  Nya: To honor our temple, meaning honor this fleshy thing that was supposed to be the house of the Holy Spirit.
• 1:12:36
  Nya: Do not fill the house of the Holy Spirit with poison, with drugs, with fear and anxiety, with toxins, with pesticides and gross things.
• 1:12:48
  Nya: Do not let this body get so unhealthy and overweight and unwell that it literally can't perform the things that God designed it to perform.
• 1:13:00
  Nya: So, just like in our salvation, god has chosen everything.
• 1:13:08
  Nya: He has designed and chosen everything.
• 1:13:10
  Nya: Everything he has designed and chosen everything.
• 1:13:14
  Nya: And we also have a responsibility to answer that calling to live up to that design.
• 1:13:18
  Nya: And so, yes, birth works.
• 1:13:21
  Nya: God designed your body to birth, but he did not say you have freedom to sin.
• 1:13:30
  Nya: He said you have freedom from your sin, so act like it.
• 1:13:36
  Nya: God gave you a body that will birth, but you need to be free from your sin.
• 1:13:43
  Nya: You need to commit to honoring the design that God made.
• 1:13:52
  Nya: Now don't hear what I'm not saying.
• 1:13:54
  Nya: I don't think that means if you had to transfer that like or like if you did have a genuine emergency in birth, that like that means something is deeply, forever wrong with you.
• 1:14:07
  Nya: But I do think that there is always a root cause that can be addressed and it's our job to try to address those things, especially if we want to free birth.
• 1:14:23
  Nya: So if you want a free birth, you want all the benefits of a free birth.
• 1:14:29
  Nya: You have a responsibility to prepare yourself for a free birth.
• 1:14:33
  Nya: I don't think that the mentality of like all you have to do is just wait and then you'll birth is a great thing to be saying to people.
• 1:14:43
  Nya: I do think that for the majority of cases that is true right, like I've seen that firsthand, that is true.
• 1:14:49
  Nya: But also when I look back at my free birth, that's not really what happened.
• 1:14:57
  Nya: I didn't just like go about life and then birth.
• 1:15:00
  Nya: I exercised six times a week.
• 1:15:04
  Nya: I ate incredibly clean.
• 1:15:07
  Nya: We were like eating incredibly healthy.
• 1:15:12
  Nya: During that time.
• 1:15:13
  Nya: I drank like raw milk every single day.
• 1:15:16
  Nya: I was eating so many organ meats.
• 1:15:19
  Nya: We were eating kidneys Okay, like we were eating heart and kidneys and liver and like all sorts of crazy stuff.
• 1:15:27
  Nya: I was drinking broth every day.
• 1:15:30
  Nya: I was taking organ supplements.
• 1:15:34
  Nya: I was drinking tons of raw milk.
• 1:15:36
  Nya: I was really, really limiting my grains and my sugar.
• 1:15:40
  Nya: So, on a just nutrition level, I was not just living how the average American lives, I was only drinking fresh spring water from the ground.
• 1:15:51
  Nya: We had a private well, I was only drinking fresh spring water from the ground, like, okay, we had a private, well, I was never even washing my dishes in water with fluoride in it.
• 1:16:00
  Nya: Now I'm not saying you have to do all those things to free birth.
• 1:16:02
  Nya: There are people who live in the city and eat McDonald's and smoke cigarettes and they free birth.
• 1:16:08
  Nya: But why would you want to approach free birth that way?
• 1:16:12
  Nya: Right, like there are people who sin their whole life and repent in their dying breath and go to heaven.
• 1:16:19
  Nya: But why would you want to get to heaven having had a life full of sins against God and then have to look up at God and be like thank you for forgiving me.
• 1:16:31
  Nya: I see now that I wasted my whole life and made this really imbalanced.
• 1:16:37
  Nya: You know what I mean.
• 1:16:39
  Nya: It's the same thing.
• 1:16:40
  Nya: Why would you spend your entire pregnancy risking it and not taking it seriously under the guise of, well, I'm going to free birth anyways.
• 1:16:52
  Nya: So who cares how I treat my health and who cares how seriously I take this?
• 1:16:57
  Nya: I think that there's a responsibility.
• 1:16:59
  Nya: You know the free birth society says this.
• 1:17:01
  Nya: When you choose to free birth, you choose radical responsibility.
• 1:17:05
  Nya: That is not light.
• 1:17:08
  Nya: That means responsibility if there's an emergency.
• 1:17:12
  Nya: That means spiritual responsibility against any sins against God that you commit in the process.
• 1:17:18
  Nya: You know that means responsibility to actually make it work, to actually make it happen that you everyone should take a strong evaluation of their life when they become pregnant and do what is necessary to try to free birth.
• 1:17:41
  Nya: I believe every single woman should do that Largely because, like there's a chance that you might have to free birth, even if you're totally medicalized, planning a hospital break, there's a chance you'll birth in the car.
• 1:17:53
  Nya: So I believe every single woman should do that and get highly educated on the physiological process of birth which, like I said, you can do from books.
• 1:18:04
  Nya: I believe that women should get highly educated on true nutrition and what actually is required for a pregnant, birthing, postpartum body in terms of nutrition and force yourself to adjust your diet, like no matter how hard it is.
• 1:18:22
  Nya: I believe that women should be physically active and fit.
• 1:18:25
  Nya: When we talk about, like our ancestors, successfully free birthing left and right, when we talk about, like our ancestors, successfully free birthing left and right, those ancestors were working in fields all day and then they were cooking on their feet in a wood stove, so like lifting firewood on cast iron, which is like heavy, doing everything by hand kneading bread every day, so like, if that's not your life, then you need to exercise.
• 1:18:56
  Nya: You can't look at that person and say I'm going to free just like that person, but I'm not going to live like that person at all.
• 1:19:02
  Nya: I mean, you can right Some people do, but again, why would you risk it?
• 1:19:07
  Nya: So, if you're not living an active life, why would you risk it?
• 1:19:08
  Nya: So, if you're not living an active life, you need to get active, you need to eat well, you need to educate yourself and, above all of that, I believe you need to get right with God, because if you are spending a pregnancy worshiping demons and chanting demonic incantations over your baby and doing witchcraft and sinning against the one true God of the universe, I would not expect that God, who controls life and death, who is the only one that controls life and death, to bless you.
• 1:19:50
  Nya: Now again, it happens all the time for reasons I don't understand.
• 1:19:56
  Nya: I was a strong pagan worshiper when I had my children and God blessed me with wonderful, peaceful, easeful births, but I believe he did so as a means of bringing me closer to him, because in those births I met God and I saw God and I knew this is not a pantheon of matriarchal goddesses.
• 1:20:21
  Nya: This is a singular God and I need to get to know who this God is.
• 1:20:26
  Nya: So that's like my overarching advice for pregnant women.
• 1:20:32
  Nya: I'm not saying saying it's gonna fail if you don't do those things.
• 1:20:35
  Nya: I'm not saying that you need to have fear if you're not doing those things perfectly, and I'm not saying that like all of a sudden I feel like you can't birth twins at home, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:20:47
  Nya: But I do think it's worth being a little more realistic about.
• 1:20:51
  Nya: Yes, there are some things that are slightly more risky and, if cornered, emily Saldea and Yolanda Norris-Clark will both say that as well.
• 1:21:01
  Nya: But because of their marketing and because of their image, they really paint a picture that no birth scenario is really riskier than another, that twins are just as safe as a singleton.
• 1:21:12
  Nya: No, that's not true.
• 1:21:14
  Nya: Twins are not just as safe as a singleton.
• 1:21:17
  Nya: Your body is still perfectly designed to birth twins, but you've got to know that there is a slightly higher risk of birthing twins.
• 1:21:27
  Nya: That has got to be in your field of awareness.
• 1:21:31
  Nya: The whole ignorance of the people following free birth society is concerning and I believe it has led to a lot of issues in birth, a lot of unnecessary transfers and a lot of situations where transfers should have happened and didn't.
• 1:21:50
  Nya: So I don't have personal experience with that.
• 1:21:54
  Nya: I've never witnessed a birth that needed to transfer.
• 1:21:57
  Nya: I've never had a birth myself that needed a transfer or needed intervention.
• 1:22:02
  Nya: But I think it's worth having a healthy fear of god.
• 1:22:07
  Nya: Right, like we are meant to worship god and fear him because of his power, I feel the same thing about his divine creation of birth.
• 1:22:18
  Angela: Yeah, I feel like that's something a lot of women that share their birth stories on my podcast are like it brought me closer to God.
• 1:22:24
  Angela: So even if they're like not there before their birth, like the birth experience often does bring them like closer.
• 1:22:30
  Nya: Yeah, and attending birth will do that for you too.
• 1:22:33
  Nya: I've only had one instance in a birth where I felt like I really needed to pray and like I mean, obviously I pray no matter what, but like we're really needed to talk to God, and I was having not even fear, but just like a wondering, and I left the room and I got on my knees and I looked up to the heavens and I prayed and I was like God, if there's something wrong, please give me a sign.
• 1:22:57
  Nya: You know, and all we received was just signs that everything was okay and wonderful.
• 1:23:04
  Nya: So I think that was like a good moment of confirmation for me that you can learn all you can learn.
• 1:23:10
  Nya: But if you don't have that Holy Spirit channel, then like you're missing a big part of this.
• 1:23:18
  Angela: Yeah, absolutely so.
• 1:23:21
  Angela: Do you want to share a little bit about how people can get a hold of you if they want to?
• 1:23:27
  Nya: Yeah, no, that's great.
• 1:23:28
  Nya: I love love talking to people.
• 1:23:31
  Nya: I love sharing information and supporting women and just like on Instagram casually in pregnancies and births and answering questions and whatnot.
• 1:23:40
  Nya: I don't actively do birth work anymore so I'm not running any courses or classes on free birth.
• 1:23:46
  Nya: I attend very casually for like a close friend, when the circumstances are right.
• 1:23:53
  Nya: I'm in my young mothering years so I'm not like trying to attend every month, but if someone wants to connect with me, my Instagram is just a free resource full of information about birth and natural mothering and Christian living and marriage and homeschooling and just all the things that I'm passionate about.
• 1:24:11
  Nya: But free birth is like a foundation of that.
• 1:24:13
  Nya: So my Instagram is wholesomehomefront and you can chat with me there.
• 1:24:19
  Nya: I'm always open to talking.
• 1:24:21
  Angela: Awesome.
• 1:24:22
  Angela: I will link your information in the show notes.
• 1:24:24
  Angela: And as a final question I am wondering because, as I'm talking and like doing these other podcasts with the other women from MMI, a theme is that at the beginning, when we kind of all started with Free Birth Society, all of our husbands had the insight to kind of know ahead of time, like calling BS on the whole thing, and what was your husband's like sort of thoughts on FBS?
• 1:24:47
  Nya: if you don't mind me asking, yeah, no, I don't mind at all After I had my first son and I was starting to get or yeah, my first son, my second child, and I was starting to get into some of those more like leadership positions in the membership but I wasn't on staff by any means I remember my husband being like, just so you know, I think this is where your relationship with free birth society should stop, and I was like why, that's weird.
• 1:25:11
  Nya: And he was like I'm just letting you know, I don't think that it would be right.
• 1:25:16
  Nya: I'm just having a feeling.
• 1:25:17
  Nya: I don't think it would be right for you to become like the inner circle.
• 1:25:20
  Nya: I love that you're learning, I love that you have community.
• 1:25:23
  Nya: I love that this is a resource for us.
• 1:25:25
  Nya: Let's leave it at that.
• 1:25:26
  Nya: And I think that was great advice.
• 1:25:32
  Nya: Obviously, that's not what happened.
• 1:25:33
  Nya: My husband at the time was really trying to build his own business and he wanted to essentially create a platform for the husbands of free birthing women, because obviously we know that, like, there's a lot of work that needs to be done for a husband there as well and they deserve support and love and care and respect.
• 1:25:59
  Nya: And so he he reached out to Emily, or I believe at the time I reached out with my email because I was friends with her, kind of you know.
• 1:26:10
  Nya: So we reached out through my email and was like hey, my husband's having this idea and would it be okay if he did some business coaching calls with you?
• 1:26:22
  Nya: He would pay you.
• 1:26:23
  Nya: I know you normally only work with women, but because this would be so applicable to your audience, maybe you could do a coaching call with him.
• 1:26:31
  Nya: And then also, do you think I could post about this in the Free Birth Society membership in the Lighthouse and let the women know to tell their husbands to join this thing?
• 1:26:42
  Nya: It wouldn't be a competing product with yours at all.
• 1:26:45
  Nya: I believe it would enrich and enhance the experience.
• 1:26:48
  Nya: And then, if you ever wanted to, maybe you guys could lead some calls together or whatever.
• 1:26:55
  Nya: We got a one sentence reply from her assistants saying Emily is not open to that at this time.
• 1:27:01
  Nya: Later, when I was on staff, like years later, she brought it up, kind of laughing at my husband and to me, and saying oh, the only reason I didn't reply to that is because I didn't want to feed into this weird dynamic you guys had where you were the one reaching out because he was too scared to and I just was like, excuse me, I thought it was common courtesy where if I know a person, I would be the one to reach out to them on behalf of my husband, just like if he had a connection that I wanted to talk to, he would reach out first.
• 1:27:44
  Nya: That's just common courtesy in making introductions yeah, normal stuff.
• 1:27:50
  Nya: Courtesy in making introductions yeah, normal stuff, yeah.
• 1:27:51
  Nya: Plus, I know how busy you are.
• 1:27:53
  Nya: There's a good chance that she would just ignore an email from someone she doesn't know.
• 1:28:01
  Nya: So I felt like there were so many rational reasons why.
• 1:28:02
  Nya: But then, throughout my time on staff, multiple other men husbands of people in her community reached out to her with very similar ideas not asking her to do any unpaid work, not asking her to do anything unusual, but just saying, hey, I want to do something for men.
• 1:28:22
  Nya: Can we talk about this?
• 1:28:26
  Nya: Can we collaborate?
• 1:28:27
  Nya: Because all of these women in your community have husbands and, like you, are the only singular connection point to all of them, and every time it was a total ignore their email, possibly block them on social media and then send screenshots and laugh at them in our staff group text.
• 1:28:48
  Nya: Laugh at them in our staff group texts, make fun of them, make fun of men, be hateful towards men, so like that.
• 1:29:00
  Nya: I mean I should have quit when I saw that, because how awful and disrespectful to someone who is trying to make the world better.
• 1:29:04
  Nya: And we all know that there are many circumstances where the husband becomes like a genuine problem in the free birth.
• 1:29:10
  Nya: So why not give them resources?
• 1:29:13
  Nya: Why not give them support, like even if you're just doing it for the sake of women and babies, isn't that what free birth society is all about, right?
• 1:29:23
  Nya: So there was all along, like my husband knew this was not okay and I was getting signs that like my husband was right and we accepted the full-time job with Free Birth Society because we needed the money.
• 1:29:38
  Nya: And my husband was like maybe this is right, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:29:41
  Nya: I believe that God guided us through that because it was a large part of my salvation and my sanctification.
• 1:29:47
  Nya: But when I finally quit, it was largely guided by my husband who was like this is breaking your spirit, this is out of integrity for you.
• 1:29:57
  Nya: Like I don't want this for you anymore.
• 1:29:59
  Nya: And he at the time picked up a second job so that I could quit and freed me from that while I was still working on, you know, building my, my Melaleuca business.
• 1:30:09
  Nya: I just on, you know, building my Melaleuca business.
• 1:30:15
  Nya: I just I wish I in some ways I wish I had listened to him from the beginning on it, because our men are direct lines of communication to God and they are connected to the Holy Spirit and they are meant to be our leaders and they know, and, like any kind of organization, that is driving a wedge between women and their husbands.
• 1:30:33
  Nya: That's not good.
• 1:30:35
  Angela: Yeah, I totally agree, and we should all take what our husbands are saying and really sit with it, you know, for a while before we make any rash decisions.
• 1:30:45
  Angela: Amazing Well, naya, thank you so much.
• 1:30:50
  Angela: This interview just really means so much to me, and I know it will to a lot of other people.
• 1:30:52
  Angela: Exactly Amazing Well, naya, thank you so much.
• 1:30:52
  Angela: This interview just really means so much to me, and I know it will to a lot of other people too.
• 1:30:54
  Angela: So thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today and share your story.
• 1:30:59
  Nya: Yeah, thank you, Angela.
• 1:31:00
  Nya: It's great to reconnect and I'm always open to doing something else if people want to learn more about something.
• 1:31:14
  Angela: Before you go, I just want to remind you I have a ton of resources for pregnancy and birth.
• 1:31:16
  Angela: If you're pregnant, whether you're a first time mom or if this is your fifth baby, I want you to check out the show notes, because I have some free trainings and free downloads that you can sign up for, as well as the link to access my labor of love, a comprehensive, self-paced online childbirth education course.
• 1:31:32
  Angela: I created this course specifically for moms who don't want to be told what to do, regardless of where you're birthing or who you're birthing with, and I'd honestly love to teach you everything that I know so that you can prepare for an autonomous birth experience and prepare to step into your role as the leader of your birth journey.
• 1:31:51
  Angela: So click to the show notes, check out all of those links and, if you ever have any questions, feel free to DM me at my main birth over on Instagram.