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Hi friends, welcome to the Pain Free Birth podcast. I'm your host, Karen Welton, a certified doula, childbirth educator and mother of three. In this space, we'll hear positive, supernatural and yes, even pain free birth stories from women just like you. We'll explore the deeply spiritual side of childbirth and how God designed women's bodies brilliantly for birth. Let's get started.
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Welcome everyone to the Pain Free Birth podcast. I am so excited. If you are following me here from my Instagram account or from anywhere else, welcome. On this podcast, we're going to get into more of the deeper spiritual side of birth. We're going to share stories about how God intervenes, about supernatural things that happen, about how our bodies' physiology works. I'm going to be interviewing women and sharing their birth stories.
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pain-free birth stories, supernatural birth stories, encouraging and positive birth stories, and stories that really make you think and learn about birth and give glory to God. I'm also gonna be interviewing experts. And so in this first episode, I thought I would share and give you guys a little behind the scenes taste of how pain-free birth came to be and how I look at childbirth and even our bodies in a unique way.
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One of the things that got me started on this that really was like a light bulb moment for me in exploring the physiology of our bodies and the spirituality of our bodies and how it's all interconnected was this time that I remember praying for a woman in a prayer meeting once. This was like 15 years ago, like long before I ever had kids. And I was praying for this woman who had shoulder pain. I felt like there was something deeper going on. And I began to just ask her more questions about her life.
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her kids, like, are you nervous about anything? Are you worried about anything? I felt like there was a root of fear underneath this shoulder pain that wouldn't let up, that wouldn't go away because normally, often when we pray for people, we see God heal them. And I believe that God heals today. I believe in a God that heals. I believe in births that can be pain-free. I believe that we serve a supernatural God. And so, as I began interviewing her and getting more stories, more of the backstory from her, she…
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told me about her daughter. College age girl, she just went off to college, she's worried and nervous, just like most mothers are when their kids move away to college. And so I began praying and we released the fear, we released the anxiety, we let go of control, we trusted God, you know, with her daughter, and we did all the things, we said all the right prayers and the pain began to go down and down and down. Every time she released and she let God carry her daughter, she let God, you know, she trusted God and she let go of the fear and
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and broke her agreement with the fear and her anxiety went down. I could see the countenance change in her face. You know, she's testing it out. She's moving it. This is like a healing happening right before my eyes. I'm witnessing this. And I check in and I keep asking her, how is it now? Can you move it? What's your range of motion? What level is your pain at? And it went from like a hundred percent like very painful to like now there was just a drop she said. And I said, well, let's pray for complete healing. And so I
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closed my eyes and I asked God, like, what else is there? I felt like, you know, like, let me just pray, let's get rid of it all. And I got this picture of her holding her daughter as an infant. And immediately I realized she's carrying her adult daughter and that would cause shoulder pain. As mothers with young children, we carry them all the time, right? But because she was operating out of fear and anxiety, that...
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Her daughter was now grown, and so we can't keep carrying our children when they're adults, right? Like we let them go, but she was struggling with that. And so when I saw that vision and spoke it out to her and then prayed, all the pain left. It was like her body took a huge sigh of relief and released her daughter fully. Because as you can imagine, trying to hold or carry an adult child would make your arm hurt. And even though she wasn't like physically,
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carrying her adult daughter in the natural, in the spirit, she was, and it manifested as pain physically. And she had gone to several doctors, she had gotten physical therapy. They could not explain what the pain was from. They had done scans, she had gotten prayer, and she had done all the right things. But what she was doing was she was trying to treat a spiritual problem with a physical solution. But when we treated the spiritual problem with a spiritual solution, her body healed.
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The blockage was removed, the fear was released. She released her daughter from carrying her and trusted God with her daughter, and all the pain left and it stayed gone. She stayed healed. And so that was one of those just light bulb, aha moments for me that really got me curious and fascinated with how the body works on a spiritual level because we are so accustomed in this culture to addressing problems with
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quick fix solution, whether that's pain or heartburn or, you know, even mental health struggles, whether it's childbirth, whether it's, you know, I'm having, I have a problem in my knee hurts and I can't run anymore. Like all these things we tend to treat it with pain meds or surgeries or take a pill and quick fixes. And that's how the medical establishment runs, right? We treat the symptoms. We don't ever even talk about the root cause.
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And there's so much talk now about, let's ask questions and find out what's really going on under the surface. What's the root cause of your heartburn or your knee pain or your toothache or your indigestion or your infertility? And so I'm here and I want to fill the space in the birth world where we discuss these spiritual root causes of what goes on in labor so that when
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you're sitting there in labor and you're stalled at five centimeters for six hours and you don't know what's going on, you can have the wisdom and the intuition to know as a mother and asking yourself, what's happening in my body under the surface that's causing the stall? Is it a physical root cause? Is my baby in a weird position and it needs to rotate? Or maybe there's a spiritual root cause and I'm scared and nervous because
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I feel threatened, but I'm not connecting the dots because maybe I feel pressured to deliver by 5 p.m. because that's when the doctor goes home. There are so many of these examples I could give you. And I've literally been studying them and collecting these birth stories for years now. And I believe that they give us such a beautiful picture, such an incredible, like it weaves a tapestry for us of what birth is truly like under the surface and how to understand childbirth.
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in a way that is not just black and white thinking or cause and effect or stage one, stage two, stage three, baby, like birth is not linear. And birth rarely ever happens according to the textbook definition. But when we understand what's at the root, what our body is doing on the inside and how our thoughts and our feelings and our fears and our desires and our mindset play a role in how our birth unfolds and how we can actually partner with those things.
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and even shift those things and how we can invite God into that space so that He can shift those things in a big way. You guys, I have a treasure trove, a vault of birth stories that beautifully depict this. And I love understanding what's going on and even talking to women about their birth stories, helping them understand what really happened, what really led to the Caesarian or what they did.
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that helped them achieve a supernatural or pain-free birth or an unmedicated birth or a birth where they felt totally empowered and in control and they took back their power. So we're gonna be diving into all of these topics and I feel like it's gonna be so enriching and enlightening. We're also gonna talk about how we as women get to take back our power and how birth is not just a physical act. It is not just a medical emergency. Like if you followed me for any length of time,
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You know that is my bread and butter. I truly believe as do many others in the birth space, many birth workers who are here believe birth is not an emergency as the medical field treats it as such. Birth is a physiological event. And when I say physiological, I mean, it is a natural thing that your body does just like blinking or breathing or digestion. All of these things are physiological processes that our body does without us thinking about it.
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And what is so brilliant is that the body is designed to birth without us thinking about it. You guys, women in comas can give birth. Women completely unconscious in comas have been recorded as giving birth to their babies. And guess what? They didn't push. I'll tell you that. They didn't do anything. They laid there and their uterus at nine months, whenever that baby was ready, pushed that baby out without drugs, without medical assistance, without pushing. So.
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If a woman in a coma can do it, our bodies can do it physiologically. But often what happens is that our head gets in the way. Our thinking brain turns on. We try to control. We try to analyze. We try to understand. We think we can birth our baby, but you can't think your baby out. Just like the woman holding her adult daughter, thinking that if I worry about her enough and if I, you know...
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think about this enough, I can somehow protect her, but that's not true. We can't think our way to having a baby or even to mothering. It's intuitive and it's innate inside of us. And so the most incredible thing that birth has done for me and in many of the women that I work with, and this is something I talk about in my course, is that birth is spiritual and it is an initiation into motherhood.
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And it's something that we don't have to numb ourselves from. And even if you have a low pain tolerance, that's okay. Birth has nothing to do with your pain tolerance. Birth is a physiological process your body's designed to do. It has the blueprint inside of it, and it knows what to do. And if we can remove fear from the equation and get out of our heads, trust our bodies enough to surrender and relax into every surge, allowing our body to do what it is brilliantly designed to do.
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we can have incredible, beautiful births and not only have an incredible birth, but actually up-level every area of our life through this transformation when we go from maiden to mother, when we take our power and we own our birth and we say, this is mine, I'm going to own this birth experience, I'm gonna trust my intuition, I'm gonna...
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fully embody my body, I'm going to be fully present in the situation, I'm going to trust my baby knows what to do. When we take back that power and we block out the fear and the voices and all the doctors saying, ah, this is going to happen, and all the people saying, you should get an induction or you should this or all these negative stories and negative bombardment that we often hear about that women tell me about over and over again in their birth stories, when we can block out that fear.
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And I'm not talking about legitimate, like medical things that you need to do when there's legitimately a medical reason to intervene. Yes, those situations absolutely happen. And we're going to talk about that too. I'm talking about when your body's just doing it, but maybe it paused. Maybe there's a stall. Maybe it hurts a little bit. Maybe there's, you know, something concerning when we can tap into our intuition and fully own our birth, we take back our power as women.
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and birth, when women birth in their power and women who have birthed unmedicated understand this concept, that there is a power that comes through you. It's actually a power from within you, I believe. It is our power as women. It is our feminine energy and our feminine power. And wow, is it strong? Is it intense? Is it so powerful? When we can fully embody that and embrace that, it does something to us on a cellular level.
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shifts something inside of us. And that's what my first birth did for me. And that's what, when I've talked to many women over the 10 years that I've been doing this as a doula and a childbirth educator, every time I speak to a woman who has birthed unmedicated, whether that's in the hospital or at home, but she was connected to her body and she didn't numb the experience. She didn't disconnect from the experience.
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when she was able to do it fully in her power, even if there was pain, she received a download. She received a transformation. She went through this initiation. And I'm not saying that like mothers who birth medicated don't get this transformation or they're somehow less than. Listen, every birth is a miracle. Every birth is a fricking amazing thing. Like I am so excited and proud and I celebrate every birth because every birth is hard and difficult
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something worthy of celebration. But there's also something that happens to us on the other side of an unmedicated birth when we can say, I did that. I pushed through, I had my baby and it transforms us from the inside out. Now we can get this transformation of birth, we can get it in motherhood. There are lots of ways we can be initiated into motherhood. You don't only have to have an unmedicated birth. So don't feel like this is your only opportunity. And if you didn't do it
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I am saying that birth is offering you an invitation and it's an invitation to behold your power on a level you have never held it before and to allow it to transform you. After I gave birth to my first daughter, I said, if I can do that, if I can push out an eight and a half pound baby from my body that my body created, I can do freaking anything.
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I can do motherhood, I can do marriage, I can pursue my dreams. It shifted something in me that where like there was literally no room for fear at all, not an ounce of fear, not like a cell of fear in my body. It was like the pressure and intensity of birth like squeezed fear out of me and every contraction and every surge. It was like I had to choose trust and I had to choose surrender.
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and I had to choose not to be afraid and not to tense and not to tighten. And I had to choose to open and surrender and embrace this incredibly intense thing happening in my body. I leaned in to the feminine. I leaned into the contraction. I leaned into the motion and the intensity and I didn't run away from it. And when I look back at it, I went, wow, if I can do that, I can do anything. You guys, I felt like a superwoman. I felt like Wonder Woman.
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And that is the experience that I want everyone to have, every woman to have available to her. I want every woman to have the opportunity to do this. Now it doesn't mean you have to give birth a certain way. You don't have to check the boxes. Is it unmedicated? Is it pain-free? Is it X, Y, Z? Okay, it counts. That's not the point. The point is that birth is an invitation into your greatest, highest potential and self. It is...
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the death of maiden and it is the birth of a mother. And it is calling you to step into this transformation. And so I invite you on this podcast and to come on the journey with me of exploring what that means to each and every woman because that means something different to every woman. I'm gonna be interviewing women here who had epidurals, who had medication, who had birth trauma, who had...
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and then had supernatural turnarounds, and then women who had V-backs. We're gonna talk about it all so that don't feel like this is only for a certain type of women, or this is only for home birth women, or only for crunchy women, or only for women who birth unmedicated. No, we're gonna talk about the deeper spiritual layers of birth in every possible facet, and I'm gonna be interviewing women from all walks of life to share their stories, and even guest experts to come on and share their brilliance.
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and their stories and how birth works and how they see birth. It's gonna be so epic. I am so excited. So welcome on this journey, and I hope you stick around.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of the Pain Free Birth podcast. If you were encouraged, it would mean so much if you left us a five-star review and shared this with your community. I'd love to connect with you on Instagram at PainFreeBirth. To learn more about the Pain Free Birth e-course, free resources, private coaching, and upcoming events, find out more at painfreebirth.com. See you next week.
