Maiden And Mother Birth

I love honoring each phase of my cycle, but as each phase has its own distinct energy and inner season, the way I do this throughout the month changes. There are specific rituals that can support you and your needs as they change and flow through the month.🌀

Rituals for each phase of the menstrual cycle was actually the topic of my last newsletter! In the newsletter, I shared a bit more about the different phases and elaborated on these rituals. If you don't want to miss out on topics like this and so much more, sign up for my newsletter in my bio!! 🤗

I have a guide to the energetics of each phase and their inner season linked there as well. The guide as well as the newsletter, and everything I post really, are created with the intention to support you in getting to know your cycle, your body, and your gifts as a feminine bodied person.❤️

What rituals would you add to this list?

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Did you know that the root chakra’s developmental stage is midway through pregnancy until 6 months postpartum? This means that what you do during pregnancy and in the first few months of your baby's life will greatly impact the foundation of their entire energy systems for their whole lives! 🤯

Ensuring that they have a safe environment and that they feel wanted and supported during this time is vital to the healthy development of their chakra system. ❤️

To support your baby’s root chakra development

❣️Connect with them
❣️Assure them they are safe and wanted
❣️Create a safe environment for them through your daily habits

Looking for support on your pregnancy journey? Send me a DM or check out my website (linked in bio) to get in touch!

Have you taken a second today to think about all the amazing ways your body is supporting you today? So many of us forget to, and forget to acknowledge and thank our bodies for all that they do for us, but our beautiful bodies deserve this recognition! 💕

Whether you’re pregnant, postpartum, on a fertility journey, menstruating or literally just existing, your body is doing incredible things behind the scenes! ✨

Your body deserves some love today! Today, I love my body because it’s home.🌷 Why do you love your body? I’d love to know in the comments!

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I have noticed such a difference in myself and the way that I go about my life ever since I started to live according to my cycle. Tracking my cycle, coming into awareness of my energy and the way that it fluctuates each month, tuning into my body and listening to her messages, it has truly been a game changer for me. 🩸🗓

I believe that aligning our lives with our cyclical nature, and seeing our changing energy as a tool instead of an obstacle, is the key to feeling grounded and embodied as women. We cycle like Mother Nature, and it’s a beautiful beautiful thing. ❄️🌸☀️🍂

If you wanna learn more about our cyclical energy and how it reflects the energy of the seasons, I have a FREE handout I'd love to send your way! You can DM me or comment “💕”and it’s all yours!

If you’re interested in learning how to track your cycle and how to make the most out of your energy, practices for each phase, and personalized menstrual support, I'm also starting to offer 1:1 menstrual cycle support. 😊Don’t be shy to slide into my DM’s, I’d love to chat with you about it!❤️

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There’s a big difference between what’s NORMAL and what’s COMMON when it comes to your period. Before I ever got my period, all I would hear were horror stories of women talking about how horrible their periods were and all the symptoms that they experience leading up to and during their bleed. I always just thought that this was gonna be my fate, and that my period was going to make my life miserable for 1 week every month for the rest of my life. 😭

While painful, heavy, miserable periods may be common, they are not normal! They actually are a sign there could be underlying issues that your body is trying to communicate with you. ❌

I don’t think that women should suffer through the hormonal changes that we experience every month. Our hormones are a gift, and if we learn our cycles and how tel hey work and what can affect them, we can utilise them to feel our BEST instead of our worst! 💕

That’s why I’m now offering menstrual cycle mentorships! 1 on 1 coaching to help you get to know your menstrual cycle better and to experience your cyclical nature as a gift and not a curse. If you’re interested, send me a DM or comment ❤️. You’ll also be able to inquire using my website launching soon 🤫

You heard me right, your menstrual cycle can tell you all about the state of your overall health just like your heart rate, body temperature, respiratory rate, and blood pressure can!🤯

Ever notice that your cycles seem to get longer if you’ve been extra stressed. Or that the color or amount of menstrual blood you have changes between normal or stressful cycles. Do you have super painful periods, or feel the effects of PMS are unbearable. These are all examples of how our menstrual cycles can communicate underlying problems to us. ❌

While the 4 main vital signs have rates that are considered normal or abnormal, menstrual cycles are slightly different since what’s normal can vary from person to person. That’s why it’s so important to track your cycles and to get to know what’s normal for YOU, so that you can be in touch with your cycles and know when it changes and what it could mean. 🌺

I’m going to be launching a new personalized coaching program soon to help you to understand, get to know, and get in touch with your menstrual cycle. I literally can’t wait to share it with you all! Interested to know more? Send me a DM or comment 💕!

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The normalized way of birthing in the westernized world is so far removed from how we were intended to birth our babies. The mainstream birth industry has striped birth of its raw, primal, mammal nature, and tried to control both the process and the mothers and their babies.

Respect and reverence for this incredible rite of passage is lost within this system. Birth is pathologized, treated like a medical emergency. Mothers are treated as patients, and everything that they endure in birth is ok because “at least they have a healthy baby”.

✨Birth is a rite of passage

✨Birth prepares you for motherhood

✨Birth imprints mother and baby for life

❌Birth is not a disease, a problem, an annoyance. And the more that we continue to treat it this way, the more we will see the repercussions, we’re already seeing them!

We need to encourage each other to trust ourselves, trust our bodies, and trust our innate ability to birth. We were made to birth, and we were made to bleed. The female form is truly amazing, and so is birth when it can unfold in the way it’s intended.

Do you agree?

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There are a lot of factors that play into how you experience your birth. How we feel internally and in relation to our external circumstances plays a huge role in not only the outcomes of birth, but how they are felt and experienced. 👩‍🍼

It may seem like a lot of how birth goes down is out of our control, because that’s the narrative that’s pushed and that is at play a lot of the time within the medical system, but this is not true!! YOU are in charge of your birth, and YOU can influence your birth outcomes and satisfaction!!🙌

Wanna know the top 4 factors that influence birth satisfaction? (Pst, they’re all things YOU get to have control over 🤫) Check em out👇

✨Personal expectation. MINDSET. Your mindset is everything when it comes to birth. Keeping a positive mindset as you approach birth, and leaning into trust in yourself, your body, and your baby can greatly influence your experience.

✨Caregiver support. Feeling supported, held, and seen by your caregivers and your birth team is super important to how you’re gonna feel about your birth. Trusting your caregivers, and knowing that they trust YOU and your ability to birth is reassuring and can help you feel confident when it comes to your birth.

✨Mother-caregiver relationship. Not only is it important to have support from a caregiver, establishing a relationship with them is also key. You want someone that you feel comfortable with, that you can express your preferences to without judgment, and that will keep an open and respectful line of communication with you as you approach birth and during the whole process.

✨Involvement in decision making. Feeling like you have a say when it comes to your birth, because you DO! Informed consent and bodily autonomy through the birth process are vital to a person feeling positively about their birth.

If you want to walk away from your birth feeling satisfied, and you’re looking for a birth team that will support this, I’ve got something special for you! If you send me a DM or comment 🤰 I’ll send you over a FREE handout to help you tune into your intuition as you choose your birth team. 💕

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Obstetric care assumes that the pain of labor is the mothers biggest concern, and that in order for her to be satisfied with her birth experience, all she needs is to experience the least pain possible. So in comes epidurals, spinals, and opioids to “manage the pain”.💉

But this is not true! More pain management does not = higher satisfaction. It’s actually the opposite!! The mothers with the highest birth satisfaction rates are those who had unmedicated labors. 🌺

When labor is unmediated and undisturbed, the hormones of birth can flow as they are meant to. They can support mother and baby. Natural labor comes with a huge sense of accomplishment. The first moments mom and baby spend together, both are awake and alert and in tune with one another. 👩‍🍼

We are so scared of pain. Physical, emotional, spiritual. But this aspect of pain is not something to be feared and to run away from in birth, I believe it’s something to walk into. Pain cracks us open, it's our biggest teacher. The pain or difficulty of labor prepares you for what is to come in your motherhood journey, and is full of insights into how your baby will need you to show up for them. 🌊

There is no shame in wanting or needing pain management in labor. I do just invite you to reflect on how you feel about pain. Do you avoid it? Do you run away from it? Are you scared of it? Why? I’d love for you to share, and to let me know if you’re planning an unmedicated labor or if you’ve experienced one:)

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So it was my birthday yesterday! And with it came a lot of thoughts about birth in general (like always) but also my own birth and how my own mother was born on that day with me. As I get closer and closer in age to the age my mother was when I was born, my birthdays are filled with more thoughts of her than myself. 👩‍👧

The transition from maiden to mother is like the transition from womb to earth in many ways. You are stepping into something completely new, a new identity, a new body, new sensations. We celebrate babies being born, and we should, but the mother should also be celebrated. 🦋

Both mother and baby are born together. I get tears in my eyes thinking of my mother carrying me, preparing to become a mom for the first time. I imagine her holding me. I think about how I wasn’t there one day, and then all of a sudden her life changed and our lives started together. ❤️

This mutual birth is a beautiful beautiful thing shared between mother and child, and I am so grateful for not only my life, but our life. 💕✨

How do birthdays make you feel? Do you celebrate both mother and child?

Do you feel like you have to be perfect? Like your body has to be perfect? Like your cycle has to be perfect?Like your pregnancy has to be perfect? Like your birth has to be perfect? Do you feel like there’s an outside “ideal” of how your experience should look and feel? 🤦‍♀️

If yes, you’re not alone! But this notion of having to be perfect gets in the way of establishing a healthy and trusting relationship with ourselves and our bodies, and definitely our births. Holding ourselves to this impossible ideal of perfection causes us to be hard on ourselves, and to not care for and support ourselves in the ways that we really need. 🤱😥

Nothing in life measures up to this idea of “perfect”, because our idea of perfect is distorted. You, your body, your cycle, your birth, will never fit this perfect mold, and that’s ok! Our experiences are here to teach us lessons, we flow through them, we grow, we change. When we meet ourselves with empathy and softness, and an openness to our experiences instead of a constant want to change and control them, we can welcome more ease into our lives. 🌺🌀

Have you felt the pressure to be perfect? Did it affect your pregnancy or birth? What do you wish someone had told you?

Follow along for more on establishing trust within your body through pregnancy, birth, and menstruation 👉

Hormonal birth control is not feminist, and it’s not empowering. In fact, it’s just about the opposite of these 2 things! ❌

Birth control is marketed to women as a means of taking charge and control of our bodies, as a means for us to decide when we want a baby and when we don’t.🤰 It’s sold as empowering because now we can be more sexually free without having to fear getting pregnant. Ok, sure, but is any of this actually for the benefit of women? ❓🤨

What isn’t marketed to us is how birth control disrupts our hormones, messes with our cycles, changes our taste in partners (what?? Ikr!). What isn’t marketed is the fact that it’s a group 1 carcinogen, it has a side effects longer than the average women’s height that’s on it, and that any problems aside from pregnancy prevention that are a cause for you being prescribed it are not actually going away while you’re on it, they’re just being covered up and they’ll come back as soon as you get off if it, and oftentimes worse. 🤯😠

Would any man you know be ok with any of these adverse effects, would they take a pill everyday or insert a plastic or metal device into their sexual organs, would they do any of this and then turn around and say they feel empowered? Absolutely not!! So why as women are we ok with it??

I believe that the true most feminist and most empowering thing we can do as women is to reconnect to ourselves, our bodies, and our natural cycles, and go about avoiding pregnancy, trying to get pregnant, or fixing hormonal issues from there!🌺

If you want to take the first steps in getting to know your body and your cycle better, send me a DM or comment 👸 and I’ll send you over a FREE handout on the subject !

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I am a firm believer in physiological birth. This stems from the fact that I am a firm believer in the wisdom of women’s bodies.

Whether we are talking about birth or menstruation, both are rooted in our feminine essence, in our power to be the human vessels for the Life| Death| Life cycle. Since the beginning of time, women have had this power and knowing within us. We’ve bled with the moon, we’ve birthed unassisted, supported by our sisters. It’s only in very recent times that mistrust in the female body and the female form has become the norm. It’s only in recent times that birth has been medicalised and pathologized. It’s only in recent times that women are out of sync with their cycles.

We have the power to change the narrative back. To choose trust instead of fear. And I believe that this starts with what we believe about our birthing and our bleeding bodies.❤️

If you’re with me, leave a TRUST in the comments.

If you’re expecting and are choosing a birth team, I have a FREE checklist just for you! A checklist, or check in, on how your providers makes you feel. If you’re interested, send me a DM and it’s yours!✨

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Everything comes back to birth, and the lessons we take from it translate into our everyday lives, into our menstrual cycles, into our relationships, into everything.

Surrender: to the flow of the universe, the flow of your body 🌊

Breathe: in your power, and out any fear 🌀

Trust: that you and strong and that you are capable, and that you have innate wisdom you can tap into 💫

All artwork by

What are some more lessons you learned from your birth?✨

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This weekend was the first new moon of 2023, and with it was my first bleed of the year.🩸🩸

The new moon is the dark moon, a time to go inward fully, to peel back the layers and experiences of the past month, and to shed them . In the darkness, black like fertile earth, we plant the seeds for the new month. Women who bleed with the new moon are in touch with nature, and follow the moon's darkest time while menstruating and its fullest or most fertile when ovulating. These women are connected with the rhythm of nature, and while they bleed they use the power of their periods for internal healing.🌑🌀🌑

Women who bleed with the full moon are equally in tune with nature, and cycle in an opposite rhythm. Their time of highest power, menstruation, is when the moon is at its fullest, and has its most outward energy. These women have the potential to use the power of their periods to heal the outer world. 🌕🌀🌕

Throughout our lives, the moon cycles that we bleed with can change, and these changes are not insignificant. Our menstrual cycles hold so much wisdom, and if we can learn to listen to them and tap into their knowledge, we can uncover depths into ourselves. 🌹🩸

What moon phase do you bleed with? Do you know? If you do, I’d love to know in the comments!

And if you are interested in the energies behind your menstrual phase, or any of the other phases of your cycle, send me a DM or comment 🌙 and I’ll send you over a FREE handout I made diving into the phases and the seasons!

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Friday feels! Women’s cyclical nature is our greatest gift.🌀 Each month we grow🌱, die🍂, and are reborn again🌸. Each month offers us a new opportunity to gain insights on our inner and outer worlds. We are gifted with different energies to match our bodies. We have different strengths that ebb and flow with each phase. We are fluid, elemental, water.🌊

I believe that the more that we witness ourselves in this state of ever changing flow, the more that those around us will witness us this way as well. Like the post says, celebrating the gifts that each phase brings in is empowering for ALL involved. If you are the partner, the parent, the child, the friend of a woman, especially a woman standing firm in the power of her womb and her cycles, celebrate her.🎉 To stand in this, with arms open to the gifts, is a practice that was abandoned by so many for so long. More and more we are waking to our power, and if that is not something to be celebrated, I don't know what is!

If you want to learn about the energies and gifts of each of your inner seasons, send me a Dm or comment at 😍 and I’ll be so happy to share it with you!!

With love✨❤️

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We need to stop pathologizing birth. Birth is not a disease. Birth is not an illness . Birth is not unnatural. Birth is not unhealthy. Women are built to birth. Our bodies know what to do. Our babies know what to do. When did we stop learning to trust ourselves, and when did we hand over our trust and our knowing to everyone and anyone outside of ourselves?

Probably at the same time that we learned about our periods. That we learned that our bodies were working against us, and that we had to fight them. Probably at the same time that we learned that we had to keep up with the boys, and function on their schedules, the same day in and day out. We learned to mistrust our bodies every time we saw something that convinced us that we should be smaller, and every time we pushed our bodies too hard to appease some external standard.

I don't talk about birth and menstruation because they are 2 things that interest me separately. They are so intertwined, and they imprint each other subtly and obviously.

I invite you to reflect on this idea of pathologizing birth, and a lot of our existence as women honestly, and how it stems from a mistrust in ourselves. Where does this mistrust stem from, and how can we rewrite our narratives?

Do you trust in yourself and your body? How did you get to that place? How are you planning on getting there?

Let me know in the comments ✨
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Is there a difference between a doula and a birth keeper? This past week I’ve been diving into this question as I’ve seen posts and talks about the difference between the two. For me personally, I think that they’re one in the same.

I’ve read that some women are choosing to ditch the term “doula” because it is limiting, and it doesn’t encompass the whole spectrum of holding space for the sacredness of birth and the birthing woman. While I believe that every birthworker should choose the title that feels best for them, I believe that in order to be a doula, this holding of space is the foundation of the work, or at least it is for me.

I aspire to support women, to support their inner wisdom and their inner knowing, to assure them of their innate power to birth and to bring forth life from nothing. I aspire to help women connect with themselves, to support them in advocating for themselves and their wishes in birth, to honor their transition from maiden to mother. I aspire to lead women away from fear, and into trust as they approach birth.

I also aspire to educate, to help women gain the knowledge that they need to feel empowered and in control of their births. I aspire to offer calming touch and physical support when needed, not because the mom can’t birth on her own, but because support can mean comfort.

I don't believe that these things are separate, and in my work I hope to encompass all of this with the women I will be so fortunate to support. Does this make me a doula, a birth keeper, a birth worker? It makes me ME, me in the space of showing up for birthing women. For now, doula feels good to me, but who’s to say it won't change. As I learn, and grow, and attend births, and hold space for women, my ideas about the role that I hold in those spaces will evolve.Through it all though, my aspirations will remain.

Little Monday morning brain dump ;) 😆🥰

What are your thoughts on this? Do you self identify as a doula or a birth keeper? If you’re not a birth worker, is there a “title” that you would be more drawn towards when seeking out birth support?

Now it's easier to contact Maiden And Mother Birth.

So who is Maiden to Mother Birth? Hi, my name is Gabriella and I am a holistic full spectrum doula in training. I am currently in the process of completing my certification with ,an incredible international holistic health school specializing in reproductive health, and , a phenomenal doula training program created by . (Yes, two programs at once, I’m feeling the 🔥!)

For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by birth! I couldn’t believe that as humans, as women, we could be capable of literally creating and growing other humans INSIDE OF US. 🤰

This fascination for me was not necessarily through a positive view for a long time though, and even as I thought it was the most incredible thing in the world, I was also terrified of it. The way that birth and pregnancy is conventionally shown to us and talked about make them seem very scary. The focus is always on the negative symptoms, the pain, the things you can’t do while pregnant, the serious complications that can occur, the strain that it can put on romantic relationships…I’m sure you’ve heard it all. It wasn’t until I started to look into pregnancy and birth myself that I began to realize the amazing power that it takes, how smart and adaptable and strong our bodies are, and how these are so much more than just physical phenomena.

The spiritual element, birth as a portal and an opportunity for transformation, the innate wisdom that our bodies hold, all of these were things that I had never heard being spoken about before. With more deep diving, I began to learn about the wisdom that our wombs hold at all times, not just when we’re pregnant, and this ignited a fire within me.

I want to share this with more women, educate more women on the incredible intricacies of their bodies and how to listen to the messages it holds for us. Knowledge is power, and I want to empower women, whether maidens, mothers, or those making the transition, to step into their power and the gifts that our bodies hold. I hope that you will join me here.✨

Do you agree??