True Midwifery

What is the history of midwifery? Why has this profession been villainized in the past and how is it seen today? Is it legal in all states? What is transcendent about birth…and death? And how does it help to have someone present to assist? Lindsey Meehleis addresses all of the above. Lindsey is a board-certified midwife who was recently featured in the Heart & Soil movie “Nourished.” She addresses the controversy of the way the movie starts: with two contrasting placentas. One from a mother who was well nourished, and another who was not.

She also describes her commitment to making sure the baby’s arrival is as safe and smooth, as possible. And why she believes we need to return to the model of womb-to-tomb care for tending to the sick and those who are arriving and departing from this planet. Lindsey is part of the “remembering” of honoring life, death, and everything in between.

Visit her website: lindseymeehleis.com – https://www.theremembering.co/

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Lindsey Meehleis

What does true midwifery look like? How does a midwife usher in life and support the birth experience? What do birth and death have in common? This is episode 419. Our guest is a midwife who was traditionally trained and licensed through a medical board but sees the birthing experience through a new paradigm. It is a process that she supports in homes. She is part of the remembering of how to reconnect with our deep knowing and understanding that our bodies know exactly what to do during the birthing process and at other times.

Our guest tells stories of lives she’s welcomed into the world and those she’s seen depart. She describes the honor of womb-to-tomb care and what we’ve lost since as a society, we’ve moved away from these ancient traditions. Our guest is Lindsey Meehleis, midwife, storyteller, mother, and rememberer of great-grandmother wisdom.

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Coming up, Lindsey gives us a glimpse of the history of midwifery. She also describes what true medicine is and tells a poignant story of helping a dying father catch his newborn baby in his arms.

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Visit Her Website: Lindsey Meehleis

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Welcome to the show, Lindsey.

Thank you so much for having me.

You came to our attention because you were featured in a movie by Heart & Soil Films. In particular, I’m remembering the segment where there were two placentas, one that looked vibrantly healthy, which is a deep red burgundy color, and the other one that looked floppy and flaccid. Can you describe to us why these placentas look so different?

I first want to start by saying that these are two placentas. This is not a huge study with lots of different placentas. When anybody says that there is an extreme one way or another, everything becomes very dogmatic. That’s not where I ever like to start my practice or start any conversation. I like to be welcoming to all different people. I love to sit down with people and have conversations about what they’re doing on a daily basis.

This film made a very big, broad statement, but that’s because that’s what happens when you edit things down. We recorded that day for 6 hours, and that segment was 30 seconds. That’s where I want to start this conversation by saying that not every single vegetarian or vegan is going to have a placenta that looks like that. Do I believe that there are vegetarians and vegans that can have healthy pregnancies? I do.

In this case or in this scenario with these two different placentas, there were two different clients that I had within my practice who so happened to give birth right around the time of filming this. One of them was a mom that was very much based on a Weston A. Price diet. She consumed very nutrient-dense nutrition throughout her whole entire pregnancy. She consumed a lot of meat. Was she a full carnivore? No. She incorporated a lot of raw dairy. She was doing cod liver oil. The other mom started the pregnancy vegetarian. It was her third pregnancy, so she was a little bit depleted going into it. By the time we reached her second trimester, she was very anemic. At that point, she started to add liver capsules, so she wasn’t even a full vegetarian.

These two placentas, when they came out, you could see a drastic difference between these two. You described one as very vibrant and the other one looked white and floppy. That placenta was also pretty hard to come out. I love letting placentas birth on their own. I don’t ever have that third-stage management of labor. The third stage is the delivery of the placenta or the birth of the placenta. That one took a little bit longer to come out.

It’s caused a lot of buzz. There are a lot of different groups of people that are varying in agreement with this or in agreement with that. I want us to take a step back and remember that we’re all in this together. There is no division in the statement that was made. If we enter into this by looking and saying, “This mom was way more nourished during her pregnancy. This was more optimal for this baby,” then we could take all of that dogma out. We could realize that, in the end, all of us want the same thing, which is a healthy mom and a healthy baby.

Someone did bring it to my attention. They said something about, “All of this discussion is moot. The point is moot because the placenta is formed primarily from the father’s DNA.” Is that correct?

The study that that is probably referencing is a study that was done in 2013 through Cornell University. What that did was it looked at donkeys, horses, and the cross-breeding between the two. What they found is on the fetal side of the placenta, the paternal DNA made up a lot of the fetal side of the placenta. There are two sides to the placenta. There’s the fetal side that’s attached to the baby where the umbilical cord inserts and the bags of water are attached. There’s then the maternal side.

On the maternal side, there are these cotyledons, which are spongy-like tissue that adheres to the uterine wall. If the mom has, let’s say, a negative blood type and the baby has a positive blood type, this blood should not exchange between the two. The fetal side of the placenta is not even what was shown on that video that was recorded with Heart & Soil. It was the maternal cotyledon side.

There’s not a lot of research on that statement saying that the father’s DNA creates the placenta. It was one study that was done at Cornell in 2013. I would love it if anybody has more information on that, but it’s not something that’s been looked at. My response to that would be that the fetal side of the placenta usually always looks great.

It’s very rare that I have a placenta that doesn’t look good on the fetal side unless the baby has had meconium, which is their first poop, and the fetal side is stained from the meconium. It is still healthy, but it looks a little bit different. That maternal side is from the mom’s nutrition. It is mom’s backup of all of those minerals that she has accumulated over time over her lifetime, over her mother’s lifetime, and her grandmother’s lifetime as well.

That is mind-blowing. Speaking of mind-blowing, as a midwife, you have had the privilege of observing and ushering into the world these fresh little lives. Tell us a story of a birth that you witnessed and facilitated.

Anytime that I start talking about birth, I realize it’s a very charged subject. I always like to start by taking a deep collective breath together. I always like all of the people that are tuning in to the show to slow down the resonance. You’re tuning in to the show for a reason. You’ve found it for whatever reason. It’s in your psyche because these are different stories and stuff that you get to read and navigate through. Sometimes, you might have a little charge around it.

WT 419 | Midwifery — Midwifery: Birth is a very charged subject.

If you’re driving, please don’t close your eyes. I want both of us right here and everybody tuning in to take a deep breath through our nose, down into our lungs, down into our bellies, and down into our wombs, if you have one. We’re letting your shoulders drop and letting any tension around your mouth go. Release your jaw as you exhale, letting everything go even more. I want you to imagine that every person that’s reading this is connected to you through our breath. We’re remembering as we breathe in unison that the most important thing is that we’re in this together.

I‘m going to start with a birth story. Anytime that I talk about birth, I equally find that talking about death is as important because the most guaranteed part of life is death. That’s the number one thing that we know coming into this space is that’s guaranteed. I had a beautiful birth of twins to a boy and a girl. This was a repeat client. They had worked with me for two previous pregnancies.

In the second pregnancy, we were peak. It was January 2021. The mom called me at 33 weeks pregnant and said, “I’m not feeling the baby move.” In those situations, you’re like, “Drink some juice.” Usually, everything is fine, but nothing was changing. I rushed over to her house and there was no heartbeat. We navigated that birth that was a death together. It was beautiful, heartbreaking, tragic, and sacred all at the same time.

This little baby girl who was 3 pounds was born in the middle of the night as we tucked ourselves back into a tiny little bedroom. She squat right in front of me. My partner, Ashley, was behind her. Her husband was right next to me. This gorgeous little girl that didn’t breathe was born into our hands. That’s everybody’s biggest fear. Nobody ever wants to have to experience anything like that. We navigated through the grief of that together. We made the whole process very reverent. Their three-year-old daughter came out and held her sister that would never take a breath.

It was a couple of months of letting the mom have that time to grieve before she could even think about getting pregnant again. She called me and said she was pregnant again. It was probably nine months later. She came into the office. I have a little tiny handheld ultrasound machine. She said, “I would like to look at the baby.” We looked at the baby, and instead of it being a baby, it was two babies. I share a room with a pediatric and prenatal chiropractor, so the office is always buzzing here. The entire office erupted in laughter. There was so much joy that was brought in by seeing two of these babies.

She continued through the pregnancy so healthily. She took such good care of herself. It was like her full-time job to make sure that she was getting enough protein, hydrating well, and taking good care of herself spiritually and mentally. One day before her due date, she went to the office. She and her husband are tattoo artists. They went to their studio. She texted me and said, “These babies still aren’t here yet.” I said, “I’m down the street from you at another birth. If anything changes, let me know.”

She went to the studio and came home at 2:00 PM. As she was getting into the car from the studio, she started feeling cramping. I had already finished the birth that I was down the street from her. I was driving home. She texted me, “I might be in labor.” I said, “I’m on my way home. I’m going to go shower. I’m going to the sauna quickly. Keep me posted.” With those calls, typically what happens is that it takes a few hours. It’s like, “I’ll see you later tonight.”

I was in the sauna for ten minutes. I had broken my first little beat of sweat. She texted me and said, “Contractions are every 2 to 3 minutes.” I went, “Oh no.” I jumped out of the sauna and jumped in the shower quickly. She kept on reassuring me, “It’s not going to happen quickly. Take your time.” I knew that I had to rush back up there.

I rushed up the freeway and called my team. In the State of California, we need to have an OB-GYN for all of our twin or breach births. I called my collaborative OB, Dr. Victoria Flores. She started gathering everything. We all got there and I walked into this room. The last time I walked into this room for a birth was for a totally different energy. I got to step into this space, take a deep breath, and make this container that we were in. Everybody that was in the room had this sacred container. We got to sit in deep reverence of being able to witness this rebirth that was happening within this mom.

I looked at her and she said, “I need to push. Is it too soon?” I said, “No. Listen to your body.” She never had a vaginal exam. She started pushing, and within about fifteen minutes, baby boy who was supposed to come second came out first. We put the baby up on her chest, and then 22 minutes later, baby girl came out. Her daughter, who was five, sat on my lap with the birth of baby girl. She watched the whole thing. She said she wanted to catch it, but then she whispered in my ear that she didn’t want to.

In that moment when the girl was born, not that anything would ever make us forget their daughter that was born asleep, but it brought so much joy to us. It made us feel this full circle of life. The fact that her brother had come first and paved the way for her to come was beautiful. That’s a little snip of a birth that I get to experience on a very regular basis.

I sense in you, as you’re telling that story, this reverence and this understanding that something beyond the physical is taking place during these births. When did your eyes open to that reality?

My story started with my daughter’s birth. I had a very medicalized birth. I was induced. I had every intervention that there is. I ended up with a C-section. I was young. I was 21 when I had her. I left that experience with this deep knowing that something that I was supposed to experience wasn’t experienced. I missed out on a profound rite of passage.

When that happened to me, even being 21 years old, I was like, “There has to be a different way to do this.” That’s when I jumped into the childbirth world and became a childbirth educator and a doula. I eventually ended up becoming a midwife. As I witnessed each birth, I noticed this energy that encompassed the room. Even if it was a cold, sterile hospital room, there was still this angelic presence in every single birth space.

It’s hard because I fully agree that hospitals are necessary and needed. I’m so grateful for hospitals in any high-risk situation. Some of my greatest allies work in the hospital. When I started to transition from being in the hospital setting more in a home birth setting, I saw even more of that magic enter the room, even the way that we talked to the baby at birth.

You’ll always catch me saying that the reason I became a midwife first is for the baby’s experience of birth. It’s not to say that mom’s experience isn’t equally as important, but I care how these babies are ushered into the world. We try to make sure that the lights are low. Most of my clients have a water birth. These babies are born from a warm environment into a warm environment. We keep voices low. We acknowledge the baby as if they were a person in the room because they are. We know that babies process things about six times slower than we do, so we slow that down. We let that organic unfolding of everything take place the way that it’s supposed to.

I posted a video of a baby doing a breast crawl. Most people don’t even know that it’s possible. I want you to think of any mammal that gives birth. Think of the little puppies that come out. They nuzzle their way into mom and find the nipple. They don’t need any guidance from us humans. It’s designed to work that way. Human babies are the same way. If we allow that to happen, then what we see are these beautiful things that unfold.

There is this beautiful sacred welcoming committee that comes in with every birth. I’ll have people ask me, “How do you guarantee that you’ll be at a birth?” I always respond and say, “I can’t guarantee that I’ll be at a birth. It’s very rare that I miss a birth. If I’m committing to being at your birth, I want to be at your birth.” There’s a sacred welcoming committee that’s already been picked beforehand. If I get to be part of that sacred welcoming committee, I’m so grateful for it. Whoever is meant to be there will be there.

Do all midwives see birth as this sacred special entry for these little beings the way you do?

I’d like to say yes, but unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case. There are a couple of different avenues of midwifery. There are nurse midwives who are fantastic and wonderful, but they’re trained a lot differently than we are. They’re typically trained in a university type of setting. Most of their apprenticeship is in a hospital-based setting, so they don’t get that same experience at home birth unless they go out and seek it. I know lots of certified nurse midwives that are home-birth midwives.

The way that I went is a traditional route of midwifery. I attended the first accredited California midwifery school. All of my apprenticeship in training was done at the home. If we had to transfer to a hospital for any reason, that was included as well but 95% of my births were at home. It brings a little bit of different philosophy behind it whereas if you’re learning in a hospital-based setting, it’s very much a Western medical-based philosophy. Whereas the traditional route is more so of herbs, homeopathy, spiritual connections, and making sure that the mental space is well-tilled. We go through so many different fears. Always, there are people that marry that in the middle.

You were trained traditionally and licensed through a medical board. You’re a midwife that, it sounds like, mostly facilitates births in the home. How does that all fit together?

It’s interesting because if we look back at the history of midwifery, that was the basis. It was the center of the community. It was the original family practice doc. The midwives were the herbalist, therapists, and geriatric caregivers. We look at the late 1400s. That’s when the revolution of Western medicine started through the Catholic church. The midwives were villainized at that point.

When we go into how midwives have historically practiced and then go into how the medical board dictates how we practice, they are two different things. Let’s talk about the United States as a whole. Every state has a medical board. There are some states in the United States where midwifery is illegal still. There are some states in the United States where midwifery is alegal, meaning that there is no guidance around what their scope of practice is. There are some states where we are licensed and have to follow certain protocols within what the state sets for us.

California and Washington are very similar in the sense. In 2014, what happened is something that’s called a sunset review. They looked over all of what we were allowed to do and took away two big things from us, which were twins and breaches. We have to have an OB present. To find an OB-GYN that’s okay with home birth is a far stretch. Luckily for me, I have two OBs that I work with that are very open and love home birth. All they do is home birth. It takes away from the family’s right to choose what they want to do with their bodies and their babies.

Another thing that they took away from us is that moms can’t give birth at home after 42 weeks of gestation. Forty weeks is the due date. There’s a bell curve. The same amount of babies that are born at 38 weeks are born at 42 weeks. Forty weeks is that halfway point. If they go late, then it causes a lot of stress. Financially, they’re out of pocket for paying for a home birth that they might not get to experience because of this law. It puts a lot of pressure on these moms.

It’s interesting to navigate through it, especially because I was licensed prior to 2014 as well. I had to adjust, shift, and move my sails a little bit. What it all boils down to is that even within this restriction, I try to give that family family-centered care with full autonomy. I trust their bodies above and beyond anything else. They know their bodies above and beyond anything else. I get to be the Sherpa that walks Mount Everest with them. I’m around 1,600 births. I also get to realize that they know the limits of their body. We navigate those things together.

Do you feel like in our modern medical scientific or clinical approach to birth, we miss some of what we were talking about at the top? We miss some of that mystical, transcendent experience and reverence for ushering in a new life.

A hundred percent. What I see happen time and time again is that I have women that get to a place in birth, which we call transition. Some of us call it transformation. It’s right at the end of birth. It’s right before she starts to push her baby into this world. It’s the time when all of those endorphins and hormones are the highest that they’re ever going to be in their life. They’re out in space getting their baby from the stars. That’s how I describe it. They’re not in the room. They’re in an actual psychedelic trance experience. It’s scary. They don’t know if they can do it. They don’t know if they can push forward.

There’s this place where we lock hands and connect our hearts. I would whisper into her ear, “The only way out is through.” At that moment, what happens is that they realize that there’s nothing else outside of them that they need other than going through it. All they need to do is surrender to it. They come out that other side in ecstatic bliss. They’ve pushed their baby into their arms.

I can’t even tell you how many times it’s been said to me that their lives are changed at that moment. Throughout the rest of their lives, they will always remember that moment when they didn’t think what they were doing was possible. They didn’t think that they had the physical or emotional space to push through, but they did. I always say that’s the best way to start motherhood. It’s for you to be in this experience where you don’t think it’s possible, but you do it.

I’m raising teenagers. There are times when I’m like, “I can’t do it anymore,” but I innately remember that strength that I found within their births. Each person’s and baby’s birth are different. You might have a mom that’s on baby number five. You think she’s going to birth super fast, and then all of a sudden, this fifth baby takes forever to come. We have to change mom’s positions and do all these different things. You’re like, “That’s what you’re going to need to mother this baby in this world.” They all have their own stories. Sometimes, we know what it means and sometimes, we don’t. There’s always this beautiful piece of spirituality that comes with each and every birth.

Honestly, as I listen to your words, I can’t help but think this is true medicine. It is serving the woman who’s delivering. I was going to say the patient, but she’s not a patient. This whole concept that we have that they need to be in the hospital to give birth is something that’s been introduced only recently. In ancient cultures, people gave birth in their home environment. We’re coming full circle to that. Tell us what your definition of true medicine is.

I want to talk back to what you said that it’s recently that we came into the hospital. It’s usually about 2 to 3 generations back that we have to look for everybody that was born at home. In 1900, every single baby was born at home. It’s not that far away. People are like, “Home birth is a trend.” We knew that the statistics from home birth went up 22% from 2019 to 2022. There’s a lot that happened in 2022 and nobody wanted to be in the hospital. I’m like, “It’s not a trend. Hospital birth is a trend. Hospital birth has been here way shorter than home birth has been. Home birth has always been here.”

In terms of what true medicine is to me, it is remembering that the body has the innate ability to heal itself most of the time. I’m grateful for Western medicine. I’m grateful for hospitals. If we have a broken bone, that is great. I’ll tell the story of when I had a mom that has a perineal tear. She is torn after she’s given birth. If the tear is small enough, I will say to her, “If I have to stick a needle into your vagina and numb it, I’ll give it lidocaine. I’ll then stick another needle that has a foreign stitch.”

True medicine is remembering that the body has the innate ability to heal itself most of the time.

Our bodies are like, “What is this? I don’t need this in my body.” The only thing that stitch is doing is holding your body together so it can heal itself. The stitch doesn’t have any magical powers in it. There’s nothing that the stitch is doing other than holding the body together to heal itself. I’ll always say, “I have to open this in order to even find your tear. This tear is going to heal fine because the body’s already bringing itself together to heal on its own.” Those were those little reminders.

I had a call from a mom that had a one-year-old that had a bad cough. She had gone to the pediatrician and felt like she didn’t get good enough information. I sent her a voice text. In the voice text, I did a lot. I reminded her to take a breath. I reminded her to take a breath down into her power and her knowing that she is the expert on her baby.

She knows her baby better than any pediatrician, any midwife, and anyone else around her. She’s been with that baby probably 24/7, so she knows what’s going to heal that baby the best. It is remembering and reminding them to come back to stillness and not be in a state of stress. Lowering those stress hormones alone is going to help the body heal. We know that. That’s scientifically proven again and again. It’s that remembering that true medicine is that the body is able to heal itself.

I love that. That resonates deeply with me. I want to go back to the top where you were talking about how birth and death in some ways are inextricably linked. Can you talk to us a little bit about womb-to-tomb care?

The midwife was the original family practice doctor. What we would say is that midwives were with families from womb to tomb, meaning the baby in the womb until the end of life or the tomb. You’ll also hear it called from cradle to grave. What that means to me is that the original family practice doc knew that family inherently. They knew everything about them. They knew the dynamics of their family. They knew how each kid operated within that family system. They were able to navigate through all of those life transitions with that family.

While midwifery is not family practice medicine because we can’t go and be the kid’s pediatrician and prescribe medication for adolescent kids or anything like that, what I do find is that the relationships that I make with these families go on and on. It doesn’t end. I don’t say goodbye at my six-week appointment like a standard OB appointment would. My oldest one is nineteen now in 2023. I still get pictures of that kid. It’s so beautiful to watch them grow and, on the same note, to also watch that mother and father unit evolve with each child and how they parent them.

It’s something that’s foreign to us. We have a specialty for every age, stage, and even part of the body. You’ve got the gastro guy, and then you’ve got the ear, nose, and throat guy.

Nobody talks. They don’t communicate with each other, right?

No. They’re not communicating with each other. They see the person as their issue. They’re like, “We’ve got the elbow case in this room and the hernia in A-2.” We dehumanize people in a way. The kind of medicine or care that you’re describing is foreign, but I’m glad at seeing a resurgence. Whether or not people refer to it as a trend or not, to me, it seems almost irrelevant.

I had the opportunity to work in the emergency room and in an ambulance prior to becoming a midwife. My initiation into this was with death. I was with several. I don’t know how many, but it was lots of people as they transitioned. What I realized is that I would be sitting in the back of an ambulance with this gorgeous 80-year-old woman and she would start telling me all of her life secrets and choices because she knew that that was her last chance in order to communicate that. I absorbed that in. I got to realize that the energy of death is very similar to the energy of birth.

One of the greatest gifts that I’ve ever given my daughter, who was twelve at the time, is when my grandmother died. She was the matriarch of our family. She was 96 years old. She was born and raised on a farm. We brought her home from the hospital to die at home. Once she had passed, I cleared the room and kept my daughter in the room. We anointed her naked 96-year-old body with frankincense and washed her body. When the coroner came to bring a body bag, we were the ones that put her in it. We put flowers in it as we zipped her up. For my daughter to experience that at that age, I feel like it is one of the most beautiful things that will carry on throughout her life at so many different stages. It is knowing that beauty and peace is something that we don’t need to fear.

The beauty and peace of child-birth is something that we don’t need to fear.

You used the word earlier in this conversation, container. Some people say, especially those who have witnessed this transition from life to death, that the container is left behind the body, but the spirit leaves. Even if you see that life is merely a pulse and it’s a physical thing that we experience, something changes when there’s no longer life in that body. Have you witnessed that too?

The energy shifts. It’s so interesting. There is this moment right before birth and right before I know that a baby is going to emerge. I feel it every single time at every single birth that I have to catch myself and remind myself to take a deep breath. Anytime I’ve witnessed a death, it’s the same energy that’s going to come as they leave. It’s the same energy that’s going to come as they come in. At that moment, there is infinite magic that’s in the room. It abounds everywhere. You can feel it. It’s nothing other than holy. That’s the only way I can describe it. It’s this holy energy. It’s something that is missed out on so many times. We don’t recognize that.

A lot of palliative doctors that deal with the end of life, I call them midwives. They’re on the same end of the spectrum at the other end. They’re doing death and we’re doing birth. I feel that they get it. They understand that sacredness with birth. One of my good friends, his name is Dr. Nathan Riley, is an OB-GYN but also worked in palliative care. We call him the OB-GYN midwife because he gets it. He walks into that space and understands the energy of it because it’s always the same.

I have to tell you that when I was in Ecuador in 2021, I met a curandera and partera or midwife and a healer in the small town of Santa Barbara. She told me so many times during the interview, which we have on the Spanish show, “Nuestro cuerpo es sagrado,” or our body is holy. She had witnessed so many of these transitions that she completely understood exactly what you were describing. It’s that beautiful, mystical energy that is ushered in and out of this world. It takes something special to perceive that.

I’m glad that you’ve brought that to the fore in this conversation. Tell us one more story before we wrap up of something you witnessed. It’s a sacred moment like we’ve been describing. You talked about the twins’ birth earlier in this interview. Do you have another story of a life being ushered in or one leaving that is especially poignant?

I’m going to tell this story because one of my good friends that passed, his death anniversary is coming up. I feel that it’s appropriate to hear the story of his death because it’s as sacred as his wife’s birth. I was their midwife for two babies. When she came to me with her second pregnancy, her husband wasn’t feeling well. She knew that there was something wrong. He was 32 years old and was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. His name is Stephen. He will forever live in my heart. The experience of that will forever live in my heart.

We navigated the pregnancy by making sure that she stayed healthy. We also navigated the pregnancy by making sure that they were taken care of. Within our community, there was almost $100,000 donated, so she didn’t have to worry about any financial stress. There were meals constantly dropped off at her door. There were hairdresser clients of mine that were going to their house to cut their family’s hair. The community gathered around them.

When she went into labor, I ended up taking more care of him than I did of her. He was in so much pain. This was a 6’3” or 6’4” man that had this big, broad shoulders and a big body, and he was probably down to 140 pounds at that point. The pain that he was experiencing was one that I was attending to. I had other people there that were helping her, but the main focus was making sure that Stephen was comfortable so he could experience and catch his baby.

Weston was born on September 1st, 2016. He was able to survive. He was seven months old when Stephen passed. He was able to get to know that baby, hold that baby, and love that baby along with their toddler. As we came to the conclusion that his sacred body was no longer going to be strong enough to push through, we were in the hospital setting.

My client and friend, Amanda, was nursing her baby. She was there 24/7 around the clock. She didn’t want to leave her husband because we didn’t know at any time where he was going to pass. What we ended up doing is setting up a chain of midwives that would go into the hospital. They would crawl into the hospital bed with Stephen, run their fingers through his hair, and sing to him all night long where Amanda was able to sleep next to him and nurse their baby all night long. That lasted for about seven days.

On the night that he passed, Easter Eve, we knew that he was close. There was a bird that kept coming up to the window right at sunrise. He was pecking at the window. We knew at that moment that Stephen was getting ready to leave. He left his earthly body, his sacred holy vessel. We were there. I did the same thing with them. We unclothed his body from the hospital clothes and anointed him in frankincense. We washed his body and zipped him up in the body bag that was taken away to bring him away.

Experiencing two births with them, holding Stephen as he caught his baby into his hands, and then holding Stephen as his soul left his body was one of the most full circle moments I’ve ever had in my life. That’s true midwifery right there. That’s what midwifery is. That’s what true medicine is right there. It’s that family-centered care. It’s that deep reverent respect for that journey.

Even this conversation has been very moving to me. It’s powerful to contemplate the stuff we’re made of. It’s more than what the eyes can perceive. As we come and go in our very brief stay on this Earth, there’s something sacred about it all. Thank you for explaining true midwifery to us and for this conversation. I want to pose to you the question I’d like to pose at the end. If the audience could do one thing to improve their health because a lot of the audience is looking for a healthier, happier lifestyle, what would you recommend that they do?

There are so many different things that I could say. I find that the most important thing, especially in the climate that we’re at where everybody is so divided, is that if we go outside every single morning, put our feet in the dirt, look up at the sun, look at maybe a little of the stars if we’re there at sunrise, and look and see where we’re connected, we realize that the power of our voice can ricochet across the entire universe. We know that through quantum physics.

If we realize that the most important thing that we know is that we’re connected, then there’s no way that there’s division anymore. If we step back into that connectedness, then we’ll step into a space where no one is in stress anymore. We’re all in this state of being one. That will drastically reduce all of these ailments that we’re searching answers for to and realize that those answers are within ourselves.

If we realize that the most important thing that we know is that we’re connected, then there’s no way that there’s division anymore.

Those are wise words to end on. Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been amazing.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

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Our guest was Lindsey Meehleis. Visit her website, Lindsey Meehleis. You can find me at Holistic Hilda. For a review from Apple Podcasts, DeeDee9000 has this to say, “I can no longer recommend this show. I love the work of Dr. Price, but this show has strayed into lunacy. Doing an episode on urine therapy is embarrassing and ridiculous. You should be ashamed for promoting such disgusting and unsupported nonsense through Dr. Price’s name.”

Thank you for this review. Honestly, we don’t expect every episode to resonate with every individual who is tuning in. Thank you for telling us what you think. You, too, can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Give us as many stars as you like and tell the world if you think the show is worth tuning into. Thank you so much. Stay well. Remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

About Lindsey Meehleis

For the past 20 years, Lindsey Meehleis has worked in healthcare but found herself often in the shadows. In the shadows of the night helping women discover their own strength through psychedelic, transcendent experiences while they birth their babies in power at home. As well in the shadows of death as a Midwife who helps people cross the rainbow bridge. Her hands have touched the lives of many as they take their first and last breath.

She has woven the stories of thousands of births throughout these 20 years. Trained traditionally and licensed through the Medical Board, she quickly learned that what is needed in the magic and mystery of birth and death can’t be found in a book. She serves families from womb to tomb, like many medicine women have done throughout time, with a deep remembering that many of these witches were burned at the stake for their threat to the standard industrialized medical complex.

She has witnessed a drastic shift in healthcare since 2020 and looks forward to co-creating a new future of what true medicine always was. She gets down to the nitty-gritty of LIFE and everything it brings and illustrates the power that we have within, showing that birth, life and death are pivotal rites of passage that deserve to be held in sacred deep reverence.