Curriculum

After attending over 150 births and providing many hours of prenatal counsel & education, Ash created a comprehensive and updated curriculum for sharing need-to-have knowledge with gestating folks and their support people.

Deeper into the Embodied Birth Class

This class is uniquely trauma-informed, delving into the basics of neuroregulation which functions as a framework from which to discuss evidence-based pregnancy and labor process, inter-partner relationship, parenting, as well as personal well-being, applicable to both gestating folks and support people.

We dive into relevant details of the labor process and natural pain management, but we also go beyond the basics to discuss birthing/postpartum fears, including the ways they help and the ways they can create obstacles toward a labor with outcomes that more closely match one’s goals. Many difficult chest/breastfeeding misconceptions are confronted to increase the likelihood of healthy feeding outcomes, whatever they may be. The class contains a primer on parenting frameworks, including attachment theory, inviting attendants to begin critically considering their own ideals and ethics around raising emotionally aware and resilient children. Nutrition and herbal support are included, as well as many highlighted topics to discuss such as seeding the baby’s microbiome, surgical deliveries, traumatic responses to birth or baby feeding, perineal tear prevention, self-advocating in the hospital, and much more.

The training is intended to offer attendants information in order to help them make choices on their own. The most appropriate and healthiest choices will vary from person to person and family to family, according to background, experiences, trauma history, class, race, gender, relationship status, lifestyle, financial status, and more. Therefore, the teaching within this environment is intended to be judgement free, and all attendants are requested to respect this judgement-free zone when interacting with one another. Each person’s sense of physical and emotional safety is priority. The class will delve into self-advocacy and support-person-advocacy with birth providers and within the medical context so that participants are empowered to be more in charge of their birth choices and their physical safety.

All segments of this class are taught with both gender-neutral language and intention, free from cisheteropatriarchical or neurotypical assumptions around pregnancy, birthing, raising children, or family structures.

Basic somatic practices are scattered throughout to help participants engage internal fears prior to labor, help to create connection between gestational and non-gestational support folks with their unborn babies, and help to create non-verbal body-based grounding specifically unique to each pregnant and support person that can be leaned on heavily during labor and birth, and usually beyond. 

“I have read a lot and was pretty well informed about birth so I was hesistant that a childbirth class could help me. But I just had no idea! I gained so much from this class, I am so relieved we ended up doing it.”

— Previous attendant

Logistics

“I loved the discussion on fears because my [partner] and I didn’t even realize what we were most nervous about, and it was so important to start talking about it together. Ash’s feedback was really insightful for us.”

— Previous attendant