Yeah.

Yes, exactly.

And I'm right there with you.

I would never say, even though I'm a fertility awareness educator and I use it and I love it and I shout the praises of it to the world, I would never say that every woman in the world, that it's the best method for them.

There's a lot of situations, a lot of people who it just wouldn't work for and it would just be more trouble than it was worth or whatever the reason.

So yeah, exactly.

informed consent is essential.

sharing a little bit of that with us?

If you were to go back to like 1920, like what was it like for you then? And if it wasn't, that wasn't piquing your curiosity yet, what do you wish you would have known sooner? Or what were you talking about her, I guess, like as she's approaching this, like what, you know, how would you approach that now?

Yeah, totally.

And I, I think, you know, I had a similar experience with my daughter when she started her period.

I was so excited and like in this really celebratory mood and really wanting to like throw her a party.

And she's like, no mom.

So we did have a really special, just personal ritual between the two of us just to, you know, bring her into that because it's, which is so important because what you were saying is, with society just, you know, it's the curse, you know, it's, you know, like people are just so adverse to their periods and often because so many uncomfortable things, so many imbalanced things have become normalized, right? So periods aren't supposed to be painful, right? But it's so normalized to the point where when I'm talking to a client and I ask if they have period pain, They'll tell me, no, just normal period pain.

You know, so it's like they think if it's not debilitating, then it doesn't count.

To just look at the app, to look at the Oura Ring, to look at the whatever, instead of like taking the time to really get to know your body, there's a difference.

Why does like the medical industry make it seem like if you don't take birth control, you're going to get pregnant?

You know, there's a lot of layers to that conversation for sure.

The birth control, like hormonal birth control is important.

pretty much positioned as the gold standard birth control, like the responsible choice that if you don't want to get pregnant, this is what you should do.

And I'm a big advocate of informed consent and also just knowledge empowering people, right? So first of all, there's a lack of quality education within the fields of gynecology.

So that when we go to a gynecologist or someone that we feel we should be able to trust to provide us with birth control options, a lot of times the information just isn't there.

Because statistically, it's less than 4% of medical professionals that actually learn in depth the fertility awareness method, how natural birth control is actually highly effective.

So can you talk about how you can pick up on this by paying attention to your own cycle?

So as we shared in the intro, you did have some unplanned pregnancies, and so I would love to hear more about how that then kind of drove your mission to teach women about fertility awareness.

Yeah, definitely.

I had two unplanned pregnancies.

I've got a girl and a boy, both unplanned, and both because really I was trying to stick to my values as a more holistic-minded woman.

I wasn't eating junk food.

I wasn't taking pharmaceuticals of any kind, and I just wanted a birth control that would align more with those values.

And so I kind of floundered around because a lot of this information isn't really easily accessible.

So why do you think there's such a massive gap in the medical education, and what does a lack of training actually cost women in terms of their health and their body autonomy?

So

starting with just, you know, knowledge is power and knowledge of self as, you know, a lot of people in the, um, in the space of self growth and things like that.

We're trying to get to know ourself, get to know our thoughts, get to know, you know, our energies and things like that.

So, you know, and just seeing the value on literacy in society, it really gives us tools and allows us to get to places that otherwise would be much more difficult to get to when we have literacy in general.

So you know, just translating it to the womb, like our wombs are talking to us every single day as women and being able to not just be numb to hearing her voice, because we're not taught anything about a lot of this in, you know, modern sex ed.

And so being able to get to a point where you can hear the voice of your woman, you can, you know, physically and obviously spiritually and, and, and all of that, but even just physically, what is she telling me? Like you, you know, when you have this practice of awareness, you know, exactly if anything is off balance, you know, you know, um, where you are in your cycle.

So as far as birth control, that's just as effective as the hormonal options and all of these things.

Yeah.

What has been the moment in your journey where you came across the womb wisdom and then it became something that was yours to really embody and learn from and then were called to chef as well we'd love to hear your story behind the work

yeah definitely so I feel like the roots of it is I've always had a really deep commitment, like my entire adult life, I'll say, from around college, a really deep commitment to like a radically holistic lifestyle.

And so part of that meant, you know, I wasn't, I've never taken like hormonal contraception or had an iud or anything like that um but i was also kind of floundering for some time with methods like that the natural methods that we do have so condoms withdrawal things like that so um you know i had an unplanned pregnancy with my daughter because of a withdrawal mishap and you know just one time is enough so it was like that was like a a sharp awakening for me.

So then I was like, kind of searching for other alternatives.

And I came across a book in a library or a bookstore and about fertility awareness and the fertility awareness method.

And so I kind of dove into that.

And I was like, well, this sounds great.

Do you have any wisdom on this about, you know, how actually we, when we do this properly, how we can really trust it and what it means to do it properly as in quotation marks?