Rewilding birth and empowering women | Amanda Alappat, coach and advocate

Early Care for Every Kid

In this episode, Amanda Alappat, a homebirth mama, certified doula, coach, seasoned yoga teacher, joins me to discuss:

• (04:30) how birthing is a pivotal experience that could color motherhood
• (06:50) the importance of knowing our options
• (07:40) considerations+support needed for optimal conditions preconception, during pregnancy, postpartum
• (19:20) Amanda's home birth story
• (28:00) physiologic birth
• (31:40) Amanda's surprising and empowering first home birth
• (38:00) RIE (Resources for Infant Educarers) parenting
• (44:00) how we could help empower women by reclaiming birth, knowing all our options

and more.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Amanda Alappat https://www.amandaalappat.com/
• Amanda Alappat https://www.instagram.com/amanda_alappat/
• RIE Parenting https://www.rie.org/about/ries-basic-principles/

Join the conversation:

• follow earlycareforeverykid.org
• connect instagram.com/earlycareforeverykid
• subscribe earlycareforeverykid.captivate.fm/listen
• transcript https://share.descript.com/view/VoOs1pT07lw

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Transcript

AI-generated transcript below. Please excuse any typos or errors.

Danielle An

Wherever you are, however, your day or night's been going. I hope you feel as inspired as I am after this episode with Amanda Alappat, to take a moment, to see how we feel in our bodies and take charge of how we mother, our children and ourselves.

This is early care for every kid, a podcast for people who want to make learning, living, and loving more harmonious for everyone. I'm your host, Danielle An each week, I interview fellow parents, educators, advocates, and community leaders who care for and work with young children and families. I share their experiences, insights, and specific, actionable tips on how you could help make the world work better for everyone.

Amanda Alappat is on a mission to support and elevate women. She is a home birth mama seasoned yoga teacher and a veteran personal trainer who was once a competitive champion boxer. Amanda has two small children and an artist husband. She splits her time between New York city, their retreat, home and art gallery in the Poconos in Pennsylvania and Costa Rica.

The destination of their upcoming family retreats. Amanda believes strongly in both physiologic birth and mothering, and is the practitioner of RIE a respectful approach to parenting. She loves growing her own food. Unschooling her daughter breastfeeding her son, hosting women's circles and retreats all while cultivating sisterhood and community.

Welcome to our conversation with Amanda Alappat. I'm so grateful to have you today because you are on a mission. You are a woman, a force on a mission to support and elevate women and womanhood and motherhood, sisterhood, community rewilding. Could you please tell me how you came into this space of birthing and rewilding motherhood?

What does that mean?

Amanda Alappat

Okay, so I'll give you the summary. I got into the fitness industry 20 years ago, and that is before Instagram and before social media. And so I was one of the only women in the industry and as such, I train. Many female clients, because they look to me as opposed to big bulky men. And I had years of one-on-one with women.

And of course I would encounter pregnant women. So I got pre and postnatal certified because I wanted to make sure that what we were doing was safe. And I just fell in love working with pregnant women and new mothers. And from there, I got into yoga and I did a pre and postnatal yoga teacher training.

And within that training, the word doula came into my stratosphere. Prior to that, I never really heard of doulas, but it just seemed like this natural progression. Okay. I'm going to train a woman through her pregnancy. And now I have the skillset to support her in her birth. And then I could train her after the birth.

And so it was just this natural progression and evolution of my career. And so I became a doula and I assisted many births. And I knew through that experience, that when it came time for me to have my own children, I really wanted to have a home birth. And so four years ago, after 70 hours of labor, I gave birth to my daughter at home.

Recently, six months ago, I had my son also a home birth wildly different than the first and in in-between when I was newly pregnant with my son, I went on a women's retreat and sat in. Many circles during that week, I had sat in circle before and I actually hosted several women's circles before. Cause I always was really drawn to community and connection.

We have a backyard space in Manhattan. I would host one day women's retreats and me and my husband did many retreats. I was always hosting play dates and we were always sitting in circle. And so from there, the retreat really showed me that I need to be doing more of this. And that was right before COVID hit.

So I came back, me and my friend were like, we're going to host monthly women's circles or we're going to do all this stuff. And then the world shut down. So we started hosting them online and we still do it monthly. I just feel really called and really passionate about reminding women. That birth belongs to us and that we're currently living in a monoculture of birth, which basically means everyone's having very similar experiences.

We don't even know that we have these options and it's highly medicalized and women are very passive through the experience. And we've been fed this line that we should only want a healthy mom and a healthy baby, which is actually like code word for like, you make it out alive. If you have an alive baby in your life, that's how low the bar is grateful.

Be grateful and it's diminishes the experience. And for me, I really strongly believe that the experience is so profound and so pivotal women need to reclaim it and recognize it. The ripple effect that how a women for. Really could color how she goes into mothering, how she feels about herself, her perspective of the world, her own level of self-confidence and how she bonds with and treats her child.

So really that's where I feel my work needs to focus on.

Danielle An

Even if we are not in a maternal space. I think the culture that we are in excludes so many different options for women, because we don't know about our options. I mean, I wish I knew more about my body, about the different ways of birthing, even before I went into pregnancy or in the early stages of pregnancy naturally, I thought, okay, I'm going to do whatever my mother did, but the standards are really, truly so

low, low.

Amanda Alappat

The bar is so low. I feel like it's important to reiterate this point. You only give birth once, right? You only have like one shot. Of course, if you have multiple kids, but each birth is a singular event, you don't get a do over with mothering. If you make a mistake, you could course correct. You could do better.

Next time. You could learn from your mistakes with birth. It's one chance. That's why it's so important for women to be educated and to take some time before it happens to make sure they know what their options are, because if they don't know what their options are, they don't have any, I

Danielle An

feel like with pregnancy, the focus becomes carrying the child to term and how to ensure a healthy pregnancy.

But the focus is really just on the child inside and not even much discussion of delivery options. So how do you support in your work? The motherhood journey and the space

Amanda Alappat

around that? So I really start with preconception. Which I know for some people might be a radical idea that there's preparation and there are steps that could be taken even before you get pregnant.

Because in my perspective, you want to set yourself up for an optimal experience and the most healthiest, vibrant, beautiful, solid, healthy, robust baby. And that really starts with the state of your body. So I start with women to boost their nutrition, to as much as possible detox, their homes, eliminate harmful products, maybe investing in a water filter and air filter, right?

Like really getting yourself to a place where you create the space to call on your child. That could also look like looping in your partner, financially planning for a baby, literally clearing your home, shutting some stuff that could be a ritual where you sit in circle and you pray to your baby and you make contact with it and say, yes, I'm ready for you, please.

So preconception, I feel very strongly about my husband and I, we personally took 18 months to prepare for our first child with our second. We took about three months, but we had already implemented so much from the first baby and you want the best quality, egg, and sperm. We took almost two years to plan and prepare for our wedding, which is like a party, right.

I just don't see how, and of course, sometimes you just get pregnant. Great. But I really think there's something to be said about going in with intention and clarity and conscious.

Danielle An

Is there anything else that you might want to add to the discussions that you had, Larry, your physical space, your mental space, intentionally inviting the things that you want for the child, as well as logistical things like finance, parenting philosophy, and having your partner on board.

Is there anything else that you might want to add to

Amanda Alappat

that could be also movement exercise? Especially if a woman is sedentary or conversely working out really hard and thinking she has to kill herself at the gym, developing a movement practice. Um, thinking about your relationship with your partner, having a child is going to expose gaps in your marriage and cracks if you will.

And so what things might be coming up or what things may come up later on, where do you need to solidify? What kind of female support are you surrounded by? Do you have other friends in a similar stage of their lives? Do you have any kind of sisterhood who's supporting you? We talk about maternity leave.

What that looks like for someone like me. Who's self-employed I had two in those 18 years. Financially safe because there's no one paying my maternity leave and really whatever comes up for the woman, she wants to spend all of our time focusing on diet and eating for optimal fertility and optimal pregnancy.

That's cool. But there are so many different sort of facets to look at and examine. And what's your connection to God, right? Because there is a mystery to all of this. There is a magic to all of this, so there's many layers.

Danielle An

So preconception during the pregnancy you offer that kind of ongoing support as well as during delivery and after.

Amanda Alappat

Right. Okay. And then postpartum and then parenting. Yes. Could you

Danielle An

tell me about the birthing as well as after. Delivery, because I think physically, and I think even more mentally doing something that you never thought you could do is truly a transformational event that happens for any mother and even the father.

Could you tell us a little bit more about the importance of the support that you need afterwards?

Amanda Alappat

I find that it's a big missing piece because there is a lot of emphasis on the pregnancy. There is a lot of emphasis on the birth, and then there's really not much talk about, especially the immediate postpartum, but also the ongoing postpartum.

And even if you think about care providers, they see you at your six week mark after giving birth. And then they're like, okay, Good luck. See you when you, if you, when you get pregnant again, and six weeks is nothing. So my work is to also, hopefully in pregnancy, have the woman and her family start thinking about what kind of layers of support they have, what kind of support they want.

So that might be a postpartum doula that might be a mother-in-law or a mother to come and stay or family that might be some friends, maybe setting up a meal train for some couples. It's a baby nurse. So just thinking about what they are comfortable with, what they could afford, where they see they're going to need the most help.

Like for me, I didn't want a baby nurse because I didn't want someone sleeping in my house. I wanted to be the one to wake up with my baby, but for some other women, they really want that sleep through the night. So that would be something also, who's going to be taking care of the mother. Who's going to be feeding her.

Who's going to be tending to her needs. Who's going to be massaging her or. Checking in with her emotionally and making her feel like it's okay to rest. Who can she really trust with her baby for a half an hour or an hour? So she could recover. Who's going to be doing the laundry, grocery, shopping the dog walking.

And if the father let's say, or the partner has a week off from work or two weeks off who is going to hold space for that mother, when all of a sudden it's heard her baby alone all day, every day. So we talk about that. I also talk about postpartum nutrition. I personally feel like everyone should have some kind of bodywork or pelvic floor therapy or some kind of practice to help restore their body.

You know, in some countries that standard of care, you get like 10 sessions with the pelvic floor therapist here we don't. So, but you have to be more proactive. I could talk about with them Yoni steaming, which is a very nice practice. Some women like to have a belly bind, just something to close them up in a way.

Danielle An

Okay. Hang on. What is Yoni steaming?

I

Amanda Alappat

think it is, you can think of it as a facial for your vagina and your vulva. So basically you would get a collection of herbs that you bring to a boil and then you place it in a bowl. And there are like Yoni steaming stools, which I have. But before I had one, I would put the bowl in the toilet. And then sit backwards on the toilet so I could lean over and it's basically wonderful.

You know, it has a lot of therapeutic benefits and healing, and again, it's like the intention, right? Like I'm setting an intention for healing and I'm carving out this time and I'm prioritizing my self-care and look for it. If you have a beautiful, wonderful birth without tearing, but your pelvic floor and your lady parts still definitely took a, I don't want to say that.

Yeah, definitely. We're pushed and stretched. I'm just

Danielle An

curious because I come from. An Asian culture. And in my two postpartum experiences, I was advised by my mother to have a postpartum. I don't want to say doula, but a postpartum caretaker for me and the baby. And I don't know how I might have survived without that.

My mother was not here for, especially my first birth. And I thought that was mostly like an Asian cultural thing. So this is really interesting for me. Cause I feel like in mainstream, I'll say America, it's not widely talked about or discuss the postpartum care, taking and recovery for mothers. There's a lot of focus on feeding diaper changes, bouncing

Amanda Alappat

back, get back to work, sleep, train your baby as if nothing happened as if within six to 12.

You're expected to, you're supposed to. Yeah, I do think other coaches, teachers do a much better job. My husband's Indian and they have a lot of aerobatic traditions, certain massages and just same kind of thing. Like another woman coming to care for intents of the mother. Whereas in this country, unfortunately, it's a Bismal, it's an abomination really of what's the emphasis on getting back into shape, exterior, external exterior.

It's no wonder that so many women have pelvic floor disorders and continents. Of course, of course. Like there was no tending to, there was no healing. There was no time for recovery. And you know, especially a lot of women are now isolated without any kind of support doing it on their own. Especially if you have multiple children.

So part of my work is to tell families there

these are even options. So I'm curious, why do you think these are such mysterious things that people don't even know to ask about, to inquire about, to get curious about as options? Why do you think that is? Why is this kind of information not widely spread among expecting mothers?

The post people want the truth? Yes, please. I think the whole experience from preconception to postpartum has been co-opted by the medical system, the obstetric medical system and the allopathic system, which is a for-profit business tending to let's say, look for pathologies or interference or manipulation control, a lot of benefits of disconnect, right?

Do they want a woman in their full power showing up to birth wild and loud and moving around and primal? Or do they want a woman that's passive and medicated and, um, and obedient. And unfortunately there's so many women experiencing traumatic births and then they're handing this baby and it's okay.

Good luck. And then breastfeeding is usually challenging if they have any kind of tearing, right? No one is really serving them or supporting them. It's a damn shame. One of the teachers that I learned from, she says, if you want to look at the health of the planet, look at the health of mothers. And yes, I know so many women that are suffering are really suffering.

Danielle An

Yeah. Even from my own personal experiences and observations, when the mother is not in a good spot, physically, mentally, whether it's from a recent birth and recovery and traumatic birth, or even a normal, whatever is called a normal birth, it's just a really extraordinary event in a person's life. It's a physical, emotional experience.

So I think that whole life stage without that kind of support or mothering of the mother, there's no way that a mother. Be in a space to provide care and nurture the child that needs the mother to survive

Amanda Alappat

because they really set the tone for the family. The mother usually sets the tone for the family and look, I know all of this and I still didn't have enough support in my most recent birth.

And it really, it...