Jul 12, 2021
Episode #62 of the Ground Shots Podcast features a conversation with Chama Woydak of Homegrown Families and Dancing Springs Farm, out of Asheville, North Carolina.
Chama and I have a relationship that spans over a decade, which began when I landed on her farm in 2012 to go to herbal medicine school. We ended up farming together for a few years before I hit the road, and I owe a lot of my knowledge about growing food and caring for animals to Chama who has dedicated the last few decades to these practices alongside her work as a doula and childbirth educator. As you’ll hear in this interview, her work as a farmer tending life and death is inextricably linked to her work as a doula re-humanizing care for others’ births in a society that doesn’t prioritize it or see it as vitally important.
In this conversation with Chama, we talk about:
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Chama’s journey into childbirth education and birthwork
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The role of doulas in childbirth
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The difference between a OBGYN, doula and midwife
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The problematic nature of the medical industrial complex in relationship to birth
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how doulas can re-humanize care in a culture and system that dehumanizes from the bottom up
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raising the bar of birth experiences
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the intricacies of complex medical trauma and how it trickles into our society
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taking a restorative justice approach to birthwork
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the connection between farming and birthwork
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how tending space in nature can help teach us how to tend and care for our human systems (we are nature)
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doula work is inherently justice work
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the power of small adjustments and interactions in making big change and how tending land can teach us about this
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how death and birth are parallel initiations