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:
Chama’s journey into childbirth education and birthwork
The role of doulas in childbirth
The difference between a OBGYN, doula and midwife
The problematic nature of the medical industrial complex in relationship to birth
how doulas can re-humanize care in a culture and system that dehumanizes from the bottom up
raising the bar of birth experiences
the intricacies of complex medical trauma and how it trickles into our society
taking a restorative justice approach to birthwork
the connection between farming and birthwork
how tending space in nature can help teach us how to tend and care for our human systems (we are nature)
doula work is inherently justice work
the power of small adjustments and interactions in making big change and how tending land can teach us about this
how death and birth are parallel initiations
