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

   

Chama on Instagram: @chamawoydak

Homegrown Families on Instagram: @homegrown_families

https://www.ashevillehomegrownfamilies.com/

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Theme music: 'Sweat and Splinters' by Mother Marrow

Interstitial Music: Ebb and Flow, Finger and the Bone by Brown Bird

This episode hosted by: Kelly Moody

Produced by: Kelly Moody