What Happens when You Apply Ayurvedic Principles to your Pregnancy Journey? Shri's birth story, Part II

In today's episode I finish my conversation with Shri.

She shares her experience of birth, and the things that made postpartum a challenge--in particular Covid and the isolation it involved

She shares the ayurvedic approach to both the preconception period, and to postpartum to help restore balance in the body

including topics on:
movement
stress management
food/herbs in the postpartum

We pick up where we left off last week, with lessons Shri learned from her experience of a stroke before she got pregnant.

To find More from Shri:
you can check out her website: https://vivabyshri.cohere.live/about
Her Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/vivabyshri/
and her Facebook Page :   https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554924608066

Transcript

Paulette  0:03  
Welcome to What you didn't expect in fertility, pregnancy & birth. How we think and feel about this enormous transition often lives in the gap between what we expected and what we actually experienced. This gap exists in part because of how we tend to talk about and portray these events on all kinds of media--in a one dimensional way--everything was amazing. But it's more often the case that there are beautiful things that happen AND at the same time, really challenging things that happen. This show shares true experiences, both the easy parts and the difficult parts and how we managed what we didn't expect, the intense things that can happen in the course of this transition can impact how you see yourself, how you see your partner and how you parent The better we understand what happened to us, the better we can manage all the things that follow. I’m your host, Paulette Kamenecka. I’m a writer and an economist and the mother of two girls and I met many, many challenges in this process, none of which I expected.

In today's episode I finish my conversation with Shri. She shares her experience of birth, and the things that made postpartum a challenge--in particular Covid and the isolation it involved at a time when she needed hands on support, She also shares the ayurvedic perspective on postpartum to help restore balance in the body and why we might opt for this holistic approach instead of the piece meal offerings in traditional western practice.

We pick up where we left off last week with lessons she learned from her experience of a stroke before she got pregnant.

Shri  0:10  
Sometimes it's very hard to come to terms with the life we imagined versus the life we actually have to live. And I think I have worked on becoming more and more comfortable with it, and therefore working with other people to make that space and time for themselves as well. And where the pregnancy itself is concerned, I think it was the consequence of the events that I didn't just walk into it,

Paulette  0:34  
yeah,

Shri  0:34  
but if that didn't happen, I would like any other woman walk into it, and that's what most of us do. And I think the reason that most women don't do it because they don't know what it entails. Why would I do a trimester zero? I don't know what to do. That's the real thing. The

Paulette  0:52  
other thing I would say about that is, for sure, I don't know what it's like in India, but for sure here, pregnancy is treated as so routine and so casually, and people imagine that you'll have sex, you'll get pregnant, you'll be pregnant for however many months. You'll go to the hospital, you'll have the baby, and then two or three weeks later, you'll be back to your old self. Yes, and that's such a false narrative about what actually happens, right? And then people are shocked that, like, holy shit, this isn't what I expected. This is totally different, but it is kind of delegitimating the magnitude of the transition. I feel like it's totally unfortunate, and you would not want to go through the same medical, scary things you went through before you got pregnant. But in some ways, there are some parallels between that and becoming a mother, because you don't go back, right? There's no going back. That's not a thing. You become something different, right? And it can be scary, but also there are beautiful things about that. Yes, absolutely you did this trimester zero, and you took care of yourself to get balance. And then, did you walk into pregnancy easily?

Shri  2:09  
I did. I did walk into pregnancy easily? I was in my mid 30s at the time, so it was that piece of like, getting pregnant was very easy. But then again, fear. Fear was the biggest piece for me. I was always afraid. Okay, I was in constant fear. But I think a lot of women are for very different reasons, for for entirely personal, different reasons. Women do feel scared of labor, scared of the first trimester, scared of all kinds of different things. And I think there was fear that I had to overcome on my own, that I had to do mental and emotional work on it was during covid as well. My son was born in 2020, so advocacy was a big piece for me, just talking about my health with my physicians all the time, because even among my first set of six, seven physicians, for example, my hematologist, she didn't want to talk about stress, and she said, Oh, if all of us are so stressed, and if a stress was the factor, then everybody would be having a stroke. That's not true. Everybody will not have a stroke. Everybody will have something different, yeah, yeah, the illness will manifest itself. The body will show symptoms and signs, and something will happen. It will just not be a stroke, yeah, it will be something different. But, but to dismiss the idea was hurtful to me at the time, and I think these things are at the core of the problems with the Western system, but they are also understandable because they are doing a massive job of their own. So I really feel like we should accept both sides and incorporate them for our personal benefits. I also went through mental health challenges during the post stroke recovery phase, and so another one of my physicians, she said, No, I will give you antidepressants. And you know, that was also the point where I had decided I'm not going to take any more medications in my system. She's body is not going to have all this cocktail going on, which is not making any sense to me anymore. And that's when Ayurveda, when it hit me like it helped me with post stroke fatigue, it helped me with mental wellness, it helped me physically. And I felt like, wow, this is just amazing. This is actually possible if more people knew about it and learned about it. And maybe it will not work the same way for everybody, but it will create a big effect, and it's so worth thinking and doing it in this way. And I had a maternal, neonatal fetal expert who was lovely. She helped me really understand what was going on inside me, and it was such a support and help that I received from her. And I feel so grateful even today. But then there was, like the other person who was hell bent on me having a natural push through pregnancy, and I just did not feel comfortable with it, because what does

Paulette  5:13  
that mean? What's a natural push through pregnancy, pushing

Shri  5:15  
the baby naturally to the vagina? Oh,

Paulette  5:18  
you mean unmedicated labor? Yes, yeah, and that was not your

Shri  5:24  
no. That was not my choice. Yes, no. I wanted an epidural, and I wanted a C section, and that's what I wanted, because I felt kind of fragile. I think the fear was making me fragile. When I look back at my pregnancy, I don't I was it was not necessarily true that I couldn't have done a labor or gone through a labor. I probably could have, but I was so engulfed by the fear of the trauma for the past that that felt like the best decision for myself.

Paulette  5:56  
I mean, who could blame you? I'm afraid for you to go through natural labor, not because of the pain and all that stuff, but just because I don't want to stress your body that much, right? But that physician,

Shri  6:09  
he was talking me through, and we were just having visit after visit, and I almost had to convince him which, which is kind of opposite of what most women go through. I think most women are told to get a C section quickly. And I was like to do this. So it was kind of opposite. It was covid. And you know, the I think covid might have added to my fear and not having access to my family and not having any support so things like those, yeah, but also, advocacy is a big piece like you wanted to go, you have to start advocating for it from trimester one, as soon as you're pregnant, 100%

Paulette  6:45  
you've had this very stressful life event before pregnancy, the pregnancy is more or less fine, but for covid, which is super stressful and there's all this uncertainty with all these things on your plate, do you have a minute to consider what postpartum will be like before you get there?

Shri  7:02  
Yeah, I think to a certain extent, all moms to be have this big picture that there's going to be a postpartum period. For me, the difficulty was not having family support, not having anybody around, and my partner's still having to go to work for long hours. So the isolation was a big piece of it for me. Now, there are some things that I had prepared during the pregnancy for my postpartum based off of ivy, which I was aware of, but also now, as my research has deepened, I found out that there's just many more things that we can do for good postpartum period, because the thing for most women is we want to go back to our normal lives as fast as possible. We want to get back to work as soon as we can, and we want to feel more whole again. So so let me back off a little bit here and start to talk about what the postpartum based it rain is. So it's really the time when the body is recovering from birth physically, but it's also adapting physiologically to a non pregnant state. And when we do a postpartum intervention from an Ayurvedic perspective, we're really looking at facilitating the adaptation of the body in that phase, and we're looking to bring in all kinds of supports for the body to be able to adapt faster and better.

Paulette  8:28  
Now I'm glad you're bringing this up, because first of all, there is a phrase that I hate in our culture called bounce back, imagining you'll just immediately. But let's talk for one second, because you have both sides. You have a western side and an eastern side. In your medical view of the body, according to Western medicine, post harm is kind of six weeks, and then you go back, and that's the point at which your uterus shrinks back to its normal size. But many things in your body have not changed or gone back. I mean, you're going back is kind of the wrong that's like work life balance that doesn't really exist, right? You're not going back. You're not going to recreate the body you had before you had a pregnancy, because that does not exist anymore. Now you're something different. But there are all these things like blood supply and size of your heart and, yeah, so many other things in your body that take much longer than six weeks to adjust to. So one thing I appreciate about Ayurveda is the recognition of that fact. And it sounds like you're about to tell us things that you could do to support your healing. I mean, it took nine months to create that body to give birth, so Yeah, six weeks. It's not going to go back to something

Shri  9:39  
absolutely so it entirely depends on the age of the mother, the state of the body of the mother, which is more important than the age, and there are so many other environmental factors that come into play. And so a bounce back is really a term I noticed at all. A woman's body doesn't bounce back. She just becomes something different. And we are interested in making that a safe, healthy, rejuvenative process for her, versus spiraling down from it. And so in our own way, that the big approach is it's called karba sanskara. And karpa literally means fetus, and sanskara means parivar, change in character. Okay? And there are different stages to this. It's the preconception phase, the entire pregnancy, and then the postnatal so guard sanskara actually includes all of this, and it says that the term is change and character. So there's a lot of change that happens for the woman, preconception, all through the pregnancy and then through postpartum. There's another big change. We must understand the seriousness and the magnitude of the change that the woman is experiencing on a day to day basis. There's a lot of environmental factors and everything that we intake, in terms of food, sleep and how that affects us, our genetic expression, and that we do have influence over that, which is why preconception work is so important. Because when we enter pregnancy with that work done, we are already setting a really good stage, both for ourselves and the baby. Now, now the for a woman who's done that work, she has a definite leverage, but now coming back to postpartum. So immediately after giving birth, the problems that show up for the vast majority of women, even though they even look different for everybody, is pain, and it's good. It's going to be like back pain, perennial pain, vaginal pain, breast pain, and a woman is experiencing a lot of pain, especially in the first 10 days after birth, and this is all while she's also expected to breastfeed. She's probably not sleeping very well because the baby's taken away her sleep. And there's a lot of hormonal changes at that point in time in the woman's body, and even though we recognize it from an intervention point of view, there's only so much pain relief medication that we can give a woman, typically, in hospitals, they will tell you to take a Tylenol for three days or something like that, which alone is it's a lot of heavy medication that comes with Other kinds of side effects, and it can potentially doesn't. For everybody, we cannot live off of Tylenol for two weeks or three weeks, when the reality is that for most women, the pain extends beyond the three days, the intensity might change, and the position of where it's happening in the body, that tends to shift. But it's not like it just goes away. So in Ayurveda, there is a lot of emphasis on using food in the specific phases of the postpartum. So the first three days down. In Ayurveda, we also want to cleanse the body. We want to cleanse the body in the first three to five days. So the foods that are given are cleansing in nature, the food has to have an ultrasound, properties, anti inflammatory, properties, antiseptic properties, and it has to be helping with immunity, vitality and rejuvenation after two weeks. But the first phase is more about cleansing the uterus. It's more about trying to bring the hormones back in balance. And the diet is really very soft. It's a little bit like a porridge or like a thick broth, but it has some very, very cooked vegetables, some spices. Then there is also rice with milk that's given with subsea nose. The mother's not expected to eat or not in the first two three days, she's only expected to cleanse and to just give whatever breast milk is coming up. And then there is something called in traditional medicine. It's called the ctora. It's a combination with a lot of dry ginger powder, because dry ginger powder has all these anti inflammatory and energistic properties. And so we want to use that in a combination with a lot of other ingredients, which also helps with improving iron levels. And if there is excessive bleeding, it would help with that. There's turmeric, there's key in it. And there are also lots of hopes which can be used. So there, there's lots of these different ingredients, and they help with cleansing the blood, they help the purification, they have the cleansing and then it also helps the fortification after a couple of weeks. So the diet really continues. It's supposed to be anything from 60 to 90 days, which is similar to the western section of what postpartum should be. But just having listened to women's stories and my own as well, I don't think that we can, like, put a label to the fourth trimester and say, Oh, it's three months long, because it's really different for everybody. And for me, I think it took me a whole year to feel like myself again. Yeah, it took me more than a year, probably, to just feel normal.

Paulette  14:56  
Let me make two comments on this. Comment. Number one is, I love that Ayurveda has a term already for preconception, pregnancy and postpartum. I interviewed brandy Cummings, she has also focused on functional medicine, and she said she was looking all over in western medicine literature, for some term that covers that entire period. And she said that she couldn't find one, none existed, and that she coined panna, but it sounds like Ayurveda beater to it. It has already in its archives, noted that these periods in a woman's life are all related and should be looked at, yeah, as a unit. They're all connected to each other. So I love that. Yeah. And the second thing is, I like the emphasis on diet to help you feel better. And I'm just thinking, if you have just had a baby, the last thing you want to do is make all these very specific food choices you don't have time. You're eating saltines that you left from your pregnancy that are three months old sitting on your counter or whatever, but you will feel terrible already feel badly, because your body is good for this huge thing, and you're exhausted and you don't have the bandwidth to make food. But I'm guessing you could make this ahead.

Shri  16:13  
Yes, some of it can be made ahead. And I did make some of it ahead, and I just used it up later, if we go down into the kitchen and actually start doing these, it's very, very simple, which means that really, any other family member should be helping us can do it, and men should do it for their wives. It's the recipes are really simple. As long as you have all the ingredients in the kitchen, it's very easy to just throw everything in. And the point is also that the recipe can be anything. You can make these with cooked vegetables, or you can make it sometimes with rice and Dal or lentils or in a soup format. The point is that these ingredients should be in it to be able to have the effect that we are looking for.

Paulette  16:58  
That's very hopeful. I love the point that your partner should be making it for you personals, and second of all, that you're not setting out a 12 course meal. This is not an intricate pastry that you have to make with some special thing. It's just include these ingredients in whatever warm, nutritive thing you will be consuming

Shri  17:16  
and try to enjoy. Can put turmeric you can put in your vegetables, nothing, nothing cold, should be consumed in the space. Nothing raw is very advisable. So should be really warm, thoroughly cooked, satiating food, and it should be tasty. Just have it cooked to whatever culture or whatever diet you have been following. But add these ingredients because they help with doing all the work postpartum that we wanted to do. This

Paulette  17:47  
sounds amazing. Did you do any of this in your postpartum or no, because some

Shri  17:51  
of it, I took some of it, not all of it. Whatever I had pre prepared, was actually more useful for me. But I also know I would use a lot of herbs. And I think herbs are just they're really easy to consume. For example, if you want to use Shatavari, you can just boil some water and use shadari. Just drink the tea, tea made out of Shatavari, or the tea made out of Cano seeds, which is what we do the first few days as well. So it's just carom seeds boiled in water, and then you strain the tea and consuming the tea in small quantities for a few days and then even later, because it really helps with detoxifying the whole system slowly and gradually. And, yeah, yeah. So none of this is a miracle. It all has to be used together and for a fairly consistent period of time. And the thing is, for people who feel the effect and they feel the difference, they might just fall in love with all of this as a lifestyle, you know? And, of course, really simple to

Paulette  18:48  
use. For sure, I am an adherence of all this stuff, right? And I'm willing to do it because I feel better on it. So this is a great suggestion, and I'm glad that you had some of these things at your fingertips when you needed them. Support is so critical during postpartum, and that sounds hard that your family was kind of kept out, I assume because of covid.

Shri  19:09  
Yeah, I was on the phone. I was just using all the social media and the Skype and the zoom and everything we have to stay connected within family. Yeah, so, but there is a lot we can do, and I'd love to talk about postpartum depression for a bit. So from an Ayurvedic perspective, postpartum depression in particular is the sudden loss of the Kapha dosha, which is the binding qualities the sticky or the watery qualities that develop in the body in the lower part during the pregnancy and when the baby is born, suddenly that is out of the body. So all that kafa is out of the body, and what that does is aggravates the water. So all depression in general is a vata problem. It's like an airy, windy space, extra space, more space than required, more space than healthy. That kind of a problem postpartum depression. If it goes on beyond a point of time, if a woman is feeling it for more than two weeks, then it will start to change form. Then it can stay as vata aggravation and Kapha depletion, but it can also depressive. It can become a heavy, stagnant, kind of a feeling where it's more Kapha predominant. And then the woman is not talking to people, she's not going out into the kitchen to cook anything for herself. It can mutate. And so we want to ideally catch it early on. And food really helps, because, again, it helps with the mental aspects as well. But in addition to that, there's also certain asanas or yogic postures, which are very helpful in that phase, as they are even preconception and then during the pregnancy, and that there's also regular top therapy. Sometimes women will reach out for a therapist for postpartum depression, but that therapy, to me, would feel incomplete, because it has to be like the whole package. It has to be the right type of movement tailored for the woman. It has to be the whole food thing, and she has to be, because it's a definite phase of the going through. And in Ayurved, because it's an ancient science, we just talk a lot about the baby, because the health of the mother is affecting the baby, and that's fair, but it's also just for the mother alone.

Paulette  21:40  
Yeah, no, for sure, it has real impacts, both on the baby and the mother. And when you're talking about this, like multi pronged approach to address it with therapy, movement and diet, what it makes me think, and you can correct me if I'm on the wrong track here is that diet obviously super important for your body in general, for your microbiome, where all the neurotransmitters are made, or majority of them, movement through yoga in particular, because it's a marriage of breath work and movement that really helps manage stress. And stress obviously has real impacts on the body. If you're feeling stressed that there's chemistry going on under that and talk therapy also to help mindset and help you get things out. And so you may be describing this in a way that people have not heard before, but what you're really advocating is concerted approach looking at the system of the whole person, as opposed to the very kind of little piecewise things that we do in the US naturally. Yes,

Shri  22:45  
the typical things women look for are to lose weight faster, to be able to get to work faster, and to be able to take care of their baby better. These are typically to have more better quality sleep. But the reality of this is that these are all external goals. Ultimately, if your body's integrity is preserved through taking out maybe 4050, extra minutes every day to do all of this work over a period of time, maybe just 30 days, you will have these goals met. You will be able to go back to work because you just feel better, you will be able to take better care of your baby. Because you're sleeping better, you're eating better. Postpartum, once we get birth, our energetic body, it takes a certain hit, which is hard to describe for me, but the our energetic body has to also recover. Yeah, some women also are very exhilarated after giving birth, because, of course, there's all those happy hormones going up, and they feel overexcited for a few days, and then they suddenly feel as if something is wrong, and that's just your postpartum hormones going up and down. And in the process, your feelings and your emotions are also experiencing a lot of highs and lows, and so you are experiencing a certain kind of ups and downs, which you are experiencing as some format of depression, or it's but highs and lows are like emotional disturbances, you know, even if they are not exactly depression, yeah,

Paulette  24:27  
very vehemently dislike the term baby blues. I don't like it because it sounds infantilizing, but it does capture this period of 10 days or two weeks after birth, when there's so much chemistry shifting around that you may not feel like you're in full control of your mood or how you're reacting to things. I think what you're saying is that's normal. Yeah, that's something we might even anticipate. Because how could you have all these giant chemical shifts and not feel them and not have some impact? Yeah,

Shri  24:58  
on the one hand, it is to be expected and it is normal. And on the other hand, if we experience aggravates, it is definitely worth seeking help, yeah, seeking help and support, even from normalizing perspective, prevention is pure in Ayurveda, definitely so. So the more work that we can do before, the easier the transition is going to be.

Paulette  25:20  
Yeah, that sounds amazing. So I am wondering, since it sounds like you learned a bulk of this after your own experience with pregnancy, is there something you would go back and do differently in your preconception, pregnancy or postpartum, knowing what you know now? Yeah,

Shri  25:38  
my process was, was there, I did a lot of good things for myself, but I think now, when I I can teach other women, there's a lot more details that I would add to it. Use a lot of different herbs which I wasn't using earlier. I would use them, for sure, I use them. Some of them I use even now, because these are all herbs which are good for female hormonal system in general, and so that's a big advantage, but it's so it's great to be using them preconceptions. Some of them can be used during pregnancy, and then there are different ones for the postpartum period. So I think that more inclusion of herbs and just what else would I do differently? I think I was great at movement, and I think most women do their prenatal classes and their yoga presence in the post nucleus classes, and that's very helpful. I think we should certainly be added. And I think it's not really about me, it's also about the hospitals and the structures that we interact with. It's really about them just not telling us what to do or giving us more ownership, asserting more ownership over our bodies and other people not interfering with it. I think that was part of my experience, which was irritating to me, and so it's just not about me personally, but it's also about the broad assistance that they interact with and how they perceive women's bodies, and they think they can tell us what to do, to do it. And some of it is fine, because these are standard medical procedures, but some of it is also just this feeling that is my body, and I've been through enough to know what I want to do with it and how I want to do it.

Paulette  27:17  
100% I only know of this one research site. I'm sure there are many, but the one I know about is called leapfrog, and it is a research site where you can look up hospitals C section and different things they do with maternal care, so that you can, to the best of your ability, choose a hospital that matches the things that you want to do in your pregnancy. Maybe have more autonomy, maybe say no to certain monitors, or whatever you want to do to try to shape the part of your pregnancy that you have control over, which, although it's limited, this is something you can do, right? And I think if more of us did the research. I'm not suggesting this, because it was so successful for me. I didn't do any of this. But in the future, going forward, it would be useful if women use that as a resource, and that would be our mechanism to change how hospitals manage pregnant women and birth because right now, we kind of assume it's all the same, and it's not. It's not all the same, and you're not the same. You're walking into an institution with very set rules about how pregnancies are managed, like, how long is too long to let the labor go on and things like that that will make a big difference. Grace is trying to, like, yeah, that is something grasping can going forward.

Shri  28:30  
Yeah. I would add to this that, especially for women who are 35 and above, I think it's, it's so helpful as a preventative, precautionary measure to be talking to a health practitioner just to truly get intuitive insight, to be able to enhance their own intuition about their bodies, because, based of my experience, I've seen sometimes that we think we know our bodies, but The reality is we are doing so many different things, we sometimes overextend our bodies and exercise or different formats of sports. And so there is a perception of what we can do and what we cannot do. And this is very individual to every woman. If we can get the support of somebody to talk it out with us and talk out on its health experiences, what we perceive our capacity to be. And I think all those pieces are really important, because no story can really be representative of humankind in general, yeah, but I have also seen that women who work out a lot. They exercise, they play sports, they have a certain confidence in their bodies, which

Paulette  29:45  
other well, I can't imagine him saying, like, I can't make you when it comes right on his version, his version, his version of that is, like, you don't have to come if you don't want to that. Like, I like, once he told me what he said, I was like, Oh yeah, it sounds like he's exactly about

Unknown Speaker  29:59  
your internal logins. And.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai