Wise Womb and Conscious Contraception with Samantha Zipporah

Samantha Zipporah joins me on this episode of the body literacy podcast to discuss conscious contraception and the wisdom of women's bodies. Sam is a fertility, sex, and cycle educator, author and activist with over 20 years of experience in personal, professional, and clinical contexts.

A former birth doula whose roots of study can be found in traditional midwifery, Sam’s work rises from an ancient lineage of midwives, witches, & wise women. She provides radical love for navigating the womb continuum & reclaiming ancestral wisdom.

Together, we peel back the layers of history to reveal the entrenched fears surrounding women's reproductive health and challenge the narratives that have been handed down through generations. This episode promises to be an insightful excavation into the magic of menstruation, the medicalization of childbirth, and the potent power that comes from embracing our bodies' innate functions.

As we converse with Sam, we shed light on the shifting landscapes of midwifery, the rise of medical dominance, and the evolution of the doula's role in modern healthcare. We scrutinize the implications of credentialing systems and insurance on personal health autonomy and ponder the intersection of commercial interests with traditional care practices. Through personal stories and historical context, we navigate the journey toward reclaiming ancestral wisdom and fostering radical love for the womb continuum.

You can learn more about Sam and her work at https://www.samanthazipporah.com/

This episode is sponsored by Pact organic cotton clothing. Pact makes its clothes with certified organic cotton in fair trade manufacturing facilities. Organic cotton uses up to 95% less water than conventional cotton during the wash phase and doesn’t contain the harsh chemicals, bleaches or dyes that conventional cotton uses. PACT organic clothing is so super soft that you’ll never want to wear anything else.

Your purchase helps make the Body Literacy Podcast possible.

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Transcript

Jen Mayo: 2:39

You're listening to the Body Literacy Podcast your connection to the art and science of feeling really good body, mind and spirit. I'm your host and holistic health coach, jen Mayo. If you've never experienced truth and freedom inside your body and amazing adventures about to begin healing happens in community. Body literacy is your tribe. Join me in discovering the keys to fearlessly unlocking your body's innate intelligence and resilience. Turn on to the wisdom of your body as we connect your wellness dots by exploring whole person healing, from neuroscience and nutrition to sexual health and sleep. Join the wellness revolution and start speaking your body's language. For a former birth doula whose roots of study can be found in traditional midwifery, sam's work rises from an ancient lineage of midwives, witches and wise women. She provides radical love for navigating the womb continuum and reclaiming ancestral wisdom. We discuss the history of hormonal contraception, medicalized childbirth, the wisdom of women's bodies, the magic of menstruation and so much more. So welcome to the show.

Samantha Zipporah: 4:12

Sam, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Jen Mayo: 4:16

Yes, I'm so glad to have you here.

Jen Mayo: 4:19

So I wanted to have maybe sort of a more in-depth conversation over this idea of conscious contraception and just what we can learn from our fertility signs and our menstrual cycles and so forth as those being used as vital signs.

Jen Mayo: 4:38

Essentially, I'll probably start out and give a little kind of set up where I think this conversation may be going, with just a little anecdote from my own life. So I remember Plain as Day being five years old and sitting at my kitchen counter we were living in Florida at the time and I was bawling my eyes out and my mom came in and she saw that I was so upset and asked me you know, jenny, why are you so upset? And I looked at her and I said I'm worried that when I'm older and I have a baby it's going to hurt. Yeah, and as an adult, you know, I look back both humorously and very seriously at that, you know, snapshot in time, and think to myself what messages had a five-year-old little girl received at that point in time that she already had this ingrained fear of her natural body and the things that it does?

Jen Mayo: 5:42

So I know you have a lot of experience in this area and I think you have a different context for where you're approaching women and their bodies and their fertility. So, with that said, maybe you can give us a little bit of background on your history with helping women.

Samantha Zipporah: 6:06

Yeah, I'm like different. Different in relation to what, right, and just oh, I just want to, you know, hold your little five-year-old self, right. Thanks for sharing that story. It kind of like spun me off into memory and like my first memories of actually my first period or actually my second period. I have a very amazing, like visceral memory where you remember like the quality of the light and like the texture of the washcloth that I was folding in the laundry room as I was having my second bleed and contemplating the fact that I could now create a human being inside of my body, right, and that's what this meant. And for me I was not at all afraid of the pain. For me it was like somebody had given me a Porsche, you know, and I was like let's get this thing out on the road. I want to see how fast it could go, like look at what this amazing machine can do, right. Which is kind of, you know, pretty indicative of like what my journey has been like, in that it started very young, with amazement and fascination and wonder and a very mechanical view of the body, right.

Samantha Zipporah: 7:40

I come from a family and, you know, most of us come from a culture as a whole with immense disease and illness and disempowerment and pain, where there's this rampant belief that having a womb is something that is going to make you suffer and going to be a painful experience.

Samantha Zipporah: 8:07

That is like a disadvantage Right In life or something Right, and some part of my little girl self. Thank you to whatever divine spark. Whatever you know past life, whatever you want to call it, some part of me knew as a very small child that that it wasn't supposed to be painful, but it was supposed to actually give me both power and pleasure. Right, but I didn't know how right, and so I started studying as a tiny person and I know this even more intimately. You know I've been telling these stories as I introduced myself at a workshop or a podcast forever, but it's like very fresh and very detailed right now because I'm doing this massive project where I'm reading all of my journals and I started keeping a journal age six. Oh wow, so I'm really. I started studying women's bodies, women's wisdom by Christiane Northrop, love her, and herbal healing for women by Rosemary Gladstar.

Jen Mayo: 9:16

Okay.

Samantha Zipporah: 9:17

When I'm in fifth and sixth grade that's amazing Before I even started to bleed, yeah. And even though they had very holistic and like emotional, psycho, spiritual perspectives offered in their books, like I would say, really the first decade of my studies, I was still just totally focused on the mechanisms and like I thought I could like figure it out intellectually, that if I could figure out how my body worked I could make it run well, like a good machine, right, and I guess I'm just like which parts of the story to tell, right? So I started very young, before I had any concept of it having anything to do with how I would earn a living or even like what my role would be in relationships or within community, and it really just naturally evolved. You know, I helped somebody put in a tampon when I was 11. And I always say that was like my first doula job.

Samantha Zipporah: 10:23

And then soon enough, people needed help with contraception, they needed help with their abortions and then eventually one of my friends got pregnant and wanted to have a baby and so I started studying to be a midwife to support her in her birth, and I was a midwife's apprentice and student and then a birth doula, and birth doula was like my primary, you know public job identity that, like I, fit into a little box for most of my 20s.

Samantha Zipporah: 10:58

And then in my late 20s I started to professionalize the care that I had been offering folks for loss and termination and that began eclipsing my birth work and I created a training and started teaching other people how to offer companionship and holistic care for any type of a miscarriage or abortion. And all this time I'm always teaching people how to tell when they ovulate, because I'm obsessed with it. And I learned when I was 19, living on a farm, doing an internship, reading Katie Singers the Garden of Fertility, and I learned doing a farming internship and studying permaculture. So I naturally saw my ovulation cycle as a cycle of nature that we could apply the principles of permaculture to and how important it is that we respect the cycles of nature as our teachers and create a relationship of synergy and humility really with them, rather than trying to dominate or control them, which always ends in it does not end well when we try and dominate, as we can see in so many facets of our culture.

Samantha Zipporah: 12:31

So.

Jen Mayo: 12:32

I'll take a pause.

Samantha Zipporah: 12:33

That was like a bit of my story. It's always been I use this term womb continuum, this continuum being a cycle that has no beginning and no end, and it's a really expansive and inclusive perspective. And certainly I've developed expertise in certain areas of the continuum, but I've always been a student and a teacher and a companion and a guide for the whole thing. So it's the ovulation, it's the orgasm, it's the abortion, it's the yeast infection, it's all of it, and just they all inform one another. So All right.

Jen Mayo: 13:20

Yeah, can you give us a little more perspective too on the whole concept of midwifery and being a doula, because I think you know I personally had a midwife in a hospital setting, which I think is a step in the right direction, but I don't think it's radically different than having an OBGYN deliver your baby for you. Yeah, there's this concept of kind of lay midwifery. That is kind of what people used to do in terms of having someone with them to help them during that process, versus the medicalized version that I think we're more familiar with now.

Samantha Zipporah: 14:12

Sure, yeah, I would refer people. I mean I will give some explanation, but I would refer people to the book Witches, midwives and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenrich and Deidre English, which is really digestible. It's really short and sweet and it is so succinct and effective at communicating specifically the appropriation and the commodification of our traditional skills as women to be able to support the body in general in life, including the processes of birth and you know how to use plant medicine, how to take care of ourselves and one another outside of the systems of hierarchy. We have like a collective cultural amnesia in our culture around this. We're so used to externalizing authority, we're so used to asking permission, we're so used to having a mediator, whether it be a priest or a doctor or a legislator, who is like there to give us permission to access our power. And our fertility and sexuality are raw power, so midwifery until the rise of the American Medical Association and similar organizations globally which arose with the industrial revolution. So we need to see this parallel that our bodies as the earth is not a metaphor and that the commercialization, the mechanization, the appropriation, all of these things of the fertility of both our bodies and the earth has a paper trail of specific wealthy white men hoarding power and creating relationships of subjugation, and it's through that process that midwifery was turned into witchcraft and demonized and stomped out. So the etymology of midwife is simply with women, and so it's a non-hierarchical relationship of companionship.

Samantha Zipporah: 16:59

And in most cultures throughout history across the globe the midwife provided womb to tomb care. There was no specialization in birth. Maybe there was some specialization in birth, but you wouldn't only know about birth. You would also know, for example, about miscarriage or about abortion or about contraception. You would also know how to set a broken bone, how to fight an infection and all of these things, and you would care for somebody in a relationship that had continuity of care in a village, intact culture. So midwifery was, you know, at least in the states.

Samantha Zipporah: 17:46

There is a paper trail, there is propaganda that was put out by the American Medical Association in the early 20th century and the late 19th century, again with this time of the industrial revolution, to demonize home birth and midwives, to say that they were dirty and unsafe and unhealthy, and essentially it was a perpetuation of the witch hunts in a lot of ways. So that you know, people were always practicing home birth underground, but it was technically illegal in the United States, I think it was 1983 or so. My teacher, actually Elizabeth Davis, is the midwife who I studied with, who is an amazing, amazing inspiration. I was talking to another midwife the other day who, like, studied in Canada in the medical system, and so what you had and what she studied, folks in my subculture scene, we call them the medwives.

Samantha Zipporah: 18:59

Right because they're trained in the system to perpetuate the mechanisms of the system, which is a for-profit industry. It's not a healing modality and it actually, like the industry would lose money and lose power if they actually taught us how powerful we were and how capable we were and we lost dependency on them. And so I believe it was in the earlier mid-80s that federally home birth midwife became legal, based on these competency tests and these programs that my teacher helped create, which has positive and negative things once things are regulated and recognized by the state. And then doula is a Greek word that essentially means slave, servant, servant, woman, slave girl.

Samantha Zipporah: 19:59

But they specifically had a connotation of taking care of the fluids Right. So it's the term doula is classist, it's imperialist and I don't use it to identify myself anymore. And it has again been appropriated and commodified to the extent that I was chatting with a woman at a potluck a handful of years ago and she was, like, had three children of her own and one of her best friends was pregnant, and she tells me oh, I would love to help my friend have her baby, but I'm not certified as a doula. So again, it's like these systems I. There's a lot of amazing doulas in the world. There's a lot of folks doing a lot of good, but we do not need permission or certifications to do what we have always done, which is help each other, live, be alive.

Jen Mayo: 21:03

And.

Samantha Zipporah: 21:03

I think that there's danger with any type of credentialing system in creating these hierarchies and barriers to access. So the profession of a doula as somebody who would help somebody have a baby, specifically in the hospital setting, is where it evolved also emerged in the 80s out of Seattle specifically, a woman named Penny Simpkin is like seen as the mother of doula care and it's like you know, it's a band-aid on the system that is broken rather than just burning the system down and starting a new one, which is what my little radical heart is more fond of.

Samantha Zipporah: 21:50

So that there's that I identified as a doula for about a decade and as soon as I started doing more public I had always been doing underground, but as soon as I became more public about the miscarriage and abortion support that I was offering, I was in Oregon at the time and a board of doulas had been working tirelessly for years to get Medicaid to fund doulas and they had finally succeeded to get Medicaid to support hospital birth doulas only if they were trained and certified and approved by the powers that be in a way that were like I had been practicing for 10 years and I would have had to pay several hundred dollars and do their trainings to get their certifications, to get Medicaid to reimburse me 75 dollars per birth when I was, on average, between prenatal and birth and postpartum, spending around 30 to 40 hours with my clients.

Samantha Zipporah: 23:01

So these doulas were like you're not a doula, doulas are for birth, not abortion. So that's becoming a huge movement. Recently that's a whole other podcast interview. That's what I'll stop there for midwife and doula, I'm sure that was more than you bargained for.

Jen Mayo: 23:27

I mean, and maybe on a side tangent on the concept of excuse me, permission, sure yeah, do you think the insurance system in and of itself is a big part of that problem? Because I know for me personally my own personal healing journey my biggest aha moment was losing my insurance, and I've talked about this before.

Jen Mayo: 23:54

But oh losing my insurance, I say, was the best thing that ever happened to my health, because I realized what a teeny, tiny little box I was given permission excuse me to access for healing and care, and as soon as you're ejected from that system, it's like wow, there's this great big world out here of actual healing modalities that don't fit inside the corporate medical industrial complex that I now have access to, as long as you're willing to pay for it and as long as you realize, as long as you value that your health is that important, and I think there's a certain valuing that comes out of having to pay for it out of pocket.

Samantha Zipporah: 24:42

Not that I'm necessarily saying that's the solution, but no, everybody should just free healthcare and free housing for everybody yeah.

Jen Mayo: 24:53

So, yeah that's the the topic of permission, I think is a huge one. Let's talk a little bit about synthetic hormonal contraception, and I think you know, as you've kind of already pointed out, language is very powerful and I think the fact that we've called this, you know, birth control for women. I've more recently heard some people refer to it as chemical castration. Yeah, so how does that change the dynamic when we go from selling you know, birth control as a marketing concept for big pharma, and maybe I think you might be able to give us a little bit of history on the companies involved with that too. How does that change the dynamic when we start using different language to describe what we're actually experiencing here?

Samantha Zipporah: 25:53

Yeah, I'm a big proponent in my work of calling things specifically what they are. Yeah, and I feel like with the term birth control in particular, it's very misleading and I would strongly prefer that we call it ovulation prevention, when that's what it is, which is what the vast majority of synthetic hormonal contraceptive methods are ovulation prevention methods or, in the case with a copper IUD, it would be implantation inhibition method and sperm murderers because you know that's. I mean that's also.

Jen Mayo: 26:40

I guess for listeners, why not like?

Samantha Zipporah: 26:42

where copper ions explode, the little like cell membranes of the sperm heads, if they come in contact with the copper. But they might make it past and you're still ovulating. So it's quite possible to habitually conceive, and then that irritation from the IUD just creates a situation where the endometrial tissue isn't thick enough to support a pregnancy, so you will menstruate. So, yeah, what if we just call these synthetic hormones ovulation prevention pills and birth control being like a planned cesarean, not like a medicine that you take to prevent ovulation from happening, and then it's not preventing birth, it's preventing ovulation, and that we are smart enough, and I think that's like part of the assumption is that, like birth is like this big, very visible thing that like sure it's preventing you from giving birth.

Samantha Zipporah: 27:42

But I feel like we are giving people their power and their agency through self-awareness when we teach them specifically the mechanism of how this thing works. And like, how many clients have you and I had over the years that have been on these medications for years and years and years and they have no idea how they work or what the risks are involved with them? So you know, I think we are smart enough to understand ovulation. I understand that like endocrine health and metabolism and mineral absorption, like. There's a lot more nuance and details, but, like the concept of ovulation and menstruation, we can teach to every eight-year-old, right, and if they want to suppress their ovulation with medications when they get old enough to do so, great. But let's understand fully the risks and benefits, which you cannot understand without understanding the mechanism of the thing that you are putting in your body all the time.

Jen Mayo: 28:50

And, yeah, it just of course comes back to internal versus external authority, right, and that industry, the, the reality that If you're as conscious about your health as I am, you probably read every food label at the grocery store to keep an eye out for toxic ingredients and produce sprayed with pesticides. You may even shop organic beauty brands for your personal care products, but do you read your clothing labels or research fashion brands with integrity? I was shocked when I learned my favorite yoga pants and even my everyday clothes are full of toxic chemicals and synthetic fabrics that are not compatible with our bodies. Many clothes contain PFOS or forever chemicals that are extremely difficult for our bodies to detox in their linked to thyroid issues, hormone disruption, birth defects, reproductive toxicity and more. Formaldehyde is used in many anti-wrinkle fabrics, and many other fabrics are treated with pesticides and antifungal chemicals. Most people think of their skin only as a barrier, when in fact it's also like a sponge or semi-permeable membrane that allows things in and out of our bodies. Consider how many medications are deliverable through patches or creams. That is because skin absorbs many substances it comes into contact with, including the toxic chemicals and fabrics of your clothing, and that's why I switched to buy impact clothing.

Jen Mayo: 30:12

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Jen Mayo: 30:51

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Samantha Zipporah: 31:32

If you've listened to my podcast already, you've probably heard me say it, but I think it's worth saying again that we have to be conscious consumers from the industry and understand that the medical industrial complex is there to provide goods and services, which is different than healing, and that very much services.

Samantha Zipporah: 31:57

If we truly feel like this particular service or this particular good is going to help us heal and we have that level of consciousness in our consumer choices, and then that's great. Like I'm not anti their goods and services I think a lot of them are super valuable but we need to be thinking from this perspective, understanding that they're trying to sell you something. The people who have been trained to work within the industry are trained to sell you the goods and services that the industry provides, and that healing is something completely different that you cannot buy, it's an experience and it's a process, and that there are healing modalities that are 5,000 years old.

Jen Mayo: 32:44

Right, and I think that's something a lot of people don't realize is how young our current medical system is. I mean, we're talking a century or so old, of this paradigm that we've shifted into and that exactly medicine and healing arts have existed, like you said, for thousands and thousands of years, and to just throw out all of that knowledge base and completely replace it with one that I think we're finally starting to understand isn't working very well is something to consider. Yeah, yeah. What are the long-term risks of being on synthetic hormonal contraception?

Samantha Zipporah: 33:26

Of suppressing your ovulation.

Jen Mayo: 33:28

Yes.

Samantha Zipporah: 33:30

So I feel like I mean just the simplistic way of like your brain and your ovaries need to be talking to each other. Yeah, you know, if your brain and your ovaries aren't talking to each other, there's going to be consequences all over the whole system and that's what happens when you shut down ovulation.

Samantha Zipporah: 33:49

You're shutting down, you're silencing the conversation between your brain, your pituitary hypothalamus if you want to get specific about it and your ovaries, and that there's like a cascade of effects ranging from you can't absorb minerals as well.

Samantha Zipporah: 34:11

You could be eating the most perfect organic, nutritional diet ever, but you're not going to be metabolizing those minerals if you're not ovulating because of the important role of progesterone, which you only get natural, healthy progesterone when you're ovulating. And oh my goodness, like listing off all of the different things that can happen if you're not ovulating for an extended period of time. Bone mass, I think, is one that is really shocking, especially in terms of our youth and how much ovulation suppression medications are doled out for a regular period, or acne or things that have nothing to do with preventing pregnancy, even and that we develop about 70% of our bone mass between the ages of 12 and 20 through the process of ovulation. Again, with that, progesterone is very important for being able to fully metabolize all of our minerals, including calcium, to build our bone mass, so that if you're not ovulating regularly from 12 to 20, you're not building bones properly.

Jen Mayo: 35:28

Right and I think we're finally starting to see. I was actually reading an article about veterinary medicine and how some veterinarians are now cautioning against routine spaying and neutering because they're finally realizing like oh are the testes and ovaries actually do have a purpose in the overall health of the brain. They might have a purpose besides just creating babies.

Samantha Zipporah: 35:58

Yeah, and so the term I use a lot and I have a whole module in my conscious contraception skillshare around body ecology, right, and recognizing that our bodies are ecosystems, not just to themselves like not isolated right, like they don't exist in a vacuum, but like starting with understanding basic endocrine function and how your digestion and your mood and your skin and all of these things are going to be affected by your hormonal cycle and when you're on synthetic hormones you don't have a hormonal cycle to be affected by.

Samantha Zipporah: 36:43

And then actually also looking outside of ourselves, into the ecosystem that we live in, understanding all of the Xenoestrogens, the synthetic estrogens from outside of our bodies, from the toxic environment that we live in. Which is one more reason why it's so important to make your own progesterone through ovulation is because, as a culture as a whole, we're all inundated with these toxic levels of estrogen coming from our plastics and our food and industrial agriculture and all these things, and progesterone natural progesterone, which only comes from regular, healthy ovulation counteracts all of this toxicity. But also that when we're taking those synthetic hormones whether it's to suppress ovulation or, to quote unquote replace our hormones in menopause which is absurd thing, also to, anyways, language that we are actively changing the reproductive capacity of fish and amphibians in our waterways due to the toxic load of synthetic hormones from humans consuming pharmaceuticals and pissing them out into our waterways. There is no a way. When you flush that toilet, it goes somewhere and that goes for antibiotics too.

Samantha Zipporah: 38:17

So we have to both consider the personal and the collective ecology and that, yes, you can't shut down your ovaries. You can't remove the testes or the uterus without affecting the entire ecosystem of the body, right right, in humans or in cats I'm like, look, I get my cat sleeping here, whose testicles we did remove.

Jen Mayo: 38:43

I had I put off doing my cat for a while and obviously there were behavioral factors that eventually fed into that decision, but I really I had this like tearing sensation of like I really didn't want to do that to work.

Samantha Zipporah: 38:58

I was like I'm not so bad, but they didn't seem to care at all. No, she was like prepared for the cat to be like sad or depressed or like in pain and they were just like whatever, yeah, right.

Jen Mayo: 39:13

But I will say my cat did put on a lot of weight after we had her fix, though, so I think there's, you know, something to be said for that, yeah.

Samantha Zipporah: 39:22

Totally.

Jen Mayo: 39:24

So we have been enough about cats.

Samantha Zipporah: 39:27

Cats are great. I mean cats are great. I mean I use cats when I teach consent to children in particular, as, like this is the way to be If you want to be touched, be like a cat. Cat tells you. The cat's like dude, touch me and touch me right here.

Jen Mayo: 39:45

And it would be really persistent.

Samantha Zipporah: 39:48

And if somebody touches a cat and the cat doesn't want to be touched, that person is going to get hurt, right, and the cat is going to be gone, right. So I think cats are great. That's lots, and I, if we're going to use, yeah that's an excellent comparison. I love it. I love it. Perk upset Right.

Jen Mayo: 40:12

Um, can you talk a little bit about moon cycles and seasons?

Samantha Zipporah: 40:17

Hmm, yeah, I mean. First thing I want to say is that, speaking of 5,000 year old medicine, right, that, uh, taoism, which is the philosophical and spiritual roots and like sort of an umbrella under which all forms of Chinese medicine acupuncture, acupressure, chinese herbalism, all these various other forms of actual physical medicine Taoism is the philosophical umbrella and that, um, what is now being popularized in the world of menstruality is a word that's being used. It's hugely popularized by the red school out of the UK. They wrote uh, wild Power is an amazing book. I love it.

Samantha Zipporah: 41:09

Um, and it focuses on this the polarity of ovulation and menstruation, with the metaphor of the full moon and the dark moon, and the polarities of the winter and the summer solstice and the seasons in between each stand for some type of uh phase in the menstrual cycle.

Samantha Zipporah: 41:31

So the fertile phase it's all wet and it's spring time and everything's all fertile and lush, and the heat of the summer solstice is, you know, like the heat also, that happens when your progesterone rises after you ovulate. So I love, I love this metaphor. It's so useful, especially for men and children, I mean, I think it's important for women as well, but I think it's an amazing teaching tool for people that don't have this cycle in their body, especially being able to relate to like oh yeah, there's these seasons and everything is really different, and like I'm not in control of it and there's no bad weather, there's only bad gear is one of the things that I'm also really passionate about in this metaphor, um, and so, yeah, menstruation, dark moon, winter solstice, ovulation, full moon, summer solstice, and these, these polar, polar energies, which, again, there's another, there's a whole module of energy anatomy.

Samantha Zipporah: 42:34

Uh, in my skill share, because I there's there's so many different mythological um frameworks throughout history to illustrate the importance of dynamic balance. Yeah Right, that stasis is unnatural.

Jen Mayo: 42:55

Uh huh.

Samantha Zipporah: 42:56

The stasis, that synthetic hormones put our bodies into, a state of stasis where they're trying to make us the same every day. Right, so unnatural and unhealthy, and that actually these, the dynamic balance of the cyclical seasons of the menstrual cycle of the moon, is how life is, is how life does, yeah, uh, and that it's. It's going to be extremely problematic if you try and control or suppress or subjugate those cycles, but I want to again give credit that, to my knowledge, taoism has been using this metaphor and writing about it Right, there's written texts about it for about 5,000 years or longer, and that I'm I've been frustrated to see white women claiming that they made this up, uh, and like getting upset on social media when people reshare their chart, right, that they did that.

Samantha Zipporah: 44:04

They're like die on the source of this. And I was like that was on the source of this and I don't really know. I mean, I think, like all cultures have had systems of energy anatomy and that most of that was communicated orally, and just cause it's not written down didn't mean it didn't exist, right, um, so yeah.

Jen Mayo: 44:33

And I think there's been this notion too, that you know, with the advent of pharmaceuticals to control our bodies, you know that that indigenous cultures and you know cultures, cultures of antiquity, were just oblivious to how their bodies worked, like they were just stupid and didn't know what they were doing. Like is that is that true, Like did they just they didn't know what they were doing and they needed you know science to come along and and show them how to control.

Samantha Zipporah: 45:09

Yeah, I, yeah, that's like what a what an amazing like colonizer over culture perspective, which is, of course, what they love you to believe, because then you need to like have access to academia and all of these highly regulated, funded, private, like privatized, industrial ways of knowing. But I mean that comes into just like gnosis and like epistemologies and all of these like how do you know what you know? Do you know what you know? And that, yeah, I believe you and I experience like this. Really, I feel like it's a remembering the level of intimacy that I now have with my cycle from I've been tracking it on a moon calendar for 24 years, wow. And I've been tracking my fertility signals and my temperature for, let's see, I'm like math 17 years, wow. So I have the data points, I have the external validation and like recognizing that the language of science that we consider a default today as truth, capital T truth the data points that are available to us again are like maybe 100 years old, right In terms of their development and in terms of anybody being able to be fluent in them, and what we have had ancestrally is body literacy, is sensual, somatic, visceral, intuitive ways of knowing and being with the ecosystem of both our bodies and the land, and that, for example, contraception and cycle awareness as a method of contraception is likely paleolithic in origins and that we created calendars.

Samantha Zipporah: 47:21

Women tracking their menstrual cycles is the origin of all time, tracking right, right and hunter gather societies.

Samantha Zipporah: 47:30

You'd want to plan your reproduction in congruency, in synergy with the cycles of the earth, with when certain foods would be available, with when you were or were not moving camp or study in camp, and that people absolutely have been planning their pregnancies and their reproduction and that this has been our job, this has been our birthright, this has been our awareness, for the majority of human history is the minority of human history that this wisdom has been lost, and it's been lost through systemic violence and political and economic motivated violence, of which the witch hunts are some of the more profuse, obvious ruptures of this wisdom.

Samantha Zipporah: 48:25

And so, yeah, this and you know, women also developed agriculture as a whole. So, like again, this, like synergy, understanding, like how we manage the resources of the abundance of our bodies, of our physical bodies, are internal ecosystems in relationship with the ecosystem of our environment. I believe absolutely is our birthright and is ancestral wisdom that we can remember and we have to just unlearn all these dissociative external authority habits that we've been in, where we have to like look at an app or look at a thermometer and that actually we can feel our fertility.

Jen Mayo: 49:14

Right, right, yeah, and can you tell us, just give us kind of a brief overview of what fertility awareness methods are and how they differ from using, you know, some sort of external device or chemical to control ovulation?

Samantha Zipporah: 49:33

Sure, so most fertility awareness methods are tracking at least one, if not all three, of what are called the primary fertility signals, which are the cervical fluids, the cervical position and the body temperature, and so being able to observe those cycle almost said symptoms, but I don't like to use the word symptoms, I prefer signals or biomarkers, right, symptom being a symptom of an illness usually and having a really negative connotation, right? So, yeah, one can track their fertility signals, their biomarkers, and identify the fertile wave. There's like for most of its it's around three to six days where there are fertile fluids present during which interaction with sperm may result in conception. Okay, and I think it's also wildly important that people learn that there is a vast difference physiologically between conception and pregnancy, that they're totally different things and one does not equal the other. They're correlated but they're not causal. And that about from the data world. I have a dear friend who is a doctor, who is a medical doctor. They're not all bad. I love lots of people in the medical field.

Jen Mayo: 51:01

Yeah.

Samantha Zipporah: 51:03

And. But she's done all of my citation work and fact checking for all my books and courses for the last five years. I pay her well for it too. This she came up with to me with this citation the stat 70% of all conceptions do not end in a pregnancy. So when a sperm meets an egg, they will start to multiply, will be a little zygote and it will hang out in the egg tube. And notice I use the word egg tube instead of fallopian tube. It's like some old, dead white guy.

Jen Mayo: 51:44

Right.

Samantha Zipporah: 51:44

Discover this body part Right and it's like such a symptom of colonialism and misogyny that all of these parts are named after the white dude.

Samantha Zipporah: 51:56

So the egg tube it's a egg tube for an average of three to six days and then it finally makes it into the uterus and then it's just kind of free floating for another handful of days and before or until the endometrial tissue may absorb it and nestle it like a little blanket till it can attach to the actual uterine wall, which is a thick muscle. And so what we have between the moment of conception and implantation on average is 11 days. Statistically speaking, we have 11 days between conception and the moment when that entity actually attaches to the physical uterine wall and the maternal blood network. And historically and I've been doing a deep dive into research again, like I was always interested and I read a bunch of books and I reread a bunch of books I did a whole bunch more research this summer with the overturning of row around plant medicine and fertility management and I know that you just started asking me about fertility awareness and this is gone super pencil.

Samantha Zipporah: 53:11

That's okay, that's okay, but what fertility awareness offers, through being aware of your fertile window and your ovulation, is this profound opportunity to fully manage your fertility without needing to ask anybody for permission, without needing to consume goods or services from the medical industrial system, especially if you actually learn how to intimately partner with plant medicine. And what I've learned through research is that the vast majority of what people would think of as herbal contraception or herbal abortion in fact is implantation inhibition. Historically, that most of the methods that indigenous and earth based and our ancestors of European descent as well we're using to manage their fertility with plants, were methods of inhibiting implantation, not methods of preventing ovulation, nor methods of causing an actual abortion after implantation had occurred. So does that make sense?

Jen Mayo: 54:20

Yeah, and I was going to say too, I mean, if we change, if we start changing the conversation, because I think First, I think most people don't really have a concept of there being a different sort of conversation about this. Prior to the whole Roe versus Wade thing, managing fertility and promoting menstruation was a thing long before it was a legal thing in the 70s or whenever that was.

Samantha Zipporah: 54:51

Oh my God. People have been managing their fertility at home with plants safely and effectively for the vast majority of human existence Right.

Jen Mayo: 55:01

But if we change the conversation from one using a very divisive word like abortion to more of a concept of promoting your menstrual cycle, does that potentially ease some of the ethical implications that I think people struggle with? Because I think even what you just described I don't think women are even very well informed on how the pharmaceutical versions of contraceptions work inside their bodies. Yeah, so there are instances where that's doing the same thing that the plant medicines that you just mentioned are doing Sure.

Jen Mayo: 55:45

You know, and even as a woman who, I mean, I had an IUD at one point. I don't think it was properly the informed consent from my provider on how that actually worked. I don't think was there. So there's I mean we could do a whole other convert a whole other.

Samantha Zipporah: 56:00

Well, and you should all by you, do you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jen Mayo: 56:04

Yeah. So I guess I guess what I'm asking is can we shift the conversation? Because I think you know, when I see women on social media out marching in the streets with signs protesting pro, versus Wade and I'm not really in either camp I've kind of opted out of that because I kind of like what you were talking about earlier. Why are we asking for permission to live inside of our own bodies? It's none of their business, right?

Jen Mayo: 56:33

I mean, it's just not yeah, and I empathize with with the sentiments of both both camps but at the same time I don't personally subscribe to either. There's a book I read Not on plant medicine, was actually on energy medicine called woman heal thyself. Are you familiar with that?

Samantha Zipporah: 56:52

Yeah, judy Bloom, yes, great book yeah.

Jen Mayo: 56:57

And I think it's about these acupressure points that were forbidden during pregnancy because they can cause an energetic you know flow that might terminate a pregnancy. Yep, I've seen it work, yeah. So I mean there's so many different ways to support and we make that shift that you're you know, even before you would ever know that you might miss a period before you miss a period. Yeah, You're just supporting your body's natural menstrual cycle.

Samantha Zipporah: 57:26

Yes.

Jen Mayo: 57:27

Does that potentially eliminate at least some of this very divisive stuff that's going on? I?

Samantha Zipporah: 57:33

doubt it, because I think a lot of the super right wing, conservative, religious people are jockeying for the idea that life begins at conception and they're completely ignorant of the physiology that 70% of those conceptions will naturally pass. I mean, yeah, education, education, empowerment and promoting menstruation, I do. I mean, I don't know, I feel like maybe there's some support, but I've definitely like engaged. I grew up in Boise, idaho. I've been in some like extremely conservative places with my work and they just don't under. I mean, it's, yeah, I don't even I'm a little again tongue-tied about it, but, yeah, promoting menstruation versus having an abortion and what the difference of that is, yeah, physiologically, ethically, energetically. I think that that would be excellent for people to even have the option to understand what the difference is between those things, and that it would be predicated upon understanding the physiology of ovulation and implantation and early pregnancy, and that, yeah, it's totally subjective for sure, but the physiology is less, though, and that we all deserve that education, and that's been as much as I've gone into this deep dive of like historical context is just like very soothing to me, like all the research I really.

Samantha Zipporah: 59:11

I think mostly about children and I think about ovulation and consent with all of the crazy, intense, loud, divisive rhetoric in the media and in politics. I'm just like obviously, if you know me at all, I've been the companion and guide for many, many people having abortions and I believe it's a sacred rite of passage, that people deserve love and care and it's deeply spiritually alchemical. I don't think it's just a medical procedure. I think it's a negotiation with embodiment and our relationship with the divine. However, most of what I see is the root.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:00:04

There's many different roots and tendrils, but I think that education around consent and ovulation are really main root issues here, and the oblivion that most people are operating in with their fertility and sexuality, the passivity that we are encouraged as women, as people with uteruses and vaginas, that like that our fertility and sexuality are things that happen to us rather than things that we fully embody and that we do, that we are, that we get pregnant, that we get laid, that these things just like. These things just like happen to us, and that we actually have a profound opportunity to be at choice and to be in very satisfying consensual relationships with our fertility and sexuality as conduits for our relationship with the divine. And yeah, that's circling back to this language of conscious contraception and encouraging people to actually gather and acknowledge and embody their physical and spiritual and emotional selves, with their sexuality and with their fertility, as a way to heal and as a way to experience pleasure and power.

Jen Mayo: 1:01:42

And that's the invitation Right and I think the idea of like sexuality and fertility being a medical event is a relatively new concept in history, correct?

Samantha Zipporah: 1:01:56

Oh, exactly, I think we've been. Yeah, it's maybe a hundred years old. These processes have always had rituals and songs and stories, and they have been spiritual and social events, not medical events. And even so, the World Health Organization, who is taking into account impoverished countries and people with no medical care and famine, all these things they suggest that globally, about 5% of people need medical assistance to give birth About 5%, yeah, and what we have in our country is the inverse where we have.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:02:49

actually less than 5% of the people in our country are giving birth without any medical intervention. Over 95% of people are having synthetic hormones, narcotics and surgery, and a huge part of this, yes, is the industry, is insurance and is that feeling of not having choice and not trusting the body which starts with ovulation administration. Our relationship with our menstrual cycles is a foundation upon which we will build our relationship with pregnancy and birthing and mothering. So, yeah, starting with the children, starting with consent. Yeah, absolutely.

Jen Mayo: 1:03:38

Woo, yeah, could you? I've heard you talk about this before could you give us a brief history on? Bear is one of the big makers of most. Yeah, I'm wondering if you're gonna circle back. I would love to. I would love to. That's kind of dangling, yeah.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:03:55

Oh, yeah. And so again, like with the personal history, is like I had very painful or regular cycles as a teenager and they offered me synthetic hormonal contraception and I refused it. I had enough social and political content, like consciousness, at the time to be like I don't trust these big pharma corporations. I don't know who they are. I don't trust them, though I don't want them manipulating. And again I have the like specific language from reading my journals. I'm like I don't want these people controlling my hormones, my skin, my mood, my digestion. Like who are these people? I don't trust them.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:04:36

And then I didn't find out until a few years ago I was watching an interview between Vandana Shiva, who is one of my all time inspiring Like she just oh, she makes my heart sing and Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, and Vandana brought it to my attention that Monsanto that is, patenting and managing all different methods of seeds and big proponent of pesticides and all these things Monsanto merged with Bayer. Really here, yeah, this was like four or five years ago, ok, monsanto and Bayer merged, ok, and Bayer has been incorporated for over 100 years and they were exclusive contractors with the Nazis to create all of the gas to exterminate my family in the Holocaust and they never disincorporated.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:05:42

They simply played reparations to the military industrial state that is Israel and never disincorporated. And Bayer makes a huge percentage of the synthetic contraceptive options on the market currently.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:06:02

So we have this huge multinational corporation conglomerate, monsanto, bayer that are controlling the fertility of both the soil and our bodies for profit.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:06:21

And the metaphor within that four seasons and four weeks analogy of the menstrual cycle, the metaphor of monocropping and what that does to ecology, what that does to soil health and what taking synthetic hormones to suppress ovulation does to our bodies, is really profound and really really wonderful, mirroring in that monocropping depletes all of the soil, mineral health and it destroys the ecosystems.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:07:00

That taking these synthetic hormones also kind of traps us in what is harvest season and that analogy. It's just like constantly, constantly late summer, early fall harvest season, with no rest of winter and no lushness and abundance of spring. And that again these systems of mechanizing and commodifying how we manage fertility and what our connection to life is, our connection to our food, our connection to our fertility. These are religious questions, these are spiritual questions. Right, and yeah, regardless of what my beliefs are, if I turned off people around talking about abortion as a rite of passage and things like this, it's just like I am not at all here to preach a dogma or an ideology. But I think that it's very important that we explore these ideas.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:08:03

Yeah, and that people are like, what would make me feel connected to the divine through my body, like how could I, is it possible for me to experience a sense of connection or a sense of wholeness that is not mediated by an external authority and that is not profiting a corporation that does not have not only my own best interest in mind, but does not have the interest of the entire collective ecosystem at the center of its action? That is, exploiting life for profit? Right.

Jen Mayo: 1:08:42

Right, and I think creativity is at the heart of correcting a lot of the ills of the world and moving society forward in a positive way. Does using forms of contraception that essentially keep your body in that stasis that you mentioned this late summer, early fall, kind of stagnation? Does that kind of metaphorically reflect something that can be said about how that impacts our ability to really show up and be very positive?

Samantha Zipporah: 1:09:26

I believe it does. I know that there's one study around the luteinizing hormone, which is in the follicular phase prior to ovulation. It spikes during the fertile window, so you don't have it if you are taking synthetic hormones. And what the study? The language they used was divergent thinking Interesting. They found a correlation between the spike of the luteinizing hormone and women's divergent thinking, thinking outside of the box, nonlinear, creative thinking.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:10:08

So that's just like one little again the language of modern science, the data. Like it's fun. I love it. I really love being able to speak that language, but on a more visceral, spiritual, like ancient energy, anatomy level, like absolutely, and again, taoism is my favorite, I've studied it and like the ovarian energy and ovarian kung fu. If anybody wants to learn ovarian kung fu, get yourself some Montauk chia. But yeah, our vital force has immense, immense creative power and that we can conceive and gestate and birth things that are not babies, with the same energy for sure.

Jen Mayo: 1:10:55

And I think there's something to be said for experience based medicine. I think this term evidence based is not that it doesn't have any validity, but I think it's kind of been co opted as a marketing term and used to help get people to outsource their permission to an external authority, like you were talking about earlier. So I think a lot of what you're speaking to here is really about intuition and trusting your own experience, your own lived experience.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:11:26

Absolutely. Yeah, that's very poignant.

Jen Mayo: 1:11:30

Yeah Well, this has been fantastic. Is there anything we haven't already specifically talked about that you think would be really important for our listeners to know about?

Samantha Zipporah: 1:11:43

Oh gosh, no, I think that was quite, quite expansive.

Jen Mayo: 1:11:47

Yeah, we covered a lot of ground there, covered a lot of ground there.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:11:51

And you'll include my info. They know they can find me if they want to talk more, learn more.

Jen Mayo: 1:11:57

Yeah, you've got some you've got some online programs that you have that people can sign up for.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:12:03

Yeah, it's an okay time.

Jen Mayo: 1:12:05

Yeah, definitely go for it.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:12:07

So I have an online learning community that's called the fruit of knowledge community, inspired by the ancient Hebrew text, the Genesis story, which is actually what came to mind when you started talking about being five years old and fearing the pain of childbirth. Yeah, right, and that that is actually like a mainstream over culture Christian trope, that that's part of what. The punishment for eating the fruit of knowledge, right. That we would suffer in childbirth, right, and so, being the history nerd and the etymology nerd that I am, being the Jewish, that I am the Jewish, which the Hebrew word that's actually used in the original text for knowledge is also used for sex, okay, and so the fruit of knowledge is the fruit of sexual knowledge. Very interesting, and there's also lots of writing and ideas that I'm very enchanted with that point to the idea that eating the fruit of knowledge was actually our awareness of our power to create life, being related to our sexuality, okay, and being related to the menstrual cycle, specifically and the snake is the symbol of the primordial goddess of the earth, mother, creator, also Lilith.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:13:43

I'm a big fan of right, and so the idea that eating this fruit was actually the original win. Not the original sin, it's like part of my little tagline, right, so that's like the umbrella, the fruit of knowledge. Learning community is a place where people can access all of my published books. I have four public self published books.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:14:09

Okay, and I also have what's what I call the living library, which is all my works in progress and various curriculums, and then there's monthly Q&A's and live events and all the different tiers. You can choose what your benefits are in the fruit of knowledge and that's the umbrella. Okay, I prefer and invite people to join us. The lowest here's only five bucks, oh nice. And then all my, all my books and courses can be purchased by themselves outside of that membership, for sure, okay, my website is just my namecom. It's Samantha Zipporah Z I P P O R A H.

Jen Mayo: 1:14:56

Nice, I'll put that in the show notes too.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:14:58

And then one little thing also just wanted to, like, go back to that fruit of knowledge, genesis story, because it's just so pertinent to what we're talking about and it turns me on. So much is this idea that you know we're, we're exits, we were kicked out of the fruit of the garden of Eden In our awareness of our nakedness, right, right, that we're different than the animals, right, the animals don't have to wear clothes. Well, the estrus cycle and our ability to actually viscerally and sensually discern our fertile window Is one of the main things that separates us. It's not the only thing, right, but I think it is a profound thing that separates us from the vast majority of the animal kingdom. So I also just kind of weave that into this subversive, yeah, retelling and reclamation of this story that like, no, it's good to eat of the fruit of knowledge, right, right.

Samantha Zipporah: 1:16:05

You should understand your sexuality and your body and your menstrual cycle. And yeah, that's the inspiration behind the name, so thank you for letting me share all of that. Thank you, I really appreciate it.

Jen Mayo: 1:16:19

Now, this has been a great conversation. I think our listeners will really enjoy it and I will include all those things in the show notes. So thank you so much for joining us and it was. It was a pleasure. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Any statements and views expressed by myself or my guests are not medical advice. The opinions of guests are their own and the body literacy podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. If you have a medical problem, please consult a qualified and competent medical professional. As always, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the body literacy podcast and be sure to subscribe and sign up for updates over at genmayocom.