Whatever brought you here, I just want you to know that I see you and I'm so glad you found your way to this.

Maybe you know exactly why you're here. Maybe it's a loss, a termination, a birth that left you more shaken than you expected, years of trying, a body that feels like it's been working against you. Or maybe it's just a feeling, something quiet and persistent that's been telling you for a while that something needs to be looked at. Either way, you were right to listen to it.

Before we go any further, I want to say something because it's something I wish someone had said to me. What you're experiencing makes complete sense given everything you've been through. You're not too much. You're not broken. You're not making it up. You're a woman carrying experiences that were never properly witnessed, in a world that wasn't built to hold them, and your body has been doing its absolute best with what it was given.

I also want you to know that these experiences, however similar they might seem on the surface, are deeply personal. Every single woman will move through this differently depending on her own story, her own blueprint, the patterns passed down through her lineage that she may not even be aware of yet. There's no right way to do this and there's no timeline. What matters is that we feel it, because the more we clench and suppress and hold it in, the more the body starts to speak in other ways.

This workbook exists because I needed it to exist and couldn't find it anywhere. We're going back to the beginning. And I mean the very beginning.

Women are the most powerful beings on this planet because we create life. And this goes for animals too. Whichever species carries and has the ability to bring life into the world is automatically the most intuitive, the most extraordinary thing. But over the years, as society has become increasingly patriarchal and misogynistic, largely driven by religious structures that placed power in the hands of men and removed it from women, we've slowly stopped believing that. The divine feminine, the wisdom of the womb, the passed down knowledge of how to tend to ourselves and each other, all of that got systematically eroded. And we're living with the consequences of that now.

Before these billion dollar industries existed, before pharmaceuticals, women were getting pregnant naturally, staying healthy and delivering their babies with the support of their elders and their communities. There was no need for medical intervention. Women didn't struggle with their menstrual cycles the way they do now. There was so much passed down knowledge and women were able to tap into their intuition and wisdom, that we all still have, to guide them through the different stages of their lives.

Now women are not only carrying the baby and responsible for birthing and feeding it, often without any real community around them, they're also expected to go back to work before their body has had time to heal and before the baby has had time to create a fully secure attachment. So we're bringing babies into the world with unsettled nervous systems who then go on to experience everything else life throws at them, bullying, racism, trauma, loss, on top of a foundation that was already shaky. The body goes into freeze, cortisol stays elevated, and then we start to see the challenges, with cycles, fertility, mental health, autoimmune conditions, physical symptoms.

And I'm not saying women should stay home and only be mothers. That's not the point. The point is that our bodies simply aren't designed to operate at the pace the world expects of us AND carry and nurture life at the same time. The more we push against that, the more we lose touch with our feminine, with our cycles, with what our bodies actually need. We were built to work with our cycles, not against them.

The nervous system is actually the first system to develop in the womb, before your heart, before your lungs, before anything else. And we're talking really early, around 3 to 4 weeks gestation, which for a lot of women is before they even know they're pregnant. That's how early this all begins.

And from the moment it starts forming, it's already picking up on everything going on around it, which at that point is your mum.

Everything she was feeling while you were growing inside her, her stress, her worries, her grief, whether she felt safe or not, all of that was coming straight through to you. Not because she did anything wrong, just because that's literally how it works. You were essentially sharing her nervous system before you even had your own fully formed one.

And alongside that, your gut is also developing at the same time, which is where the gut-brain connection begins. Most people have no idea that the gut is sometimes called the second brain, and that relationship between the two starts in the womb. So when people talk about gut feelings, or anxiety sitting in your stomach, or just knowing something in your body before your mind catches up, that makes total sense when you understand this.

This is why when we do this work together, we don't just look at what happened recently or even in childhood. We go all the way back to the womb, because that's where your nervous system first started learning whether the world was a safe place or not, and that shapes pretty much everything that comes after it.

One of the things I really want to talk about before we go any further is the importance of actually feeling this stuff, because the more we clench and suppress and hold it in, the more the body starts to find other ways to get our attention, and usually those ways are far less comfortable.

I also want to say something about how we label emotions, because it really bothers me when someone gets called an anxious person or a depressed person, as if that's just who they are. Anxiety, grief, sadness, anger, these are emotions, the same as happiness and excitement and joy. They're not personality traits and they're not who you are. They're just feelings that need somewhere to go, and when we don't give them that space they sit in the body and start to stagnate, and over time that shows up as physical symptoms, hormonal imbalance, autoimmune conditions, all the things we've already talked about.

Every woman will also move through this differently depending on her own story and blueprint, and some of what you're carrying may not have even started with you. We carry patterns passed down through our mums, their mums, all the way back through the lineage. So if something comes up that feels bigger than your own experience, that's probably why.

There's no right way to feel any of this and there's no timeline. The only thing that matters is that we stop holding it in.

If you're struggling with your fertility, your cycle, your pregnancy, or anything to do with your reproductive health, one of the most important places to start is your own time in the womb. Not last year, not your last relationship, not even your childhood. We go back to before you were born.

There's a huge link between what we experienced in our mum's womb and how our own reproductive system functions later in life. If we haven't gone back and looked at that, at what our mum was going through while we were growing inside her, it can be really difficult to create a safe enough space in our own womb, whether that's to conceive, to carry, or just to heal.

Indigenous cultures have always understood this. The idea that everything starts in the womb, that what we carry there matters not just for us but for the generations that come after us. These patterns get passed down. The grief that was never processed, the trauma that was never looked at, it doesn't disappear, it just moves through the lineage until someone decides to do something about it.

And you're clearly that someone, because you're here.

Nobody actually tells you what's happening in your body during and after these experiences, and I think that's a massive problem. When you don't understand what your body is going through, you can't make sense of what you're feeling, and that disconnect just adds another layer to an already overwhelming experience.

When a pregnancy ends, whether through miscarriage, termination or stillbirth, hCG, oestrogen and progesterone all drop suddenly and sharply. That crash is what drives the low mood, exhaustion, brain fog and grief that can feel completely overwhelming. Your body isn't overreacting. It's responding exactly as it should to an enormous hormonal shift.

And here's something that most women are never told. After every pregnancy, even one that ended very early, fetal cells can remain in the body, in organs, tissue and bone marrow, sometimes for decades. This is called fetal microchimerism and it means every pregnancy leaves a biological imprint regardless of outcome. Your body held that pregnancy in a very real and physical way, long after the world moved on and expected you to do the same.

Research has also shown that cells from a baby can transfer across pregnancies, meaning living cells can connect three generations. So when we talk about these patterns passing through the lineage, it's not just a spiritual concept. There's literal biology behind it.

When we talk about premature birth, the conversation almost always centres on the baby, what they need, the care they require, the milestones being watched. And of course that matters enormously. But what often gets completely overlooked is what the mum's body has been through, and the impact that has on everything that follows.

When a baby arrives early, the mum's body hasn't yet had the chance to complete its hormonal preparation for birth. Oestrogen and progesterone drop suddenly just as they would in a full term birth, but prolactin, the hormone responsible for milk production, may not have reached the levels needed to bring milk in straight away. Her body is still catching up to the fact that the baby is no longer inside her, and that takes time, and that time looks different for every woman.

During this period a lot of medical staff will suggest or push towards bottle feeding, and whilst that's sometimes medically necessary, it's really important for women to know that breastfeeding after a premature birth is still possible. Skin to skin contact, even in a NICU setting, helps to stimulate prolactin. Hand expressing and pumping in those early days signals to the body that milk is needed. It may take longer than expected but it's not over just because it hasn't happened immediately.

The oxytocin that would normally flood the body during skin to skin contact after birth can also be delayed or disrupted when a baby goes straight to intensive care. And oxytocin isn't just about bonding, it's also part of what helps the mum's body recover physically and regulate emotionally afterwards. When that contact is interrupted, everything from mood to milk production to recovery can be affected.

And on top of all of that, the mum is often sitting in a hospital, alone for long stretches, watching her baby in a machine, not knowing when she'll be able to hold them, running on adrenaline and fear and love and grief all at the same time. That leaves a mark. It's a form of birth trauma and it deserves to be named and supported, not just endured.

If this was your experience, your feelings about it belong here just as much as anything else.

Something I feel really strongly about and that doesn't get spoken about nearly enough is what it's actually like to be a woman of colour going through pregnancy and birth in a healthcare system that was not built with you in mind.

The statistics are alarming. Black women are almost four times more likely to die during or shortly after pregnancy than white women. Asian women are almost twice as likely. And what makes this even harder to sit with is that the research shows this isn't about deprivation or education or social class. Black women at every level are still at significantly higher risk. That tells you everything about where the problem actually lies.

Women of colour are more likely to have their concerns dismissed during pregnancy, more likely to be sent home when they should be kept in, more likely to receive inadequate pain relief during labour and more likely to describe feeling invisible, spoken over and simply not believed. And because of all of this, so many women of colour arrive at birth already carrying a fear and a mistrust of the system that's completely rational given what so many have experienced before them.

And that fear matters physiologically, not just emotionally. When the nervous system is in a state of threat, the body produces cortisol and adrenaline, and those hormones actively work against labour. Oxytocin, the hormone that drives contractions and supports birth, needs the nervous system to feel safe in order to flow. A woman who doesn't feel safe in that room, who doesn't feel believed, who is on high alert, is going to have a much harder time labouring than a woman whose nervous system feels held. And this is one of the reasons why the gap in outcomes for women of colour is so significant.

You're allowed to ask questions. You're allowed to say no. You're allowed to ask for a second opinion and to bring someone with you who will speak up when you can't. A doula, a birth partner, a trusted person in that room with you can genuinely change the outcome. Research consistently shows that continuous support during labour, particularly from a doula, improves outcomes for women of colour specifically.

And if you weren't listened to during your pregnancy or birth, if you were dismissed or made to feel like less, that experience belongs in this workbook just as much as anything else. It's a form of trauma and it deserves space.

Something that doesn't get talked about nearly enough is how our earliest experiences of feeling safe, or not feeling safe, shape every relationship we go on to have. And when I say earliest, I mean from the womb.

The way we attach to other people, how close we let them get, how we respond when they pull away, whether we cling or shut down or push people away before they can leave, all of that has its roots in our very first experiences of being held. Or not being held. And for a lot of us those patterns were set before we even took our first breath.

These patterns don't just affect our romantic relationships. They affect how we feel about our own bodies, how we respond to medical situations, how we experience pregnancy and birth, how we bond with our babies, and how we process loss. They can also show up in fertility struggles, because a nervous system that learned early on that the world isn't safe will often make it very difficult for the body to feel safe enough to conceive. And they can shape how we move through perimenopause and menopause too, because those transitions stir up everything that's been sitting quietly.

And for anyone who needs the science behind this, here it is. When the nervous system is in a chronic state of stress or threat, which is exactly what an insecure attachment style creates, cortisol stays elevated. Elevated cortisol directly suppresses the production of oestrogen and progesterone. It disrupts ovulation. It affects the implantation of an embryo. It interferes with the hormonal regulation of the menstrual cycle. It accelerates the onset of perimenopause symptoms. So when a doctor tells you your fertility struggles or your hormonal chaos are to do with your hormones, they're right. They're just not asking the next question, which is why are your hormones behaving this way?

If you had a difficult early start, if you were separated from your mum after birth, if you were in the NICU, if your mum was struggling during those first weeks and months, if you were adopted or fostered, if your earliest experiences of being held were inconsistent or frightening, your attachment system will have been shaped by that. And it's worth understanding how, because it explains so much.

This is a section I want to handle really carefully, because I know that for some of you reading this, it might be the first time anyone has connected these two things together. And I think that connection is really important.

Sexual trauma, whether that's abuse, assault, coercion, or any experience where your body wasn't respected or where you didn't feel safe, lives in the body. And specifically, it tends to live in the pelvic bowl, in the hips, in the womb space. This isn't just a spiritual understanding, it's physiological. The pelvic floor holds tension. The muscles of the vagina and cervix can tighten chronically as a protective response. The nervous system learns to associate that part of the body with threat, and it responds accordingly.

What this means in real terms is that sexual trauma can show up as painful periods, vaginismus, pelvic pain with no clear medical cause, difficulty conceiving, difficulty with cervical examinations, a disconnection from that whole part of the body, or a sense of not feeling at home in your own womb. And because nobody connects the dots, women go from specialist to specialist looking for a physical explanation for something that also needs to be held emotionally and somatically.

It can also make pregnancy and birth more complicated. Cervical examinations during pregnancy can be retraumatising. Labour, which requires the cervix to open and the body to surrender, can feel completely unsafe to a nervous system that learned that surrendering in that way leads to harm. Women with a history of sexual trauma are at significantly higher risk of birth trauma for this reason.

Something else I want to mention, because it's something I feel really strongly about and the research is increasingly supporting, is the link between this kind of trauma and autoimmune conditions. When we experience trauma where we had no control over what was happening to our body, the nervous system carries that. And one of the ways that can manifest physically, years or even decades later, is through conditions where the body essentially loses control of itself and begins to attack its own tissue. MS, Parkinson's, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, thyroid conditions, these are all autoimmune responses where the immune system has turned on itself. The theme of loss of control, of the body not being safe, of something invading from within, is the same theme. Research in the field of psychoneuroimmunology consistently shows that chronic trauma and chronic stress dysregulate immune function in ways that significantly increase the risk of autoimmune disease. This isn't to say that everyone with an autoimmune condition has a trauma history, but the correlation is significant enough that it absolutely needs to be part of the conversation.

And if any of this resonates with you, I just want you to know there's no pressure to go anywhere near it until you feel ready. Some things take time to approach and that's completely ok. It's enough to just notice what comes up as you read this and let that be the beginning.

Postnatal depression is one of those things that gets talked about just enough for women to have heard of it, but not enough for them to actually understand what it is, what causes it, or why it happens. And because of that, so many women experience it without recognising it, or recognise it and feel completely ashamed of it, which just makes everything harder.

Postnatal depression isn't a sign that you're a bad mother. It isn't a sign that you don't love your baby. It isn't a character weakness or something you can just push through with the right mindset. It's a hormonal and nervous system response to one of the most significant physiological events the human body can go through.

When the placenta is delivered after birth, oestrogen and progesterone drop dramatically, and that drop can be absolutely enormous, especially if those levels were very high during pregnancy. For some women, this hormonal crash triggers a depressive episode that feels completely disproportionate to the outside world but makes complete physiological sense. Add to that sleep deprivation, the demands of a newborn, a body that's still recovering from birth, and a world that expects you to be glowing and grateful, and you have a recipe for a nervous system that's completely overwhelmed.

Postnatal anxiety is also really common and often less talked about than PND. It can look like intrusive thoughts about something happening to the baby, hypervigilance, difficulty sleeping even when the baby sleeps, a constant sense that something is about to go wrong, or just a low level hum of dread that doesn't go away. It's the same nervous system response we've been talking about throughout this whole workbook. The body in a state of chronic threat, trying to protect what it loves.

Something that's also really important to understand is that postnatal depression and anxiety aren't always about the birth you just had. For many women they're a doorway into everything that came before. The miscarriage that was never processed. The termination that was pushed down. The birth trauma from a previous pregnancy. The early attachment wounds that were sitting quietly until the vulnerability of new motherhood cracked them open. If your postnatal experience brought up more than just the present moment, that's why. And it all belongs here.

If you're currently experiencing postnatal depression or anxiety, please know you don't have to navigate it alone. Reaching out to a professional alongside this workbook is always a good idea and there's no version of this where asking for help isn't the right thing to do.

You might have heard me mention throughout this workbook that the patterns we carry don't always start with us. That the grief, the fear, the sense of not being safe in the world, can be passed down through generations. And I want to explain the science behind that, because this isn't just a spiritual idea. There's actual biology here.

Epigenetics is the study of how our experiences, and the experiences of those who came before us, change the way our genes are expressed without changing the genes themselves. So it's not that your grandmother's trauma rewrote your DNA. It's that the way her body responded to that trauma, the stress hormones, the nervous system adaptations, the immune responses, left chemical markers on her genes that got passed down. First to your mum. Then to you.

Research has shown that the children and grandchildren of people who experienced significant trauma, famine, war, abuse, loss, carry measurable biological differences in their stress response systems. Their cortisol levels are different. Their nervous systems are more reactive. Their immune systems behave differently. This has been shown in the children of Holocaust survivors, in communities affected by famine, in families with histories of abuse and loss. The body remembers and it passes that memory on.

What this means for you is that some of what you're carrying may have arrived before you did. The anxiety that seems to have no cause. The grief that feels bigger than your own experience. The sense of not being safe that you can't trace back to anything specific. Some of that may belong to your mum, or her mum, or generations further back than that. Women who lost pregnancies and never had space to grieve. Women who had no choice about their bodies or their reproduction. Women whose grief went into the lineage because there was nowhere else for it to go.

And here's the really important part. Epigenetic markers can change. What was passed down can be worked with. When we go back and process what's been carried, when we give the nervous system new experiences of safety, when we complete what was left incomplete in our own birth story and our own reproductive experiences, we're not just healing ourselves. We're potentially changing what gets passed on. And that's something worth sitting with.

Something that gets completely lost in the way we talk about periods is that your menstrual cycle isn't just about bleeding. It's a monthly map of your hormonal health, your nervous system, your creativity, your energy and your emotional world. And the relationship you've had with your cycle your whole life matters more than most people realise.

If you grew up being taught that your period was something to manage, to hide, to push through, to suppress with medication or contraception, that relationship with your own body has an impact. Not just on your cycle but on how you move through every hormonal transition that follows, including perimenopause and menopause.

Something that really surprises a lot of women is how early perimenopause can actually start. For a lot of women it begins in their late thirties, sometimes even earlier, and yet most women have absolutely no idea it's happening because nobody tells them what to look for. By the time anyone gives it a name, she's often been living with symptoms for years.

Perimenopause is the transition leading up to menopause, when oestrogen and progesterone start to fluctuate and gradually decline. Menopause itself is defined as twelve consecutive months without a period. Everything before that is perimenopause, and that transition can last anywhere from a few years to over a decade.

The symptoms are so much broader than hot flushes and night sweats. There's also anxiety that seems to come from nowhere, rage that feels way bigger than the situation, brain fog, joint pain, insomnia, heart palpitations, changes in libido, vaginal dryness, urinary changes, depression, a feeling of just not recognising yourself. All of this is hormonal. And so many women get dismissed, or medicated for the wrong thing, or simply not believed. Sound familiar?

Something else that's really important to understand is that chronic stress and nervous system dysregulation can actually speed up when perimenopause symptoms arrive and make them more severe. Cortisol and stress hormones compete directly with oestrogen and progesterone in the body, so a nervous system that's been in a state of chronic stress for years is essentially accelerating the hormonal decline. Women who've been through significant trauma, burnout or prolonged stress often find their symptoms arrive earlier and hit harder.

And the relationship you've had with your cycle your whole life really does matter here. If you've spent years fighting your period, suppressing it, pushing through pain, ignoring what your body was trying to tell you, that doesn't just disappear when the hormones start to shift. It amplifies. The body that wasn't being listened to gets louder.

Something a lot of women also don't realise is that you can still get pregnant during perimenopause. Because ovulation is still happening, just irregularly, pregnancy is still possible until menopause is fully confirmed. If you're not planning to conceive, contraception is still relevant and this is something women are often not told clearly enough.

And if you're carrying unprocessed grief from earlier reproductive experiences, miscarriage, termination, birth trauma, fertility struggles, the closing of the door to biological motherhood, perimenopause has a way of bringing all of that back up. The hormonal shift stirs what's been sitting quietly. It's the body asking, one more time, to be heard.

Menopause isn't an ending. In many indigenous cultures it's seen as a woman's second spring, the time when she steps fully into her wisdom and her power. The energy that was once given to the cycle is now fully available to her. That's worth preparing for, not dreading.

Click each part to understand what it does and how it connects to your cycle, fertility and reproductive health.

When I first learnt about primitive reflexes, it was a game changer.

These are automatic movement patterns that develop in the womb and in those first months of life, and they're supposed to integrate, which just means fade into the background, as the nervous system matures. When they don't integrate properly, they can stay active in the body for years, sometimes decades, and they show up in ways that look completely unrelated to what's actually happening underneath.

Reflexes like the Moro reflex, which is the startle response, the rooting reflex, the grasp reflex, these all develop in the womb. And if the early nervous system environment was stressful, if there was trauma around birth, if bonding was disrupted, if the baby was born prematurely or by emergency caesarean, these reflexes may not integrate the way they're supposed to.

In adult life this can look like anxiety that gets triggered by sudden movements or sounds, difficulty regulating emotions, sensitivity to light or touch, poor coordination, difficulty concentrating, or a constant feeling of being on high alert even when there's nothing to be on high alert about. It can also show up in reproductive experiences, because a body that learned very early on that the world wasn't safe will carry that in its reflexes as well as its nervous system.

Reflex integration work involves gently reactivating these early movement patterns and giving the nervous system the chance to complete what was left incomplete. It's incredibly gentle and it can have really profound effects on anxiety, emotional regulation and that felt sense of safety in the body.

The energetic and emotional residue that can remain in the womb after a pregnancy is something that doesn't get talked about nearly enough, whether that pregnancy ended in birth, miscarriage, termination or loss. And I want to talk about this not just spiritually, although that matters too, but also practically, because the body holds onto experiences and if we don't consciously clear and tend to the womb, that residue stays.

Think about everything we've covered in this workbook. The hormonal imprints, the fetal microchimerism, the nervous system patterns, the way the body holds memory. All of that lives in the womb space. And when a woman goes into a new pregnancy without having processed what came before, the womb is essentially carrying two stories at once. Her own, and the one that wasn't given space to complete.

Most women have no idea this is even a thing, and that's not their fault. But if you've experienced a pregnancy loss, a termination, a traumatic birth, and then gone on to conceive again, you may have noticed that the anxiety, the hypervigilance, the sense of waiting for something to go wrong, felt bigger than the current pregnancy alone. That's because it was. The nervous system was also responding to what happened before.

Clearing the womb energetically, whether that's through ceremony, through somatic work, through breathwork, through intentional movement or through a closing of the bones ritual, which we'll talk about next, is about completing what was left incomplete. Giving each pregnancy, each loss, each experience, somewhere to land before you move forward. It doesn't mean forgetting. It means releasing, and there's a really significant difference between the two.

Women have always known how to tend to each other after birth and loss. Long before modern medicine, communities all over the world had rituals, ceremonies and practices specifically designed to support a woman through the most significant transitions of her reproductive life. Most of this knowledge was passed down through generations of women, and most of it has been lost or dismissed in the western world. But it still exists, and it is worth knowing about.

Closing of the bones — Mexico and Latin America
A traditional ceremony performed after birth and after any significant reproductive experience including miscarriage, termination or loss. The practice involves wrapping the woman's body from head to feet using large pieces of cloth called rebozos, firmly and deliberately, with the intention of closing and gathering the body back in after the enormous opening that birth or loss requires. During pregnancy and birth, the pelvis, hips and bones literally open and expand, and in most western cultures nobody closes it back again. The rebozo wrapping signals to the body and the nervous system that the experience is complete, that it is safe to come back in, that the healing can now begin. It can be performed days, weeks, months or even years after a birth or loss. It is never too late.

Bengkung belly binding — Malaysia
A traditional Malay postpartum practice where the abdomen is bound with a long piece of cloth for the first 40 days after birth. The binding supports the uterus as it contracts back to its original size, helps with posture and back pain, and provides a sense of physical containment and support. The 40 day postpartum period is considered sacred in Malay culture and women are cared for and rested during this time as a matter of course.

Sitting the month — China
Zuo yuezi, which translates as sitting the month, is a traditional Chinese postpartum practice where a woman rests for the first 30 to 40 days after birth. She is fed warming foods, kept warm, protected from cold air and water, and cared for by her family or a hired helper. The focus is entirely on rest and recovery. The nervous system is given time to recalibrate, the hormones are given time to settle, and the woman is not expected to do anything except heal and bond with her baby.

Jaappa — India
In many parts of India, particularly in Hindu tradition, the postpartum period is called the jaappa period and lasts for 40 days. During this time the new mum is cared for entirely by her female relatives, usually her own mum or mother in law. She is fed warm, nourishing foods cooked with ghee, turmeric, fenugreek and other herbs specifically chosen to support milk production, hormone recovery and physical healing. She is given daily oil massages, kept warm, and is not expected to do any housework, cooking or childcare beyond feeding the baby. Ayurvedic postpartum care, which sits within this tradition, is deeply sophisticated. It understands that birth creates a state of vata imbalance in the body, meaning the nervous system and the body itself are in a state of depletion and vulnerability. The entire jaappa period is designed to rebuild warmth, nourishment and stability in the body after that depletion. Sesame oil massage, warming herbal preparations, rest and being surrounded by women who know how to hold a new mum.

Jamu massage — Indonesia
A traditional Indonesian postpartum treatment that involves full body massage using warm herbal oils, followed by the application of a herbal paste to the abdomen and belly binding. The massage works to move stagnant blood and fluid, support the uterus and help the body recover physically from birth. Jamu itself is a traditional Indonesian herbal medicine system that has been used for thousands of years to support women's reproductive health.

The 40 day rest — across many cultures
The number 40 comes up again and again across cultures. 40 days of rest after birth. This appears in Mexican, Middle Eastern, South Asian, African and many other traditions. It isn't a coincidence. 40 days is roughly how long it takes for the uterus to contract back to its pre-pregnancy size, for the major hormonal shifts to begin to settle, and for the body to start to find its feet again. Most western women are expected to be functioning normally within weeks, sometimes days. The rest of the world has always known this isn't enough time.

Placenta rituals — global
Across many cultures, the placenta is treated with reverence rather than as medical waste. In Maori culture it is buried in the land, connecting the child to their ancestors and to the earth. In many African traditions it is buried under a tree. In some cultures it is dried and kept. In others it is consumed. The placenta grew your baby. It was the only organ your body ever made specifically for another person. The way we treat it in western hospitals, disposed of without ceremony or acknowledgement, is completely at odds with how most of the world has always understood its significance.

Womb steaming — global
Yoni steaming, which we talked about in the nourishment section, has roots in Korean, Mayan, African and many other traditions. In Korea it is called chai-yok. In Mayan tradition it is a central part of women's reproductive healthcare. The practice of sitting over warm herbal steam to cleanse, nourish and reconnect with the womb is ancient and cross-cultural. It wasn't invented by the wellness industry. It was reclaimed from traditions that understood the womb as something worthy of tending to.

Rebozo use during labour — Mexico
The rebozo is not just used in closing of the bones ceremonies. In traditional Mexican midwifery it is used throughout labour to support the baby into a better position, to rock and soothe the labouring woman, to provide counter pressure during contractions, and to help the baby descend. It is one of the most versatile and effective tools in a traditional midwife's practice and it is slowly being reintroduced into modern doula and midwifery training.

What is really sad is that as communities have become more westernised, as families have spread out, as women have moved away from their villages and their female relatives, so many of these practices have quietly disappeared. Women who should be resting and being held are instead alone, wondering why they feel so lost. And the answer is that the support system that was always supposed to be there simply isn't anymore. This isn't just an Indian experience or a Mexican experience or a Chinese experience. It's a global one. And it's one of the biggest losses of our time.

What strikes me about all of these practices is the same thing that strikes me about everything in this workbook. None of this is new. Women have always known what they needed. The knowledge was there, it was passed down, it was practised and it was effective. What changed is that we stopped listening to women. We replaced community and ceremony with clinical efficiency and we are all living with the consequences of that now.