Maryn Green | Reclaiming the Mystery of Life: Private Midwifery and the Indie Birth Association
Maryn Green of the Indie Birth Association joins InnerVerse to discuss her private midwifery practice and experience as a guide to sacred birth. We talk about the intuitive knowledge within the female body, biofield consequences of pregnancy and birth, what "the science" still doesn't know about the creation of life, miscarriage support, old wives tales, ultrasound imaging, practicing informed medical choice, what we see as a cultural conspiracy to scare women about having children, and the mystical non-sedated birth.
In the Plus+ Extension we discuss the spiritual and biological significance of the placenta, hospital harvesting of birth materials, the divine twin symbolism, the potentials of placentophagy, the secret transmission of ancestral wisdom, issues with state-licensed midwifery and why Maryn gave hers back, utilizing the power of Private Member Associations, life after birth and mothering the mother.
Plus+Full episode · 2h 16m
InnerVerse Plus+Hear the full 2h 16m episode
61 more minutes of this conversation, plus the complete Plus+ archive, premium video and a private podcast feed for your app.
Cancel any time.
Get tuned with Chance
Tuning forks find where energy is stuck in the field around your body and bring it back into flow. Sessions over Zoom, recorded for you to keep.
30 Minute Consultations
Have something to look at, or looking for guidance? We can consult oracular tools, read your chart, or just talk through whatever you choose.
In this episode
Core themes
Two Belief Systems, Not Right and Wrong
Maryn Green will not frame hospital birth as evil. She frames it as a business running on different beliefs. Her belief is that birth is a natural event, a rite of passage, a process bodies already know how to do because we carry the recipe in our cells, and that babies deserve to be born in peace. The medicalized model believes birth is generally a disaster, that women and babies need saving, and that the process needs controlling. She points out most obstetricians are trained as surgeons and never trained in normal birth, so trouble starts when a woman lands in a setting whose beliefs do not match her own.
The Baby Is a Sovereign Soul
Green often will not call them babies. She calls them highly evolved souls that happen to be in baby bodies, arriving with their own karmic paths and their own preferences about how and where they want to be born. That reframe moves birth choices away from intellectual decision making toward tuning in, and it lifts blame off mothers when things go sideways. On miscarriage and on births that ignore the plan, she is blunt that we are not responsible for what another soul chooses. Chance Garton connects this to his biofield tuning practice, where he sees challenges a mother carried in pregnancy show up later in her child.
Conception Is Still a Mystery
Asked what science only pretends to understand, Green starts at conception. An elder taught her that the egg is the creative force and the sperm is the intention, the set of beliefs. She wonders aloud whether conception happens every time given the opportunity, with implantation being the real choice point, and what happens in that week of delay while the father grounds his energy and the soul decides. Garton answers with his own story, a miscarriage last year followed by a dream of an unbreakable little blonde girl, a baby like the one from The Incredibles, on the very day his wife took the positive test.
Informed Choice, Not Informed Consent
Green corrects the standard phrase. She does not say informed consent because she does not assume anyone will consent and does not need them to. Informed choice means an honest conversation about benefits and risks, after which, she says, most women decline far more than they agree to. As an unlicensed midwife she has no skin in the game and nobody above her requiring routine tests. On ultrasound she stays deliberately unabsolute. Technology is not bad, and peace of mind after a loss has real value, but routine scanning trains a woman to ask someone else whether her baby is okay, which becomes a habit she carries into the birth.
Powerful Women and the Attack on the Family
Garton noticed that nearly every show he and his wife watched during their first pregnancy carried something horrific about mothers or babies, and calls it deliberate fear programming. Green agrees and goes further. Scaring women and convincing them they are broken keeps them from a power that would change the world, and birth is where that power gets seized away from the family. She describes surrender at the gate, going to the stars to get your baby, her near painless ninth birth of Cove River and her excruciating tenth, and giving her license back.
Quotes
“They believe that birth is generally a disaster, that women and babies need saving, that birth is a process that needs to be controlled. And so that's how they behave. It's also important to note that most doctors, most obstetricians have never been trained in normal birth, that they are trained as surgeons.”
“I think I can boil it down. Like any philosophical concept requires a foundational belief. And I think the ground of spirituality is in free will.”
“I was taught by one of my elders that the egg is the creative force. Obviously that's what's going to grow into this person, but the sperm is the intention, is often the set of beliefs.”
“So our baby announced herself and gave us the message we needed to feel comfortable about going through pregnancy again.”
“So in all things, if we go in with the perspective of I'm doing this practice or I'm having this baby as an expression of my wholeness. So you still do the modality, you still do the healing work, but it's an expression of my wholeness, not seeking to fix my brokenness.”
“And it's so easy to feel like you're doing it wrong because everybody wants to tell you how to do it. And of course, if anybody really knew, they'd be trillionaires because there is no one way to do it. It's the way inside. We have to follow the way inside. That's all we got.”
“It changes, but I've always loved the visual. And I don't know who said it first, but of going to the stars to get your baby and bringing them home. And that's what it feels like. That is what it feels like to me when I've really paid attention.”
“And I think that it speaks to the quality of her character that she really wants to take responsibility for what she's doing rather than put it off on a liability on the state.”
Maryn Green is a private midwife and co-founder of the Indie Birth Association, advocating for sacred, autonomous, non-hospital birth and midwifery education.
See all Maryn episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
