Birth Alchemist: Birth Doesn’t Have to Traumatize You (Do This Before Labor)

Uncovering Birth Foundations Course

Birth shouldn’t induce fear… but for many, it does.

If you’ve been researching birth, you’ve probably noticed something: most resources either gloss over the real challenges or leave you feeling more confused than informed.

The conventional medical system isn’t designed to consider the needs & desires of each unique woman, nor are they equipped to answer these types of questions. Most standard childbirth classes aren’t either.

That’s why this course exists.

Get 10% off with code JOSH 👉 https://joshtrent.com/uncoveringbirth

In This Episode, Eyla Cuenca Uncovers:

[00:00] Birth Trauma Is Stuck Grief

• How birth trauma forms when a difficult experience has nowhere to go and becomes internalized rather than processed.
• Why it is not the event itself that creates trauma but having nobody to talk to about it afterward.
• How 90 minutes of birth trauma processing can allow a woman to move grief through her body and see her experience in a completely new way.
• Why women carry the experience for decades, and Eyla has worked with women in their 60s still processing their births.
• How Bert Hellinger’s family constellation work explains the loyalties we carry to ancestors we have never even met.
• Why the family morphogenic field operates like a Wi-Fi signal in our cells, carrying unresolved experiences across generations.
• How a family member who was excluded from the family system can be unconsciously relived by someone two generations down in order to restore belonging.

Resources:

• Eyla Cuenca

[03:50] How Generational Baggage Shapes Birth

• How the greatest gift a parent can give a child is a life free of their projections.
• Why a woman can do everything right and still unconsciously repeat the birth story of the women in her family.
• How the need to belong is a survival instinct, and to choose a different birth than her mother had would feel on a deep biological level like exile from her family.
• Why the most common underlying patterns are attachment challenges, addiction in one caregiver, and codependency in the other.
• How early parentification creates hyper-independence that shows up in birth as an inability to receive help or support.

[09:25] Unconscious Agreements in Child Birth

• Why the covert agreement to belong also shows up as replicating a difficult marriage, or even unconsciously taking on a parent’s disease to remain in energetic connection with them.
• How mom groups can become a form of trauma bonding, commiserating about difficulty as a way to belong in the absence of real community.
• Why cutting cords and releasing contracts as a mental or spiritual practice is not enough.
• How infertility cases reveal when a woman has done all the biohacking but has never asked what she is afraid of on the other side.
• Why the gaslight of “she was there, she was good, we had everything we needed” can mask a deep experience of feeling isolated and alone with a mother who was never truly present.
• How IVF without addressing that underlying grief is still bypassing the real question.

[14:20] Men’s Role in Child Birth

• How Josh arrived at the first birth with purely Western conditioning and wishes he could have shown up differently.
• Why their son was born by cesarean, leading to an ICU stay, having to refuse a spinal tap by signing a form, and a knock on the door from child protective services the next day.
• How for the birth of their daughter, Josh simply asked himself whether he trusted his wife and let that trust be the only guide.
• Why a man who is not present or not trusting collapses the container around the woman giving birth.
• How men come to Eyla’s classes on a full spectrum from fully committed to just there because she asked him to come.
• When a man shifts into trusting his woman and understanding his role as the gatekeeper and protector, the woman can finally follow her body.

[20:45] The Dogma Of Free Birth

• The two camps in the birth world and both carry a shadow: the highly medicalized side and the free birth dogma side that shames women who do not birth in a specific way.
• Why Eyla does not give energy to either polarity and sees dogmatic energy itself as something that can sour a birth space.
• How men were brought back into the birth space after decades of hospital birth excluding them.
• Why by the 1940s half of American women were birthing in hospitals and men were kept in the waiting room with a cigar.
• How women were always supported by other women historically, and isolated birth without support was accidental, not a model.
• Why the polarity between the extremes is actually necessary to help each woman find herself.
• How helping a woman move from wanting an elective C-section to choosing a vaginal hospital birth is a huge win for Eyla.

[27:00] The Alchemy of Birth and Trauma Healing

• Why “take it as it was” is one of the most healing phrases in birth trauma work.
• How a visible exhale and disarming happens in a woman’s body the moment she can finally accept the reality of her birthing experience.
• How guided self-inquiry creates the space for alchemy to happen, and sometimes a woman cannot arrive there without someone holding that space for her.
• Why many of the most powerful birth workers came from their own challenging fertility and birth experiences.

[30:00] From Trauma to Peace, Power, and Wisdom

• Why transformation from birth trauma to peace can take decades.
• How Eyla’s client who was mistreated at a hospital birth in Eastern Europe was too scared to give birth again.
• Why needing similarity in order to feel safe, needing other women to birth the same way to stay secure, is what enmeshment looks like in the birth community.
• How over four years that woman moved from rage at hospital birth to thriving in Vermont with multiple children and abundance flowing into her life.
• Why if the medical team remains the villain in the story, a woman stays in victim and cannot expand into anything new.
• How the alchemy process requires a purification and something in a woman unconsciously knows this before she begins, even when the belonging contract makes her resist it.

[36:15] Readiness Is the Signal

• Why building safety and asking about the needs underneath the emotion or the armor is more useful than confronting beliefs directly.
• How men carry their own unmet needs into the birth space too, including the fear of repeating the harm that was done to them as children.
• Why the alignment between a couple looks like the man becoming genuinely receptive and present, and the woman beginning to blossom in response.

[41:40] Pain Shouldn’t Be Part of The Body

• Why circumcision is the first intersection where violence comes into contact with a part of the body that should only ever experience pleasure and safety.
• Why the baby who does not cry during circumcision is frozen by fear and pain.
• How men in Eyla’s sessions have recalled flashes of their own circumcision and later confirmed those details with their fathers.
• Why the argument that the baby will not remember is not a reason to proceed but reveals the disconnection that makes the act possible.

Resources:

• American Circumcision | Documentary
• 628 | The Truth About Circumcision: Ending Male Genital Mutilation + Protecting Infant Innocence | Eric Clopper

[48:55] The Dangers of Ultrasound

• How a belief that pain should be part of the body gets seated in the nervous system from that first experience.
• Why ultrasound wave technology is the first normalized assault on the fetus that most parents never consider.
• How researcher Jim West compiled human studies showing babies responding by turning away from ultrasound focal points, and in one study more than half of 30 babies covering their ears during the scan.
• Why ultrasound intensity was significantly increased in the late 1980s so scans could be done faster.
• Why the reasons given for ultrasound monitoring most often lead to additional interventions.
• How the IV in labor opens the door for traumatic birth.
• Why a woman labeled as a geriatric pregnancy plants a seed of fear that cascades toward a highly managed birth.

[57:35] Receiving Is the Lesson

• Why the most important thing Eyla learned from birthing her own daughter was how to receive support and trust the people she had chosen to be with her.
• How she entered her birth prepared to accept whatever consequence came, because nothing could have taken her to the hospital.
• How her birth became the moment she unraveled a deep contract of abandonment from her childhood.
• Why being alone with God at the threshold between death and life proved she no longer needed the story of needing them to see her.

[01:01:55] The Man’s Daily Death and Rebirth

• Why for women the portal is the birth itself, and for men the portal is the long game of daily caregiving where the ego death happens every single day.
• How Eyla watched the father of her daughter snap into place at 44, his business take off, and his life reorganize completely.
• Why Josh’s moment with his son in the ICU, putting out his pinky and saying I am sorry, was the moment he promised to be a better man.
• If a man has the capacity to hold whatever his woman brings to him without collapsing, she will be able to multiply everything he wants in his life.
• Why if she feels rejection in whatever she expresses, she cannot support him in multiplying any of it.

Resources:

• Uncovering Birth Foundations Course – Use code JOSH for 10% off

[01:08:15] The Third Entity within a Sacred Union

• How building a true union requires both partners to leave the parent of the opposite sex and disentangle from the loyalties of those stories.
• Why unmet needs from childhood expected from the partner prevent the third body from forming in a pure way.
• How children feel the guilt as a burden of what was before they arrived.
• Why a conscious birth is the consciousness that alchemy is possible from whatever the experience was.
• How women who alchemize their birth trauma go on to impact their family, then their community, in a bottom-up transformation of the world.

[01:13:10] Learning from Your Children

• How the Uncovering Birth Foundations course covers the physiological process, movement throughout pregnancy, the man’s role, nutrition, limiting beliefs, the psycho-spiritual dimensions, and a postpartum blueprint.
• Why Eyla’s daughter is her greatest barometer for whether she is living in alignment.
• When she is in resonance with her daughter’s expression of joy, she knows she is on her path.
• Why children are extensions of their parents, and discord or symptoms in a child are coming from the parent.

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All Resources From This Episode

• Eyla Cuenca
• American Circumcision | Documentary
• 628 | The Truth About Circumcision: Ending Male Genital Mutilation + Protecting Infant Innocence | Eric Clopper
• Uncovering Birth Foundations Course – Use code JOSH for 10% off