Postpartum University® Podcast

Connecting with Your Postpartum Culture

August 16, 2022 Maranda Bower, Postpartum Nutrition Specialist Episode 73
Postpartum University® Podcast
Connecting with Your Postpartum Culture
Show Notes Transcript

“Bounce back” culture has failed us terribly.

Although the signs that this isn’t working are everywhere, where do we look when stepping outside of the modern norm?

It is this crossroads where we’re given the opportunity to come home to the traditions and cultural practices that have been lost across generations.

The secret to a better way of experiencing motherhood rests in this wisdom.

The way back, however, requires a deep process of discovery and digging back to our roots. Today, we’re here to share our best advice and what we’ve been working on at Postpartum University to help you get started.

Go to https://postpartumu.com/postpartum-university-podcast-ep73/ for more!

In this episode, I am sharing:

  • Digging back into our own culture for information can be difficult
  • Conversations with our elders usually include many hardships that shifted the way we had to show up as mother
  • For traditional practices and wisdom, we have to go back deeper
  • Why we desperately need to move away from the modern “bounce back” culture
  • Using tradition to get back to the root of who we are
  • Where can we go to find this information
  • Finding community and asking questions

 

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Where to find me: postpartumu.com

Feeling inspired and ready to learn more about how you can actively revolutionize postpartum care?

Welcome to the Postpartum University podcast where we support you and your provider in understanding the science, the art, and the sacredness of healing after birth. I'm Maranda Bower, your host, your Postpartum Nutrition Specialist, and homesteading mom with four wild kids. It's time to get you the holistic, whole body healing that works. Welcome to the Postpartum University podcast. 

Of course, I'm your host, Maranda Bower. And I had an amazing question that was asked very recently, and I wanted to absolutely make time to address this because it's so very important. And it's one that I'm actually seeing more and more people interested in, especially after we just launched the Postpartum cultural traditions blog series. If you haven't looked into the different cultures around the world, I highly recommend doing that. We'll leave the link here for you. But after doing that series, which was absolutely amazing in terms of learning about the cultural traditions around the world and how we care for postpartum women, it's just been phenomenal. 

And one of the questions I've been getting a lot of is how do you study your own postpartum cultural traditions? And this is a really difficult topic, a really hard topic, because what we're finding is that many of our grandmothers aren't aware of the postpartum traditions that are a part of our own cultures, whatever culture that means for you. And we're having to dig back further to great grandmothers. We're having to investigate further than that into places that doesn't really contain this amount of information. And I don't know about you, but for me, I don't even have my great grandmothers with me. 

Unfortunately, I've never, I've never gotten to meet them. They had passed away well before. So that information for me and for many of the women that I support are just non existent. And when we do have these conversations with our grandmothers and our elders, it's more of an attitude of well, you know, we didn't really have any cultural specific related healing tools that were available to us, because we just had to get up, we just had to do it. We had to, we had to move, we had to push through. And I think that comes with a huge shift of, of what has happened within our world, especially related to our families going off to war and our need to step up and to take care of our families and to the people who are left behind and, and famines wars, worldly struggles, all of those kinds of hardships have really shifted the way we care for mothers. 

And so our grandmothers are really a generation that has suffered immensely and had to push through and do whatever it is that they needed. And really, I'm speaking in a very general sense and in a way that reflects multiple cultures around the world. This is what we're seeing. So in order to get the knowledge of whatever culture is ours, whatever that we're a part of, we have to go back deeper. And often that's very difficult. It's very challenging. And the more that we get away from these traditional cultural practices, the more they will be lost. And the current cultural traditions that we are seeing right now are cultural traditions. What we have created in the last few generations are a part of what we are experiencing in postpartum. 

And that's the bounce back method, right? Where we are told as women that we just got to get up, we got to do it no matter what, which is what our grandmothers and our mothers had to face. And really difficult times as the world was changing industrialization, all of those kinds of things. And that has become our norm. And what we know is that that norm of this bounce back culture that we have created for our mothers is greatly affecting how we are engaging with our children, it's greatly affecting our lives. And, and quite frankly, it's not working. We're falling apart, we're suffering from depression and anxiety, and a host of auto immune issues. And it's not working out for us.

And so many of us are looking for answers where we're wondering what can I do to support myself in a way that is not reflective of what the culture is currently doing because the way our modern world is working and the way our grandmothers and mothers were forced into managing everything and getting up and doing it all on their own is no longer working. And so how do we do that? We go back to those traditional cultural practices. 

And this is an amazing way that you can get in touch with your generations with the the women who've come before you with your own culture, and really getting into the root of who you are as a person. It's incredibly powerful to look at your own cultural traditional practices that were given to maybe your great great grandmother and the generations before her. So where do you begin to look? Where do you find this information? Because as we get older, it's being lost. And it's so much harder to find this information. So where do we go? Where do we find this? I will tell you that one of the most helpful parts of finding these answers are reaching out to your communities, especially communities that that represent the culture that you belong to. And if you don't know what culture you belong to, DNA testing is readily available and something that you might want to consider.

I know that when I got some DNA testing, it was absolutely incredible to see where I have come from and what is within my blood, and it answered a lot of questions for me in terms of where I've come from and where I can investigate things a little bit further. So that had always been a really big part of my own journey and discovering my own cultures. So if you're not sure and you don't know who to ask in terms of your family doing the DNA testing, looking at generational trees, mapping out your families and where they've come from, that can be a first start for you before you can even dive into figuring out what kind of postpartum culture traditions were a part of your family. Start looking at where you can connect in with other people who are part of your culture. Ask around. I will tell you, doulas in particular are a wealth of information when it comes to researching anything related to birth and postpartum. So find a community of doulas that you can ask about. When we did the postpartum cultural series on our blog, we found a massive amount of information pertaining to cultural traditions in the postpartum world all from doulas. They're just such a wealth of information. So seek out doulas in your area. 

Find people who are a part of your culture and start asking questions and they might know someone that they can connect you with or elders that they can connect you in with or other groups that you might be able to get in with and continue down that line and ask questions. That is one of the biggest parts of this whole entire journey is asking questions so that you can learn a bit a little bit more where do these people come from how did they get here. How what what did they do when they get here all of those and of course I'm speaking in a very general way because I'm trying to encompass you know the entire world and the view of cultural traditions but really ask those important questions especially to those elders and the people who can support you. 

If you're a birth and postpartum professional who wants to give the families you serve some solid holistic evidence based information regarding nutrition, repletion and nourishing your body after baby. This is for you I have 18 beautiful pages and a handout form that is completely free free full guide to nutrition completion common misconceptions supplement support favorite recipes 30 healthy and quick snacks and so many more. You can download your free collection with handouts at postpartum you that's the letter you dot com slash handouts. 

Books are also a really great place to look look for places where you can connect into other pieces anthropology sociology. Those are incredible resources in terms of learning a little bit more about the culture and maybe the foods that they had eaten during a specific time, or how they like to live and that can give you clues as to how the postpartum experience was for them as well. Google scholar is also a very amazing place believe it or not to search for these anthropological and cultural views of of postpartum care. 

And they actually have a lot of amazing summaries where you can learn about cultures from around the world using Google scholar of all places so connect in with all of these and unfortunately, I can't give you a great answer and exactly where to go and exactly where where you're going to find your answer. And this is exactly how the culture practice, but in a huge sense of this, that's part of the journey, is the discovery of your family and the women who've come before you and the women who've done this work. And tapping into that power for your own birth and your own postpartum is magical. It's a process. 

And that process is what's really going to connect us in on a significantly deeper level. So enjoy that process of discovery. Look at all the places you can. And if you find something, you are more than welcome to email us, let us know. And we would be more than happy to add more cultures and traditions and practices onto our blog series.

We absolutely love doing that and we want to represent as many as we can so that this information is readily available. And it's not so difficult to find the resources and information that we need to truly honor our own culture. So enjoy the process. Let us know how we can support you and connect in with our own blog on all the cultural traditions from around the world.

Love this episode. Let us know by leaving an amazing review. Your support is everything. Want more? Head over to postpartumu.com. That's postpartum, the letter u.com, and explore how we support moms like you in holistic whole body healing that's specific for the unique needs of mamas in the years postpartum. See you there.