UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, and special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Pānquetzani. Pānquetzani comes from a matriarchal lineage of Mexican folk healers. She honors the over 4,000-year-old traditions of her foremothers and is a womb healer—the first womb healer I’ve ever interviewed here on Insights at the Edge. She’s a traditional herbalist and birth keeper. She uses her sacred hands to heal through bodywork, traditional foods, and herbalism and has touched over 3,000 wombs and bellies. Through her platform Indigemama: Ancestral Healing, she has taught over a hundred live intensives and trainings on womb wellness and ushered thousands of BIPOC members through her online school, Indigescuela. With Sounds True, she’s the author of the very first book of its kind on Mexican traditional medicine for postpartum healing. The book is called Thriving Postpartum: Embracing the Indigenous Wisdom of La Cuarentena. And here I am with Pānquetzani. Welcome.
Pānquetzani: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Wonderful to be with you.
P: Such a beautiful introduction. You make me feel so special.
TS: You are, and I’d love for our listeners to get to know even more about you and your lineage. And right here at the start, I wonder if you can introduce us to the healing lineage that you’re a part of.
P: Yes, yes. And hello, my name is Pānquetzani, and my mother’s lineage has been a big influence. They’re from El Mexico, northern Mexico. These are the states that border Texas Ang, and in this lineage, this lineage is very rustic. So we were a tribal nomadic people. And so a lot of the medicine that I work with through my maternal grandmother is actually use what you have, right? Use what you have available, make use of invasive herbs, make use of weeds, make use of the entire tree, not just the fruit, but the seed, the leaf, the bark, the root, right? So this is very almost like a survivalist approach. And on my father’s side, they’re from the valley of Mexico, what’s now known as Mexico City and Lash. And though that was a whole megalopolis at the time of the Spanish invasion with over 200,000 people in the city.
So the medicine is a lot different and the things that they have in common. So both my maternal and paternal side inform the work that I do. The things that they have in common are postpartum. The number one thing that you need to do is to keep the uterus warm. Since the uterus is a warm organ, you have to maintain that vital heat so that it could do the work that it’s supposed to do of healing where there was the placental separation, because that leaves a wound healing, that closing off the arteries, closing off the blood supply so that you’re not bleeding for too long. Shrinking to, I don’t want to say pre-pregnancy size because your uterus never really goes back to the same size, but shrinking back to your new normal uterus size and also reducing pain. A lot of people don’t realize that sometimes the after pain is worse than labor pains. So reducing discomfort and speeding healing is all facilitated by warmth. So we guard the uterus through warmth.
TS: Now, just to hear a little bit more about you as well, how did you discover that your destiny was to focus on womb healing in such a primary way?
P: What’s wild is that some people have aha moments and awakenings and they make a decision. And for me, I just feel like I just was born into this and walked my path. The moment that I could walk. I was born into a traditional family where cooking from scratch, cooking caldo, using beef bats, soups and stews, using the parts of the animals that are not usually consumed, like the gelatinous bones, the hooves, the tail, all of the bits and pieces that are actually the most nutritious for your gut and for your hair, your skin, for your tissue, growing herbs in the garden. I thought all of these things were just normal Mexican activities. And so as I grew up and got out into the world, I realized that the culture of my family and my community, I grew up in La Echo Park, a pre gentrification Echo Park, huge Mexican, central American, Pacific Islander, Filipino community. And on my block, we were all very similar. So getting out and growing up is when I learned, oh wow, I have something pretty special at home. And I remember when I was 14 years old, my friends and I, we used to go to the library and check out books with fake cards so we could keep the books super, super nerdy, nerdy, devious, urban stuff.
And so one of my friends, she checked out a book for me, or should I say, I don’t know, stole, reclaimed a book. And it was called Infusions of Healing. And in this book I was reading stories about Ra. RA is a person who heals naturally with herbs and rituals and foods and body work. And so I was reading about these s and every single RA that they were profiling, all of these stories, they were sharing all of these remedios or remedies that they were sharing. I was like, oh, ELA does this. Oh, ELA says this. Wow, this person could actually be my grandmother. Wow, this sounds like what we do. And because I saw myself reflected in this book, that is when I realized I have something special at home. If these people who to me are just super normal, people are special enough to be in this book, that means I must have something special at home.
And that planted the seed at 14 years old that I knew I needed to write a book. I knew I needed to document what we do at home to heal. And Myla, my grandmother always told me growing up, she would tell me stories about literal miracles happening. She grew up in poverty. She sometimes didn’t have food to eat, she had malnutrition. She had so many siblings. And she would tell me, MHA, you need to write a book about this. You need to write about this before I forget these stories. You need to write them down, write a book. And I would always tell her like, yeah, yeah, we’ll write a book. And in my book, Thriving Postpartum, I include some of her stories of her not being able to walk after birth and going to the doctor and being ridiculed by him and him telling her, this is all in your head. And then going home, getting traditional body work. And guess what? She could walk pain free, stand straight up and walk pain, pain free without the ridicule, with love, with tradition, with deep understanding and empathy. And it’s only because my friends were like, oh, look, this cool book, BKE would like this. They gave it to me. And ever since that young age, I have been deeply involved in reclaiming who I am and disseminating ancestral medicine
TS: In Thriving Postpartum, you pour into it so much from your healing lineage, recipes and body work suggestions. And the centerpiece is this 40 day process that is called Laina. Can you introduce that to people?
P: Yeah. La cuarentena is the first 40 days after giving birth. And so in Mexican traditional medicine, la cuarentena is translated as the quarantine. Quarantine, meaning you stay in the home and no one from the outside is allowed to come in unless they are here to help. They’re here to make sure that you don’t have to get up, do dishes, stress about the daily routine at home. Your only job during La Ana is to sleep, to eat, to bond with your baby, and to heal, to do the deep, emotional, physical, spiritual work of healing postpartum. And this Ana, it gives you a 40 day integration period, which is something we’re robbed of in modern day society. We’re expected to be just as productive with less sleep. We’re expected to go back to work and play the same role, even though our values may have changed because we’re parents now and we’re expected to look the same and to snap back weeks after giving birth, when in reality it took us nine long months to go through this growth period.
It’s going to take a minimum of nine months to get back to your normal post-pregnancy body. I don’t want to say pre-pregnancy body because you’re never the same afterwards, but to your new post pregnancy body nine months or more. So La Ana is based around warming the uterus through nutritious foods. I call them sacred foods because these are ritual foods that you have to eat for your wellbeing. My mother, during my third postpartum, she fed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She brought me, she fermented jars and jars of different cortis, different so that I could have variety throughout my 40 days. And one day she’s making my ex-husband some tacos, the delicious, the fried ones, and I could smell the lard and the corn mixing together in the air cooking. And I’m like, Ooh, that smells so good. And I’m like, can you make me some too?
And she’s like, no, you have your soup. And I’m like, but I don’t want soup right now. I like the way that smells. And she’s like, you’re doing so good, Miha, just like you just have a few more days, you got to have this soup. And it is a sacrifice that you’re making. You don’t get to eat the normal delicious foods that you would normally eat. You don’t get to make that choice because you’re in La Ana. You are in a ritual and rituals in many Mexican and Mesoamerican rituals. They require sacrifice. Why? Because the earth sacrifice for us, because we eat from the earth, which requires death. So we have to sacrifice to give back and to keep this harmony flowing, to create an actual visual and practical representation of reciprocity in our lives. And this keeps us healthy. This keeps us happy. This keeps the balance in our home.
And so my mom didn’t allow me to eat the tacos, unfortunately, but I’m glad that I didn’t break my ana because every bite of food that you take, it needs to be nutritious and it needs to be soft kind of blend, simple, very, very brothy, liquidy, wet foods. This is what helps you heal faster. It helps stools pass without you having to push. You want everything to just slip out. You don’t want any downward pressure in those first 40 days, especially if you suffer from hemorrhoids or if you had tearing or if you had stitches, or if you even have any pelvic pain afterwards. You want to make the process as smooth as possible because that will make sure that you don’t have long-term issues in the future. A lot of people tell me, I’ve never been the same after having a baby. My pelvic floor is so weak now.
I pee, I sneeze and I pee, I cough and I pee. Or I feel a bowling ball sensation in between my legs or my abdomen feels so heavy, it feels so weak. All of these are signs that you didn’t take the time that your body requires to heal postpartum. So the yerbas, the herbs that we take, we bathe the person with aromatic flowers and plants. We wash their hair with it. We give them vaginal steams or s va to get steam, the herbal volatile oils up into their uterus, up into their pelvic floor, relaxing all the 24 different muscles of their pelvic floor so that they can have some relief every single day for 40 days. We do body work with our hands and with the, which is a Mexican textile, similar to a shawl, but more sturdy. And we move lymph. We help detox the body because we all know that there’s a huge hormonal shift and your estrogen drops dramatically the moment you deliver your placenta. So we’re facilitating healing. We’re making sure that the process of postpartum is as smooth as possible because no matter what your tissue, your spirit has gone through some trauma, even if it’s an easy birth, they’re still tearing. They’re still ripping. They’re still stretching, they’re still bones moving, right? So we make this transition as gentle as possible.
TS: There’s a quote from Thriving Postpartum that I pulled out. Our Mesoamerican culture values the birthing person as honorable one to be celebrated in the same way a warrior is celebrated when they return from battle. And what I thought was, huh, we don’t do that in western culture across the board in terms of how much time you’re given from your job and how a family relates to holding this person’s process and the way that you’re describing for 40 days. And I think one of the big points you make is that we have to move to more of a collective healing framework than this individualistic framework. It’s just up to the mother and maybe her partner and figure it out. This is a very collectivist focus, welcoming this warrior home. And I wonder if you can talk about that shift, how it’s a whole cultural framework that’s different.
P: Yeah. I truly believe that indigenous women will lead the way to change. We come from a matriarchal collectivist culture. So when we, in Spanish, we have a word like man, to tell someone what to do, Manda. When we tell someone what to do, it’s not for me because I want it this way. It’s because we have the vision for the collective and we could see what needs to happen. So we’re able to delegate. And when we are able to work and practice community care, then that means everyone is uplifted. For example, when I gave birth the people who I helped give birth to their children, they came and they helped me. So it was my turn to give when their children gave birth, and it was their time to give when I gave birth. And so we have this really solid concept of social debt.
A lot of people see debt as a bad word. Oh no, I owe. But actually we do owe our communities because our communities deserve, in my language now what we call people or the deserving ones. We deserve care. We deserve. And if I’m deserving of it, that means you are equally deserving of it. So that means I show up for you, I put in work for you, I help you, I give to you. And the more generous you are, the more that you could give, the more rich you are. A lot of people think that the more you have is how, oh, if I have a lot, that means I’m rich. But actually for us, if you give a lot, wow, this person’s so generous, they’re so wealthy, they’re so rich because the highest wealth is our community and someone who gives a lot also is receiving a lot.
So there’s a whole ecosystem behind La Ana. And if we allow families to lead this movement of collective care, then we’ll be able to see once parents are thriving in their homes, once babies are given what they need from their parents, then these babies grow up to be empathetic humans, they have the capacity to change. They are seeds for rebellion. They’re seeds for revolution, they’re seeds for love, and they’re able to just guide and lead without apathy, without oppression, without having this coldness because we have humanity. The more connected you are to community, the more connected you are to earth. Because the community is an ecosystem. We are a part of the earth. We work with the earth just like giving and receiving. There are seasons, right? So season for giving, season for receiving. And so we’re able to understand this. And not only is society better this way, but the earth is better off this way.
TS: In reading Thriving Postpartum, I learned a lot of things that were unfamiliar to me. And one of the things that I was not aware of in anywhere near the way of its extreme truth as you describe in Thriving Postpartum, is the maternal mortality crisis that exists in the United States from the type of individualism and lack of collective care that we have for new moms in our culture. And I wonder if you can talk some about that and how you see your work in response to that mortality crisis for new moms.
P: Yeah, we have horrible numbers here in the us. Black women are up to eight times more likely to die pregnancy and postpartum than white women. And brown indigenous women are three to six times more likely to die post-pregnancy and postpartum or pregnancy and postpartum. A lot of this has to do with institutionalized racism. Institutionalized racism, doesn’t believe women of color institutionalized racism has us in a continual state of being gaslit. We say we have a pain, and instead of this pain being investigated, you could take the pain. It’s not pain, you’re fine, it’s nothing. And so we have to become our own advocates within this system, and that is really tiring. It’s an uphill battle when you’re going against the grain and when you’re going against the grain and your pregnancy is already hard enough on its own, but you’re going against the grain during pregnancy, that’s additional stress.
And this leads to even poorer outcomes for infant mortality because we know there’s studies that prove to us that racism causes premature birth and low birth weight and poor birth outcomes in babies. So imagine doing all of this work alone, right? We need community to hold us up to remind us when we’re being gaslit, to heal us after we’ve experienced obstetric violence and to help us to come with us to appointments and help be our advocate so that we’re not so exhausted from advocating from ourselves. Every visit’s like you walk in to the building and you just forfeit your sovereignty, you forfeit your autonomy because this person in a white coat is telling you that they know your body better than you. And so there are too many examples of folks dying because they weren’t listened to, because they weren’t given the care that they actually deserved.
And midwifery and traditional birth work creates an alternative to this violent system. So one of the big things that will help to heal the maternal and infant maternity crisis is having our own, what if we didn’t have to expose ourselves to racial violence? What if we didn’t even need to go there? What if we can walk into a building that was a birth center? Or what if a midwife can come to us? What if that midwife was a black queer woman? How would our care be different then? So creating these infrastructures and supporting black and brown birth workers and really uplifting families, where we need it most is one of the best ways that we as people can combat this silent crisis that’s happening with maternal and infant mortality.
TS: And the work you’re doing at In Digi Mama is so important in this regard. So let’s say someone’s listening. There’s two parts of this, and they are a friend to someone who is getting ready to have a baby, and they’re like, I want to help. I don’t know if this person’s going to be taking the full 40 days to create a quarantined sacred situation, but they are taking a month off, and I want to be a helpful ally in that. What can I do? So that’s the first part.
P: Yeah, I have a whole chapter on that in Thriving Postpartum, and they also have a list called postpartum doorstep drop off because if you don’t know what to do, you can just drop things off. You can drop off soups, you can drop off teas, you could drop off activities for the older kids. You can drop off hydration. And so we have that list and we have that chapter in Thriving Postpartum. And also we talk about what if your person who knows nothing about children, nothing about babies, there’s a section about that too, in Thriving Postpartum. What can you do? Anyone can come in, take off their shoes, wash their hands, and fluff a pillow and just listen. Anyone can do that. Anyone can sit at the foot of a postpartum person’s bed and give them a foot rub in silence or give them a foot rub while they listen to the birthing person and just keep them company postpartum could be a really lonely time because you go through pregnancy alone, it’s your body carrying the weight.
You push out the baby, you can have all the support, but it’s your strength, your willpower, pushing out the baby, and it’s you, your body, your tissue coming back together and healing. And so we need to accompany postpartum people. In Spanish, we call this cia. cia, and I don’t know if there’s an English word for cia, but CIA means to keep a person company and just break bread with them and so postpartum to keep a person, company and break bread with them. You would be serving them, you would be helping them, you would be listening, you would be making sure that when they get up to go to the bathroom, you can hold their arms, you can hold their hands. You can make sure there’s no toys on the floor, that the toilet seat is down, that they have some water to wash their perineum off with. There’s so many simple things that we could all do. I train doulas. I have a six month training program, but we don’t all have to be trained in order to support. Anyone can give support.
TS: It’s interesting, I think sometimes when you go to visit a family that has a new baby, it’s all ogling and ogling on the baby, but not necessarily attending to the warrior woman who has come back. The way you’re describing, it’s a different focus.
P: Oh, yeah. One of the most touching parts of my last guana, I don’t remember actually if it’s the third or fourth, I’ve had so many babies. I get them confused. But
TS: You’ve had four.
P: Yeah, I’ve had four. And so I had them both very close together, so they get mixed up. Sometimes My last two get mixed up. The more you tackle on, the more confusing it gets. I used to always wonder how my grandmother did that. She had eight kids, and she’d be like, oh, was it this one? Was it that one? I’m like, how do you not know your children? And I’m like, okay, that’s how I get it. And so in one of my last two Ena, I had my uncle and aunt and nephew come over and just hearing their voices at my door. I loved it. And I was like, oh, yay, they’re here. And I was nursing the baby and he was asleep, and then I could hear ’em start the vacuum. I could hear them picking up toys, telling the older kids to help out.
I could hear them chatting, and that just made my heart so light and it made my weak. They never came in to say hi to me. They never asked to see the baby. My ex-husband, he said, oh, do you want to see the baby? And they’re like, no, no, no. We just came to help out. My uncle, he grew up with my grandmother’s medicine, so he knows I’m not here to be entertained. I’m not here to see a spectacle. I’m not here to talk to Pānquetzani. If the lights are off and the door is closed, I’m going to let her rest. Instead, what he did is they cleaned my house and they left. They cleaned my house, they left me food, and then they left. And so this is perfect, and this is the opposite of what people do. They want to take pictures with the baby.
They want to feel like this is an event for them, and it is happy and it is great, but we don’t know that perfumes on our bodies could irritate baby skin. We don’t know that a kiss on the baby’s cheek could be deadly for the baby. We don’t know that when we come in, we need to be in full health. We can’t have coughing. We have to make sure that we haven’t had a stomach bug. And so all of these things that seem like little things that are normal in this modern day western culture actually have a great impact on postpartum. And one thing that I hope for the Thriving Postpartum to do is to really change the narrative from no, this is not about being a visitor and being a guest that is taking photos with the baby. You are here to pay homage to the birthing person.
And these are the things that the birthing person actually need. They don’t need a greeting card. They don’t need pictures. They don’t need for you to take away their baby from them and interrupt breastfeeding. Even the smell on your clothes could interfere with the baby scent. The baby needs to smell the birthing person’s chest and breast and nipples and pheromones in order to stimulate their appetite and body feed, right? So there’s so much in this natural realm of birthing that needs to happen that we need to learn about so that we create this necessary cultural shift.
TS: What is the view of postpartum depression from the perspective of Mexican traditional medicine?
P: You know what I’m remembering? I was hanging out with my midwife friend, Sumi, and she said that she was in Uganda, and she asked the Uganda midwives about postpartum depression, and they said, they started laughing at her, and she’s like, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, postpartum depression. Oh, I’m so depressed. I’m getting my clothes washed for me. I’m so depressed. I don’t have to go down in the river and get my own water. I’m so depressed. And so they don’t understand. They literally could not understand the epidemic of postpartum depression here in this country because they don’t live in isolation. They’re not forced to be lonely because doing things on their own, and this hyper independence is not celebrated in their community. So a lot of what causes you to the downward spiral of postpartum depression is loneliness, isolation, not having the appropriate foods you need, not having the physical and emotional support to keep your hormones functioning optimally, optimally. It really is. We really are so delicate. We’re so delicate postpartum. Our hormones are so delicate. There really needs to be this perfect cocktail of oxytocin, pitocin, and estrogen for us to feel good. And so a lot of what Mexican traditional medicine does is preventative care. We help prevent postpartum depression. We help prevent postpartum anxiety. What are you going to be anxious about if there’s nothing to be anxious about because you get taken care of?
TS: Okay, here’s another question. This is kind of a curiosity question on my part, which is the view within your healing tradition about the placenta and how it should be honored, consumed nutritional value or what?
P: Yeah. Human beings are some of the only mammals that don’t eat their placenta right after childbirth. The placenta has minerals, and it also has hormones in it. So a lot of people will consume, especially in traditional Chinese medicine, it’s regular practice to encapsulate or to cook the placenta. I did both. In my tradition, we bury the placenta. The placenta is considered the life giver or the twin of the baby. So you give birth to life, you give birth to this living baby, and you give birth to death. You give birth to the placenta, it comes out. It was once alive, and then it dies. Once it separates from your uterus, and this organ looks like a tree. You could see all of the veins. Oh God, it’s just beautiful. It looks just like a tree. And then you bury it under a tree and wherever you bury it, your baby is set to have roots in that area.
And if they’re ever having a hard time, they’re encouraged. Go back to your tree. This is a way of saying, go back to the earth. The earth is your first mother. You’re always going to have a mother. When I’m gone and dead for 30 years, 50 years, and my child’s still alive, they will still have a mother to go to their first mother, the earth, when they need to be consoled, when they feel lost in the world, when they feel lonely, when they need maternal touch, they can go to this tree, to this flaw of land and soil and connect and feel me, feel my maternal energy. Right, right there. The organ that I built, it’s right there. And now it’s in the trees. It’s in the root system, it’s in the flowers. It’s being spread by the bees. And so this is our tradition. We bury it. I’ve consumed it. And honestly, it was great. I loved the way I felt when I was consuming placenta, and I did feel a smoother transition. I felt like I didn’t feel the postpartum blues. And if I felt them creeping in, I’d be like, oh, wait, I didn’t take my pills today. Let me take my placenta pills, and then I’d be right back to happy after taking them
TS: In Thriving Postpartum, you describe a bit about your own experience, particularly giving birth to your third child, and I found it very insightful, illuminating about intergenerational trauma and intergenerational healing. And I wonder if you could share a bit about what happened to you in the experience of birthing your third child and how that changed you.
P: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a big one. My third was my most challenging by far. And I really feel like I gave birth to myself, and he looks like me too, Kiwi my third. And so, oh, that was a journey. That was a journey. I have a very complicated relationship with my mother that we are both intentional and healing. And when I announced that I was pregnant, it was Father’s Day, and I told my dad as his surprise, his Father’s Day gift, and my mom found out that I was pregnant through my father, and she got so upset. And so when I called her, when my dad told me, I was like, oh, your mom’s mad. So I called her on speaker phone thinking that I was going to get congratulated, and she just yelled at me. She yelled at me, how could you have another baby?
You can’t even take care of the two that you have. Why are you having another one? Just like her own fear, her own anxiety projecting it onto me. I felt like it was her voice in her head from when she got pregnant with me. She was a teenager, she was 16, so I felt like that was being projected onto me. And then I was like, you know what, mom, just, if you’re not going to me, just don’t talk to me. And I didn’t talk to her for my whole pregnancy for nine months. And then the day of the birth, she shows up. I don’t know how she found out, probably through my dad. And so she comes to my house and I am having the hardest labor of all three. My first birth was orgasmic. It was beautiful. My second birth was intense, but very quick.
And this third birth was just 32 hours, painful, heavy. I was already not sleeping. So I started out depleted, and I was laboring in the tub by myself, my ex-husband. He had fallen asleep. He was tired. I was like, yeah, so I must be nice. And I asked myself, what do you need, Pānquetzani? I thought that I needed my ex-husband. I was like, I think I’m at this point where I just need to be held by him. And then I asked myself, what do I actually need? Let me not think about what I need. Let me feel in my heart, in my womb what I need. And I asked myself, okay, what do you need womb? What do you need? And I hear my body say, my mom. And I’m like, Nope, that must be wrong. Okay, what do you need? I know I don’t need my mom right now.
Now she’s like the worst person to call. I’m not going to, okay, what do you need? And then I kept hearing my mom, my mom, my mom. So I’m like, damnit, I have to surrender. If this is what I teach, this is what I preach. I have to practice what I preach. So I had my friend and midwife Sumi, call my mom into the room, and she comes in and I tell her, hold me. And just from me telling her what to do, hold me. That’s something that I never felt safe telling my mother to do because she was overwhelmed. She had anxiety, and I often got pushed away. And so to be received by my mother was incredibly healing. We wrapped a towel around her and I hung on the towel, and she held me up, and I could feel her struggling to hold all of my weight.
And I’m of course bearing down and just letting her hold me, just literally surrendering and being dead weight, feeling comfortable being dead weight, and knowing this incredibly strong woman is going to hold me up and buried my head in her legs. And I felt like a newborn baby. I could feel and I could smell what I smelled as a newborn. It was almost like the way you get a whiff of a perfume or of a flower, and you’re just completely in that scent. I felt like, wow, this is how my mother smells. I remember this smell and I was sweaty and my face is wet, and I’m just like rubbing all of my tears and all of my sweat on her and smelling her pheromones, having this incredibly just organic moment. And I tell her, I’m sorry that I haven’t been talking to you. I’m sorry if I was being a pet daughter and thank you.
Thank you for doing this for me. She had an incredibly painful labor, and she was screaming. She was 17, screaming, I want to go home. I want to go home. I don’t want to be here. And I could almost feel how she felt as a teenager in my body. So I was little baby newborn me, but at the same time, I was my teenage mother giving birth to newborn me at the same time while my mother held me up while I gave birth. And I felt like in that moment, I created a new dynamic for us. That birth birthed me again, and it gave her an opportunity to be vulnerable with me because the only way she was allowed to also say, I’m sorry too mha, and I just wanted to give you space mha. It’s okay. You’re a great daughter mha. I love you. The only way that she was able to say that in that moment is seeing me in extreme helplessness. Her being able to hold me physically allowed her to hold me emotionally and spiritually. And this is after 32 hours when I finally birthed my 10 pound baby.
TS: What would you say the insights were for you from that experience? People who are either healing relationships related to their own birth or healing relationships with their matrilineal line as part of the process of giving birth.
P: One of the beautiful things that we do in Mesoamerican culture is when we’re in ceremony, we become a God. We become God. So in this way, when you’re in labor, it’s almost like I was able to become my mother and understand why she was the way she was. I had empathy for her, and I was able to forgive all of the things where I felt she didn’t show up for me good enough, soft enough, nurturing enough, kindly enough, I was able to understand her because I felt her. I could literally feel how she felt. Wow. No wonder she was this way. She was overwhelmed. She was exhausted, she was scared.
And so there was a moment of intergenerational healing because I wasn’t seeing things as a little girl anymore. I’m seeing things now through the eyes of my mother, and only through putting myself in her shoes have I been able to forgive. And that power of forgiveness now allows me to approach my relationship with her as an adult. And a lot of times in our relationship, I have to be the bigger person, and I don’t resent that anymore. I don’t tell myself, well, I’m the daughter. I shouldn’t have to be the bigger person all the time. I used to tell myself that story. Now I’m like, well, I understand and I have the empathy, and I have the patience. Even though this hurts me. I’m going to take a breather and I’m going to come back when I have the strength to face this again. And ever since then, that was the pinnacle of the progress that we’ve made.
And I just posted a reel of this that went viral of me reading my dedication to my mother. I told her my book, dedication, Thriving Postpartum. I told her, thank you for birthing me and breastfeeding me at 17, what do you know at 17? And she did those things. We have an uncut lineage of natural birth and breastfeeding in our family, and she held that tradition. And because of her, I hold that tradition and it went viral. And I went on my close friend stories and I told them, yeah, I deserve that virality because I worked hard for this relationship and I worked hard for that hug for her to be able to say, I love you and I’m proud of you as an adult. That’s so much work that she and I have done together as a mother and daughter throughout so much turbulence to be able, for us to hug, for me to say thank you genuinely, and for her to say, I love you. I’m proud of you,
TS: Pānquetzani. One of the things I feel in your book and in who you are, the way you speak is a sense of devotion that you have to your whole ancestral line and your inheritance as a traditional healer. How would you language that devotion? What is it that you feel dedicated to as an ancestral healer today in the contemporary
P: World? Yeah, there’s so much. There’s so to say about that. I feel like it starts with me. When I check into my womb, I ask, what are you feeling? How’s it going? And a lot of times there’s ancestral stuff in there. The first postpartum, which is womb adjustment. In Muslim American culture, we believe in the prolapse and the way that organs need to be sitting in your body. And so we put everything back after birth through manual manipulation. And I remember feeling so much anger released with my first postpartum, and I felt like that anger wasn’t even mine. I felt like that anger was ancestral, and I have so many ancestral gifts. And with those gifts, I also have ancestral wounds. And so as a healer, it’s my job to not only use the gifts, but address the wounds because my ancestors bled for me to be here.
My ancestors struggled and suffered so that I could be able to disseminate this medicine. So of course, I owe them reverence, and I owe them reverence through doing the healing work that they may have not had the opportunity to do. Maybe they didn’t have the privilege to slow down. Maybe they didn’t have the privilege to cry, to dance, to experience sensual sexual pleasure. So I need to make my life an altar for my ancestors. I need to be the one who is coming with the fire of, Hey, this is all for you. My life is for you. The way that I move through the world, the way that I live my life. This is an homage to you, my ancestors, because you were oppressed in these specific ways, because you went through this trauma. I’m going to heal this in me, and I’m going to make sure that I don’t perpetuate trauma.
I’m going to slow down with my children, and even when I’m tired, give them my best, give them the best version of me. And through this generational healing, I heal lineages backwards. I give them, Hey, you know what? This wasn’t in vain. Your suffering wasn’t in vain. I give them that reason. I know that they survived colonization and oppression, and they didn’t do it just for them. You need a strong will to survive if you survive colonization, if you survive all of the violence that our people were exposed to, then you had to have had conviction. Right? Was it 20 million, 20 million indigenous people killed in the first few years of the Spanish invasion? Millions. So we’re survivors, and I deserve to thrive. What does that mean? To me, thriving means waking up, feeling happy, feeling energized, experiencing joy. It means disseminating my medicine with the people who need it the most.
It means celebrating myself. It means giving my children the lives that they deserve, the resources that my grandparents and great grandparents didn’t have, and not only the physical resources, but the energetic mental, social resources that they may have not had. And I see it already in my oldest children, my 15-year-old, for example, he is a self-directed self-taught student of metal. He does metal work, and he creates weapons and bows and arrows and knives and swords and tools. And I showed my grandmother, who’s 83 years old, I was like, oh, look what AMI made. And she’s like, oh, your grandfather used to do that. And I was like, wait, my grandfather worked with metal. And she was like, yeah, means metal worker. And she’s like, yeah, they had a, that’s what his whole family did. That was their business in Mexico. I remember going to their shop. And yeah, they were masters at it. And I was like, wow. Because I’m able to give my child a life where he wakes up and is in tune with his body and knows what he wants to do. He is falling into the family legacy of metal work. And it seems so simple, but a lot of children don’t have that freedom in their homes. A lot of people don’t teach their children, Hey, you know what? Tune into your heart. Do what you love, follow your curiosity, make a mess, and then also clean it up.
TS: What’s interesting to me is when I asked you this question, you said, when I tune into my womb, and then you responded from that place, and I pulled this quote because I thought it was so interesting, and maybe we can end on this note in Digi Mama, ancestral Healing Honors that all life comes through the womb, and that an intimate connection to the divine is illuminated through this channel. And I thought that’s really interesting because often you’ll hear people say, when I tune into my heart, you don’t often hear somebody say, when I tune into my womb. So I wonder if you can talk about that, because it’s not only in the context of postpartum healing, it’s just in the context of answering a deep question that I asked you.
P: Yeah. A lot of people, I feel like in Western culture, we’re taught to think with our brains, right? That’s the only organ worthy of thought. But actually, we could tune into our heart. You could feel it in your bones. You could get a gut feeling. And same thing with the uterus. You could tune into your uterus. Your uterus is the creative, nurturing, protective center of your body. And I have a poem about this too, in Thriving Postpartum. It’s called “Postpartum Sangrona.” It talks about the blood that comes from your uterus and how sacred it is. And so we have this powerhouse of protection, of healing, of regeneration, of sustainability in our bodies, which is the uterus. And so when we tap in, when we tune in to that organ, this beautiful space, we’re able to really feel from a centered space, from our core and whatever we tend to feel and create that comes from the uterus. It’s sustainable. It has depth. It is, since it’s our creative center, it’s just full of life, full of creation. So yeah, I talk to my uterus. I write from my uterus. A lot of people write from their minds. I write from my uterus. Yeah.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Pānquetzani. Pānquetzani has written the first book of its kind on postpartum healing through the lens of Mexican traditional medicine. It’s a comprehensive guidebook called Thriving Postpartum: Embracing the Indigenous Wisdom of La Cuarentena. Thank you so much for everything you poured into the book and for your bravery and what a strong and articulate womb-based human you are. Thank you so much.
P: Thank you, Tami.
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