Crystal Tennille Irby, a birth worker among many other crown jewels, joins Aja and shares her birth story, the importance of knowing and understanding your birth story and using it as a catalyst to healing. As Crystal shares her very personal birth story she helps us to understand how both her physical and circumstantial birth stories impacted her life but most importantly, how she began to use it self-reflect and begin a road of transformation. Additionally, Crystal shares how she used to tell her children’s birth stories and how, in the way she told those stories, she defined her perception of her relationship to her children.
Crystal and Aja also discuss the impact of birth stories on the culture as a collective, when the root chakra is developed and how black people have been uprooted for centuries and how this has impacted where we are today. She also digs into how understanding the root chakra can help start children off balanced and is a healing opening for the birth person.
Other key points addressed in the conversation:
- How Crystal approaches women when they reveal they’re pregnant.
- How raising children under a capitalist society prevents us from raising children as a collective and how this impacts our families.
- Why mothers need the space to speak their truth about how they feel about motherhood at all times.
- The connection between your birth story and the way you move through the world.
- Understanding your perception of yourself and your children through the lens of your birth story.
- The process Crystal took to create a new narrative for yourself regardless of the facts of your birth story.
- Not making excuses for our parents but using their and our truths to understand and develop a healthy self perception.
- Root chakra and how the generational trauma impacts this along with the birth person and how the healing work can impact the birth person and child.
- Joy and privilege is our right as humans and how we can use it to transform parenting.
Contact Crystal:
Book referenced: Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System As a Path to the Self by Anodea Judith