In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Ashley Glowiak, a licensed marriage and family therapist, PhD candidate in transformative studies, birth and postpartum doula, yoga teacher, and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy trainee with MAPS. Ashley specializes in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for families, with a deep focus on maternal health and intergenerational trauma.
We touch upon topics of:
- Ashley’s healing journey and entry into psychedelics and family systems therapy (00:02:00)
- Parenting with consciousness and the concept of “family ecology” (00:06:00)
- Intergenerational trauma and Family Constellation work (00:08:00)
- Spiritual and epigenetic layers of ancestral healing (00:12:00)
- Using Ayahuasca and psilocybin to address family trauma (00:14:00)
- A practical framework for healing cycles and trauma with plant medicine (00:17:00)
- Somatic integration and neurogenesis post-ceremony (00:20:00)
- Breaking relationship and behavior cycles consciously (00:23:00)
- How to identify what is truly your authentic self (00:26:00)
- Postpartum depression and the healing role of microdosing (00:33:00)
- The importance of natural birth, rite of passage, and community support (00:41:00)
- The “village mindset” and raising children in community (00:50:00)
- Birth as a psychedelic experience and the hormonal reality of labor (00:47:00)
If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com
Find more about Ashley Glowiak at http://www.ashleyglowiak.com and follow her private membership community for support on microdosing, family-centered retreats, and integration work.
Transcript
Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.
Ashley Glowiak: Children really absorb from the environment, from the people, from the relationships that they’re in on how to perceive the world, the beliefs that they should hold about themselves and others. They receive that. And oftentimes where we are in modern times is that most of us come from unresolved trauma, and so even in the most well-intentioned and loving families, oftentimes there is.
Distortion, right? That’s coming through these systems. And so we then inherit different ideas, beliefs, conditionings, that actually have nothing to do with our authenticity, have nothing to do with who we are, but just ways that our families have survived. And while some of that information should absolutely be harvested and cultivated for resilience, if we don’t bring consciousness to it and decide is the threat happening in present time or was that three generations ago?
Is there something I can take and move on so I’m not responding or reacting to my child with the same temper the same depletion, the same belief system that was handed down to me? Unless it’s something that you treasure and you want to pass on through that you identify as resilience.
Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast, as always with you, the whole Sam Leaf. And today I’m interviewing Ashley ak.
Ashley Glowiak: Ak. That’s right.
Sam Believ: Ashley is a licensed marriage and family therapist and a PhD candidate in transformative studies specializing in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy for families with a deep focus on maternal health and integration trauma.
She’s also a birth and postpartum doula. A yoga teacher and MDMA assisted psychotherapy trainee with maps. And speaking of maps, we’re coming to you from maps psychedelic conference. For those of you who wanna watch this on YouTube, you’ll be able to see the video and you’ll be able to see us at our booth here.
This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you, Ashley. Welcome to the show.
Ashley Glowiak: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me,
Sam Believ: Ashley. It’s really nice meeting you. Ashley’s pregnant, which is always really nice.
Pregnant women have very nice energy. Ashley, tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to work with mental health and being be the post, the be the birth doula and all of those things. ’cause obviously it’s. It’s not that conventional.
Ashley Glowiak: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So my journey into the intersection of family psychedelics which is a unique kind of crossover that’s happening right now, although in traditional indigenous communities, it’s been so integrated for so long.
But it really stemmed from my own healing journey, which I feel like is so many people’s awakening into this work. That happened about 20 years ago when I went to see a psychedelic assisted therapist for a trauma diagnosis, and it was really in this experience that led me to understanding, hearing my authentic voice for the first time, and really putting myself on a trajectory of inquiry and devotion to understanding how family systems work.
Really what is the dynamic between. The human, mammalian species and how we engage in the world and with the ecology that we come from. And I became really fascinated in birth and postpartum because I knew at that point that I wanted to do the healing to become a mother one day. And this was, my early twenties.
So
Sam Believ: it’s five babies earlier.
Ashley Glowiak: Five babies earlier. So it was really my prayer to, do what I needed to do. I was in one of those positions where I was in the terrible relationships that were repeating themselves. Not quite understanding why I wasn’t in a state of more flow and more health.
And psychedelics really saved my life in so many ways and opened me into a whole new perception and mindset. So I became really devoted to understanding altered states of consciousness on all levels. I studied yoga, lived on a few yoga ashrams. Studied somatic therapies like time massage and, facial work, things like that.
And became really invested in a psychotherapy program that I was able to intersect psychedelic work with and became involved in Ayahuasca church and did a lot of healing in that space. And my work with that, coupled with the side education or research, if you will, on birth and postpartum. It just let itself so beautifully to understanding how we could start to re-pattern some of these intergenerational trauma responses that people have in real time and offer families a new experience, with medicine while they’re becoming a family.
If we can get to them before amazing and if we. Support and intervene postpartum or a few years after, whenever we can support that healing, I think it’s a good thing to do.
Sam Believ: Fascinating story. And also a you said the, so this is the fifth baby or the sixth number?
Ashley Glowiak: Five.
Fifth number five. Who’s number five?
Sam Believ: When did you do all of this? ’cause having all those babies and as a parent myself, I know it’s really hard. And then all those studies do you sleep? Or tell us about the journey just a little bit. ’cause I, I. I can’t really imagine,
Ashley Glowiak: thank you. Yes. I,
Sam Believ: and you don’t look too stressed either.
Ashley Glowiak: Yeah. I focus a lot on to the best of my abilities. Yeah. How to be resourced, because the way that I have understood the research and how it’s come through is that. It is really the mother who is the first epigenetic field for the family. And that’s not to put more pressures on moms and to make life harder, but to understand as a human species, that if we support the mother with multiple layers of support, to have good attitude, strong beliefs in themselves, to be able to hold their frequency in a purified and high way.
Then the children are more regulated, they come out with more ease. Everything is easier. So I focus a lot on my efforts on holding what I call the family field in coherence. And when I am able to do that, which is not all the time, but when I am able to sustain that, my life allows me to do multiple projects.
I also homeschool my children, so they’re with me all the time for the most part. So I work early mornings, I work evenings and I integrate them into this work. So I have a framework I call family ecology, and it weaves them in so they forage for mushrooms. We learn about the fungal networks, we learn about nature together and how we can.
Take the lessons that we learn from the biomimicry of the world around us and apply it to our family into our lives. So they become, integrated into the work that, the research that I’m doing. I call ’em my living laboratory, honestly, because I am trying something new here and bringing them along with me.
So it’s pretty integrated.
Sam Believ: Very impressive. Yeah, I have been conducting some experiments on my children as well, unconsciously. But it’s all
Ashley Glowiak: an experiment, right? So as long as we’re conscious about it and we’re putting in some heartfelt intention,
Sam Believ: for example we live at an Iowa retreat, right?
We have right now we have a slightly separated property, but it’s all together. So my children grew up meeting thousands of people from all over the world, always friendly people. They, their view of the world now is very different. It’s like world is just full of lovely people. Like my older son, Adrian, he learned how to swim very early.
He was only three years old. We have a pool at the retreat and he, I taught him a little bit, but he had other, no, he had about 50 different swimming teachers from different countries in the war. And everyone was in the pool at the time. Taught him a little bit. So that’s pretty interesting.
But yeah I’m all for experimentation because I believe that something is definitely not right the way we do with things. And you touched on so many interesting topics family systems, relationship cycles but so yeah, let’s talk about family systems and tie it into the parenting that you your style of parenting that you described.
Ashley Glowiak: Yeah, so the question being just how do I view the family system?
Sam Believ: First of all, yeah, teach us about family systems because, Sure. Is it internal Family systems? Is it something else?
Ashley Glowiak: Something else? Yeah. So Internal Family Systems has a lot to do with the internalized family that you hold, the different parts in your brain, the different parts of your personality.
What I’m talking about is the actual. Intergenerational connection that we hold as human beings, that the people that come from. Before us are woven into our bodies. Not only in our DNA, but in how we are raised in the first primarily gestation to seven years of life is a really a programmable state of mind.
We’re in a hypnotic space, if you will, children really absorb from the environment, from the people, from the relationships that they’re in on how to perceive the world, the beliefs that they should hold about themselves and others. They receive that. And oftentimes where we are in modern times is that most of us come from unresolved trauma.
And so even in the most well-intentioned and loving families, oftentimes there is, distortion, right? That’s coming through these systems. And so we then inherit different ideas, beliefs, conditionings, that actually have nothing to do with our authenticity, have nothing to do with who we are, but just ways that our families have survived.
And while some of that information should absolutely be harvested and cultivated for resilience. If we don’t bring consciousness to it and decide is the threat happening in present time or was that three generations ago? Is there something I can take and move on? So I’m not responding or reacting to my child with the same temper the same depletion, the same.
Whatever belief system that was handed down to me, unless it’s something that you treasure and you want to pass on through, that you identify as resilience. So the system is the interconnected web that we live in, and I love working with the mushrooms in not only it’s accessibility and support.
No. Ayahuasca was a huge healer, teacher of medicine for me in my early life, and still,
Sam Believ: you can’t grow ayahuasca in your cupboard, so I understand there. Yeah.
Ashley Glowiak: And when we start to look at coming back into our body, which is going to be the lineage of the father, the lineage of the mother, as well as what we call the ancestral over soul of your.
Multiple lives that you’ve had or however you connect to that. Then we can also start to look at the lands that we come from. And so the medicine, I think and feel is for everyone. However, it’s also helpful to know where the medicine was for your. Lineage and what kind of relationship was cultivated in that space.
And so psilocybin is present on almost every continent, right? And so it’s more part of kind of the interaction of the human evolution. When we go to some of these sacred medicines that are specific to region. And when we look at the fungal network, it’s such a great teacher and reminder for us on the fact that we are always interconnected and we don’t live in a silo and just like people, no matter what happens, we are always healing, engaging within a system. Okay.
Sam Believ: Just to understand like your view of it, that we have the, in our family system, we have the information that’s been passed on the behaviors. Then there’s this epigenetic part where, you know right now the is it a boy or a girl?
Ashley Glowiak: A boy.
Sam Believ: Okay.
Ashley Glowiak: Yeah,
Sam Believ: because if it was a girl, her eggs would already be in her. So something that’s happening to you now will affect your grandchildren, basically. And it’s like that level, but then there’s, do you also believe in like a spiritual level to it? As in I don’t know, like karmically, like caring, some kind of energetic, let’s say your grandfather was a bad person, so now you have to be a good person to balance it out, out.
Ashley Glowiak: I certainly have belief in spiritual. Reason why we come into the bloodlines we come into, and it is, I think because everyone I identify as nature, that nature is always looking to resolve and restore itself. And so within that context, absolutely. One of the frames that I pull a lot of information through is Family Constellations, which is the bird Hellinger work that talks about how it’s those people who we have rejected in our family.
The stories that we say we cannot tell. So the bad grandfather for that example, right? Like the one that did the thing that nobody wants to remember. Those are actually the most important places for us to go and to liberate through the story, through the voice so that the pattern doesn’t have to be repeated in a future generation.
Because the idea is that the frequency, almost if you think about it, like little tubes or something that it will combust, it will explode if there’s not flow. And so we wanna restore what we call. The flow or the coherence of love within the system. And for so many that is to resurrect these stories and to understand.
And I think medicine work is so profound for this is that when we go into these spaces of prayer with a medicine, we’re open to new perceptions on who the perpetrator is and how evil, terrible the stories that we make about them. And we start to understand. Through humility, right through the medicine. At least I can speak from my experience knocking me on my ass and being like, it’s so much deeper than what you think.
So much more than what, the reason why people behave, they, the way they do is always for a purpose. There’s always a trauma that led to that expression. There’s always, so if we’re gonna point our finger, we go on forever. At some point, right? We make amends with this person. Had that experience acted in that way, and if we can free the family from holding that secrecy, then we can move on.
We can learn from it and we don’t have to repeat it.
Sam Believ: Have you seen a Disney cartoon about Columbia called Encanto? I
Ashley Glowiak: have, yes.
Sam Believ: It’s like we don’t talk about Bruno. It’s like it is a
Ashley Glowiak: Yeah.
Sam Believ: The family member that’s been
Ashley Glowiak: shunned and
Sam Believ: canceled. Yes. But it’s a great example. That’s beautiful example.
Yeah. Interestingly, I do have exactly that story where my grandfather, my dad’s dad was a really bad person. Like he, he was a criminal and. He like did bad thanks to my father and my grandmother, and it’s just I know a lot of trauma that I carry comes from there. So how many generations back do we have to go?
Or is there like a limit where you like, okay, this is not my problem anymore?
Ashley Glowiak: I think so. There’s always that. Collective wisdom tradition that always says the seven generations behind, seven generations forward. And what I really have seen, so I think to answer that question specifically, I don’t exactly know.
What I do track in the families I worked with and what I’ve researched is that we can go as far back as the stories that we remember that people can share with us, but also it’s just in our bodies. So when we start to track our own reactions, even if we dunno where they come from, our own judgments towards ourselves or people.
Even if we don’t know where that comes from, our own hatreds, our own, whatever it may be, our own discordant frequency, if you will, if we start to move towards that and become curious and without judgment. Free it up, liberate it, own it. Take self responsibility and cultivate a nervous system. Cultivate a body that can decompose that and allow yourself to become a new person who doesn’t carry that anymore.
And there’s a process to that, and I’m happy. That’s might be another podcast, but there’s a whole process to being able to do that. That
Sam Believ: was going to be my next question about like very practical. So don’t give us the entire process, but let’s say somebody comes from a really bad traumatized family.
Not bad, like we’re, nobody’s bad, but let’s say mother line and father line of the family is messy and there is conflicts and like any maybe like summary of what’s the process, how they can do it, and then, and where do the plant medicines come in?
Ashley Glowiak: Yeah. So here is the framework that I’m leaving together.
I imagine there are multitude of process, right? And different places where people can seek support for these. But the framework that I really come to track that does a really beautiful job is to start with family constellations. So if someone comes to me and they say, this is my story, this is my history and I’m suffering because of it, and this is how it’s showing up in my life, I’m going to ask, tell me about.
Your mom, tell me about your dad. And just the words that they say to describe them will be so indicative on if they’re still holding charge. If they’re still holding onto anger, rage, blame and we can do that. Tell me about their life. Tell me what you know. Gathering story, which is something that is natural to human beings that we have done for the beginning of time. Gathering story. Let me hear how you’re understanding this. Let me hear how you’re perceiving this. And once we start to what I call eRate the soil, a little bit of the family field, then we can connect to the. The medicines, then we can say, okay, what is the, the intention or the prayer to kinda liberate and create more space and freedom from this?
And people have the experience they have, right? As as someone holding space for so many people, you don’t get to choose what experience you have when you go into a medicine journey. It’s your sole contract with the medicine or however it aligns, but they have their experience. And upon that, when they have the mystical insights, the visions, the deeper understandings, what’s so important specifically today, is to bring in somatic integration and to allow it to actually shift their soma, their body so that they can sustain the new understanding of their life.
And what I mean by that is, in historical context, when we’ve been working with medicines as a healing passage or altered states of consciousness which we all have through our shared ancestry of small band hunter gatherer tribes, we’ve all had some sort of connection to ritual, to ceremony to heal, to bring people back into balance.
But what we’re doing with. Now in modern life is, we’re in a different context. People are inside all day. They’re sitting all day. They’re not eating the same foods that are encoded with life force. And so there is actually a limit on the a TP that they have in their body, in their metabolic health to have the neurogenesis, the new neural pathways that happen with plant medicine to sustain itself.
So we see people having experience and it might be profound. But then do they become a new person on the other side? Sometimes. Sometimes. A lot of times not right now. And so they’re back again. And they’re back again, and they’re back again with the same issue. So what I always recommend to people is for that integration, is to really rely on nature as your integrator to really put your feet on the earth, right to ground, to receive the ions that your body actually needs to hold an electromagnetic charge.
To carry your frequency forward and be able to have the capacity when you’re tired and your child is doing the thing. You’ve got young kids. It’s like right now my 2-year-old, if I’m gonna unload the dishwasher, she is as fast as possible going to the bathroom and pulling everything out of the drawers, taking all the bandages that we have in the home and putting them all over the walls, so do we have the. The capacity to meet life with the love, with the ease, with the acceptance, with the calmness that we’re going for in these healing spaces. And if we don’t, I always bring people back to the earth. Go back outside, stay. We’re under a lot of artificial light this week.
But minimize that. Get your eyes in the sun as soon as the sun rises. Be outside in natural light and limit artificial light. And come back into our natural ways as social mammalians. And when we do that, all of a sudden we are able to start to shift our attachments to the stories. I find
Sam Believ: It’s beautiful what you say, come back to our natural way as social mammalians and I just realized something.
We are an ayahuasca retreat, but we’re also there’s this part where people come and it’s, you can see in the background, mountains and everything is green. Lots of sun. And then there’s people sitting around the fire, which is the most natural thing for us. And then I ask a cherry on top.
I think a lot of healing comes from just this and connecting to nature. It’s funny my middle son is also very obsessed with bandaids. Anytime he hits his hand or anything, he is and then, and I need a bandaid. So it’s just it’s a thing. The recent purchase, they went out to the city with my wife and instead of asking for toys or Marvel superheroes, whatever he asked for a roll of masking tape and then just tape stuff all over the house.
I don’t know, what’s the thing, you can probably psychoanalyze it, even do something. I
Ashley Glowiak: have to do it for my kid too. I’m happy to do, but
Sam Believ: yeah. Then you mentioned something just now about like people. Doing the cycles over and over again. And in the beginning you mentioned relationship cycles.
Talk to us about cycles. Why? And also how do we break them?
Ashley Glowiak: It’s the hardest part, right? Yeah. In getting out of the pattern. So the cycles are that they’re patterns, they are repetitive, they are something that’s familiar to you. So typically coming from family, coming from previous, experience.
It’s something that’s common. It’s comfortable even in the drama of it, let’s say. But they’re patterns and we identify ourselves off of them. We say, my husband is this way, that’s just how he is. Or, my wife is like that. And we can even hit our own limitations and say that’s just how I am.
Even if it creates suffering, even if it creates something that we don’t want. And so the number one thing we have to start to cultivate is consciousness is expanded, ability to be self-responsible about how our machine, our vessel, our bean operates in the world. And in order to do that, there’s different practices, right?
Medicine work can be supportive of expanding consciousness breath work, meditation, something to cultivate mindfulness, something to cultivate self-awareness. And when we have a little bit of that and buy-in where someone’s gonna say, I do actually want this to change because we need people to agree.
We can’t force people to do something that they actually don’t wanna do. And then, then when we’re able to cultivate that, then we can have these little points of shift. And that’s going to be, notice the pattern. Take a minute to pause and regulate. Take a minute to do something different. What is it that you’re wanting to become?
How is it that your highest self would respond in the situation? Can you pull that down and pull that through and show up like that for this experience? And give yourself some traction points. I really see it as, people get so stuck in their personal, their personality, which is their personal reality, right?
It is like Joe Dispen, but name it. We get so identified with our, with these attachments, with these stories, with these distortions. When people start to understand that you can truly evolve into whoever you want to be, and our biggest guiding light for that, our inner compass, is what brings you love, what brings you joy, what brings you, into a state of feeling good and feeling connected with others as you’re guiding light.
Then we start to have fun with it and start to understand, okay, if that’s a pattern, I then can shift it into something else. And what do we want that to be? And that gap is the quantum leave. This is why it doesn’t work for everyone, because it takes effort, it takes discipline, and it takes the desire to become a new person.
And so not everyone’s gonna do it, but for those who are interested, then. There’s space for that, and I think plant medicine work is an amazing ally to that transformation.
Sam Believ: This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity.
Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. What if you have a part of you that. You say this is me. This is just who I am. How do you know whe whether it is your authentic self and that’s something you have to keep, or it is something that is just something you believe and you carry generationally or whatever.
And so how does one know what’s the authentic self and what needs to be changed? Yeah. Hope that makes sense.
Ashley Glowiak: Yes, absolutely. I’m gonna share a personal story of how this shows up in my marriage. ’cause I have one coming to my mind, but my husband’s from the east coast, right? And I don’t know if you spent much time on the East coast, but it’s like a little bit of a sharp way of language, right?
It’s like people phy Yeah. That’s like the nice, yes. And, but they sometimes it feels I’m from South Dakota, like Midwest. I feel like he’s yelling all the time. So like pitch tone and frequency is like an important aspect to how I understand life. And he will be like, that’s just the way I am.
This is how, my family shouts. Like we just do it. This is, I’m not mad. Like this is just how I speak. And so there’s a way there where it’s okay, he has a connection to that being who he is. Is that authentic being. Or is that the rapport that he holds with his family?
Is that the loyalties that he has with the people that raised him, that say, this is a tribal mindset and I don’t wanna break rapport with where I come from. It reminds me of home, it reminds me of where I come from. But when we look at that, it’s not that people, just were born that way, it’s, they were conditioned through the home, through the environment.
And that might not bother many people. ’cause many people love being on the East coast and speaking in that way. But for me, sometimes it can feel a little jarring. And so we come at this impasse, it’s I’m not going to tell him what is authentic for him. And I think that’s where we get into a really, key point to recognize that as humans, especially people who are in positions like we are, where we’re working with people who are under influence or altered states, is that I will never tell someone what’s authentic for them. Because it’s not my place and it’s mostly I track that they will feel the discord, they will feel.
Actually growing up in that environment with that tone was hard for me too, and this was the pain that it brought up for me. Or not, or they totally love it and they’re gonna hang onto it, and that’s their jam and it’s all good. I need to cultivate my own, response to that. And that can be my work.
So it’s not a black and white situation. But I do support people just to track what it feels like. Does it feel good? Does it bring up good memory? Does it have you vibrate in a frequency that feels like, you can actually have the somatic experience of feeling in your center, feeling in alignment, feeling in your central channel or your core.
That’s a good place to find and decipher between what is your truth and what is it that you want and what is it that just came through you that you’re used to, and a lot of the ways that we speak, a lot of the ways that we hold our body posture, a lot of the ways that we behave is to stay.
In rapport with the family and the communities that we come from, because that’s a natural, again, social mammalian survival strategy that we have. And then at some point we get to choose, is that serving me and my highest good, or is there another version of this evolution that I wanna adopt?
Sam Believ: It’s almost like a bi love language sort of conversation.
It’s oh, your language, your love language is him being nice and that for you, he the right
Ashley Glowiak: things
Sam Believ: and maybe he is like giving you gifts or whatever. But it is very, it’s a topic that’s near and dear to me as well. ’cause I’m from Eastern Europe and you can probably notice that I’m not too expressive, and and I can be in my joyous mood ever and people like, why are you so serious?
Because it’s mostly internal. It’s really external.
And it’s, there’s definitely some kind of programming, but as you said, in the first seven years, it was programmed into me and it’s really hard for me to be that expressive. And my wife is Colombian, and Colombians are Latinos, and she, bubbly and this and that.
And everything is in Dimi and everything is cute and nice and so it’s hard for her. And sometimes she, we don’t understand each other because she. Thinks I’m angry or whatever, or it’s and I say, this is my authentic self. This is what I am. And I explained to her, see you have to understand that there’s, I’m like a coin, right?
And there’s one side of the coin that I’m, I’m serious and I’m, thoughtful and I am introverted and I do this stuff, but the other side of the coin allows me to think of great things and create good things, which result in economic stability and a lot of good things. It’s like you cannot have 2 cent coin on one side with the other side of a 5 cent coin or whatever, if that’s a good example.
So it’s that’s just who I am and I probably will never be able to be that version. And I’m telling her for in Eastern European, I’m extremely expressive because like I’m trying to do my best, but sometimes still might not be enough. So I guess you define your own auth authenticity in the end of the day.
Because only you know what is real and what is not. And I think medicine can help. I’ve definitely had, I’ve had some things that I considered were issues and considered were my problems. And I honestly went to medicines to ask, is that a problem? And or not even that, it was like, how can I fix it, heal me?
And several different medicines, several different ceremonies said, you know what? There’s nothing wrong with me.
So maybe that can help as well. Absolutely. Another topic I wanna change the topic is because you have your five baby on the way, fifth baby on the way. So you should know it really well.
Postpartum depression. Can you avoid it?
Ashley Glowiak: Yes. It doesn’t happen to everyone. So I guess, I don’t know if a void is the right word, because if it’s something that is. Occurring if it’s something that’s been set the stage, if you will. Sometimes what we look at as a pathology of like depression is really an initiation.
And so you, I imagine can really connect to that as well in the work that you do is not we can look at pregnancy loss too. Miscarriage like oftentimes that feels so overwhelming and heartbreaking. And we can look at that as, what’s wrong? What’s wrong? How do I fix this? What’s going on?
We can also look that as an initiation into motherhood. That can be it’s own medicine. So postpartum depression is very serious in this time and age. It’s really prevalent and I think there’s a lot of reasons to why, and I’ll speak to just a few briefly, is that we are not in the village mindset.
We are not, like I said, orienting to the mother is the first epigenetic field. Oftentimes in this society, in just modern life, there is pressure for a mother to do all of the things, be all the things and it’s overwhelming and there’s not a lot of support to have her in a place that’s going to be most beneficial for that postpartum time.
Additionally. We’re not being held by the generations of women. We’re not witnessing birth at home. We’re not witnessing children, running around with the aunties and the grandmothers typically for some, absolutely. But as a majority that’s been lost. And so there’s a loneliness. There is a depression and isolation that can happen after you have this really big experience and then you’re not witnessed.
And when we look at rites of passage. One of the key things that needs to happen when someone goes through something that takes them to someone, they were to a new version, which is every pregnancy a woman goes through, you are no longer the same. You go through a death rebirth cycle, which I think is really common as well in ceremony work.
And you need to be witnessed by the community. You need to be acknowledged to, celebrated, and oftentimes it’s overlooked. And so women have. A process with that. They’re not being held in a way that is conducive to their their mammalian side really when you look at just like how we operate as human beings.
So in terms of how do we reduce chance for that, we start to talk about how to support life and the next generation. Way before we start having children would be ideal. We start to talk about how to incorporate the care, the food, the nourishment. The positive touch, the soft, soothing touch that a woman needs after she’s dilated 10 centimeters and delivered a baby.
You know how to do the closing of the bones and wrap the body, and to do these different things that like support her energetics to come back into alignment as a new version of herself who is now responsible for this additional life. So I think community support is huge. And then when we talk about, the initiation process, which I don’t think it’s avoidable for everyone, I think sometimes there is a personal journey.
I know with my second child, I didn’t have postpartum depression. That postpartum anxiety, that was pretty intense and it was actually connected to, he is my first son. Connected to what I tracked is an intergenerational expression of a tragedy that happened to my grandfather and my grandfather was murdered.
And it was right after I had my son. I was paranoid that someone was gonna come murder me and my family. There was like a replay of memory that was happening through me. And so it actually wasn’t until my son was a year, I sat in Ayahuasca ceremony and I was able to have this like closing experience with my grandfather and told him that he had passed.
I had tracked that he was kinda stuck in limbo, right? That he didn’t quite understand what had happened, right? And so had this experience in the ceremony and it was really supportive to me resolving that anxiety and welcoming my son into a new space. And so was that avoidable or was that necessary for me?
I guess I orient to that being part of my healing and part of my lineage process. If I had more information like I do now, because that was at the beginning of a lot of the research I’m doing around intergenerational and epigenetic work, I maybe could have caught that at three months postpartum versus, suffering in my process.
And doing that at 12 months. Yeah. But it felt important to me as as in my own, my own growth. In terms of bringing medicine into the postpartum period to help women finalize the ceremony of birth, I think it’s a really valid conversation to have because we have women looking to pharmaceuticals to support anxiety and depression.
They’re looking for relief and that has its pros and cons. It can compromise different aspects of their physiology and the components of what gets passed on to baby, as well as it doesn’t always work and it’s not always affect. But when we start to look at microdosing, when we start to look at offering small bits of medicine into the woman’s life, what it does is it begins to open her back up to connection with nature simultaneously, because these medicines are alive.
They’re not. Just extracted, they are living frequencies and so they can offer some maternal and generational holding. If even if we don’t have the physical aunties and grandmothers there, they can offer the whispers of You’re amazing. You
Sam Believ: OJ the grandmother. I ask her for your help with all.
Ashley Glowiak: Yes. So I see that happening with a lot of medicine and that it’s like offering this. Family lineage support through the energetics of the medicine. And I’ve seen it change women’s experience in postpartum drastically for the good.
Sam Believ: Yeah, Michael, though Marshall has really helped my wife specifically.
And after the second baby really helped. After the third one, she resisted it for some reason, but I guess. Yeah, you have to like sometimes and any require change the perspective on something negative as maybe some kinda learning process as you said, maybe something needs to be moved, something needs to be processed.
So yeah, it’s more complex than just here we go, take this and it goes away. Few topics that we can put together, you mentioned something called village mindsets and that we don’t see natural birth anymore. We don’t see that support. Talk us about that. Can we recover that and what is village mindset and why should women do natural birth?
Ashley Glowiak: Women should do whatever they believe is gonna be best for them.
That’s what I believe. I will, I think everything has. Consequence and impacts and things like that, no matter what spectrum. But I think one of the biggest things is that women need to be in an environment where they feel safe. And we’re in this chat around, is what does that look like?
But when we look at the statistics of. Outcome for hospital births. We can understand that over medicalization of birth is one of the leading causes of maternal and infant death, right? Mortality. And so there is a way that intervening, or intervening, excuse me, with nature has repercussions. However, some women feel safest, meaning that they can actually open their bodies more when there’s company of medical assistance, and that’s something to take into account.
Some women will feel that the lights above them, that the noises of the machines that being strapped down and not being able to move in primal movements will feel absolutely terrifying to their body and really create an outcome where they will need an epidural or they will need something to not be engaged in the birth process, which will inhibit them to move through the cycles of that rite of passage.
Likely needing to have support on the other side. To move through those stages so that they can feel like initiated. As a mother, I have a lot of women who say, I don’t feel like I’ve taken my seat as a mother, and a lot of it comes from birth trauma because for them it was registered as trauma to be in that setting.
When we start to look at how humans have developed for 99% of human history, which is. The majority of our time here on the planet has been in small van hunter gatherer tribes, which is the foundation of my research. It’s darcey NVAs, her work on the ancestral evolved nest, which has nine components, one of them being natural perinatal birthing experiences, and on request demand breastfeeding and things like this.
Like very, like more organic, if you will spaces to be in relationship with your body and your baby. What they find is that it’s actually directly connected to morality. It’s actually directing and supporting how people respond and cooperate in the future if they’re being held in these safe places and not feeling overwhelmed as infants, as children.
I think one of the things that medicine work can do within the healing component is remind us that it’s okay to trust our bodies. It’s okay to trust the earth. It’s okay to come back into natural rhythm, and it’s actually safe to just have the experience that we’ve been doing for so many years to be here and we can trust that.
Having children is a natural experience. And when we come back into trusting the rhythms and the stages of that, it has a really amazing way of like all my children, right? Except for my son, he was a vaginal breach. That we went somewhere to have extra people, who knew that route, support us, but have been born at home, witnessing each other’s births.
Around seeing the whole thing. And I have found that with my daughters, there’s that initial stage of damn, that’s really intense, and I’m a woman. Like I, this is like a serious thing. But now that they’ve seen it happen a couple times and it’s been so normal, they are so comfortable in their bodies.
They’re so comfortable with that idea. They’re it’s so normalized that a baby is just born in the living room or on the bed, and then we’re like eating breakfast together. And to have that reestablished, has them not fear their bodies, has them be in a in a space where they feel more excitement and less, less disconnect, from that whole process.
And again, it all comes down to, so I never wanna make someone feel or offer something that would have someone doubt what they know to be true, that they need because people need what they need. When we, again, look at the field that we’re holding the mother and the child in, if we’re wanting to not carry distortion, fear, and limiting beliefs through, can we cultivate a space where we come back into trust?
That we can birth our babies, that we can feed our babies, that we can take care of our babies as a family unit and as a community and not outsource it. Right now in parenting, there’s a lot of outsourcing to doctors, to schooling, to, we can outsource education and medical advice and all of the things, and it’s not wrong to get opinions and perceptions and perspectives, but can we also take responsibility that.
We are in charge of that process and offering our children in lineage the most coherent, pure space that we can muster at the time.
Sam Believ: Yeah. If you outsource everything, then who’s living your life? Then we have to,
Ashley Glowiak: anything that’s scary, you’re like, can you fix it? Can you do this? Or can you just take this away?
And we know like rites of passage are hard, it’s not, but what happens on the other side of that, it’s why people keep coming back to your retreat center is like, what happens on the other side of that rite of passage or that gnarly, ceremony where you are in discomfort and you’re purging and you’re crying and you’re, needing the hardest parts of yourself, but you come out the other side.
You then know that you can handle so much more. And a mother, it’s a gift to be able to come out the other side of labor and to be like, I did that, and here I am standing and I can handle. I now have the expanded capacity to handle the children that I have and the family that I’m creating.
Sam Believ: Let’s talk a little bit more about labor, specifically the, that it can be psychedelic sometimes.
Have you ever experienced that?
Ashley Glowiak: I have.
Sam Believ: Can you tell? Can you tell us?
Ashley Glowiak: Birth is like the original psychedelic, perhaps maybe before we even knew on all of the other amazing medicines, is the hormonal cocktail of the body. Is what we get addicted to, right? It’s has its own powerful components that bring us into altered states.
And it’s, we can activate that through breath the word, we can activate that through different things. The pregnancy has a particular way of unfolding. That when we allow it to have its layers and unfold organically or within its natural process, if you will, the hormonal cocktail that happens for the woman is altering.
You are going into a different realm. You are meeting your baby’s spirit and like pulling them through your body in a totally different space than waking consciousness. We track brainwaves, we’re gonna see that the woman’s brainwaves are in, theta in different spaces than just waking consciousness.
But we also see things that are like you would see in a ceremony. We see purging, we see crying. We see the roaring, the animalistic noises. We see all sorts of things that support the opening of the energetic body to do what needs to happen and when we actually start to have a few experiences where we reopen the body in this way, birth does not have to be painful.
And I think that’s one of the wild, like new understandings that we’re coming to is people are starting to talk about how to. Expand our bodies and how to shift our actual patterning and far fascia and our tissues to open ourselves to be. Birthing beings again is that there’s also a thing called orgasmic and ecstatic birth, right?
So there’s polarities in life. That’s what you’re talking about with you as two sides of the coin. We got the negative polarity where we learn a lot through the initiations and the hard things, and we got the positive polarity where we get too, like sore and with birth we get to find our place on that line.
And I’ve seen and experienced. Full of altered states on, birthing my children and being in, in that kind of big open portal where you have human life coming out of you. It is by nature of different reality to do that, and the body prepares you for it.
You’re not you’re set up for success. If we can allow nature to take its course.
Sam Believ: Yeah, we, I don’t know why we don’t trust the nature anymore. Something happened this whole under there’s so many things in life that makes no sense right now, but if you go back to this tribal society analogy, understanding how we used to live, everything used to make sense.
So many things can be explained this way. I wanna talk about this village mindset as well, but from the point of view of that. Parenting was never supposed to be a thing that just two people do.
Ashley Glowiak: Yeah.
Sam Believ: Can you talk about that?
Ashley Glowiak: Yeah, sure. Yeah. It’s actually a big part of where I’m growing into right now, and part of the heart of family ecology.
Is not only is this a framework to support psychedelic integration into family systems, but it’s also what my husband and I are creating as a homeschool co-op for families that incorporates our children, like I said, who get to learn about forging and learn the language of nature in different ways, and find their interest in reconnecting with the earth below so that they can.
Kind of sprout and grow in as much, effortlessness as we can do in this time. But it has been a big process for us to align with the village that we feel is healthy. Is of the same orientation and mindset that we are to welcome and to share space with and to support them having, babies and to support raising their children and have them incorporate into raising our children.
It’s an intimate thing. And so I think it’s really important for us to get clear on what are our values, because if we don’t have connection to what it is that we value, then we just are hanging out together, right? Which is recreational hangouts and fun things like that is great and all good, and learning from different kinds of people and having exposure in that way is always a learning experience.
So it’s not negative, but when we talk about aging and sharing life and really raising children as a collective, then we really orient to, okay, what is it that we hold as true for ourselves? What is it that’s so important to have as these pillars that we, I know that the values move through these different families and that we can hold them together because then we know how to support and raise one another’s children without.
Bringing in our own projections, bringing in our own, ideas of what it should be or look like.
Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s interesting ’cause in the past you would not choose your village, it would just be like, there’s the people you live with ’em, you figure it out.
Ashley Glowiak: Now
Sam Believ: we
Ashley Glowiak: can burn out. We have to find ourselves.
But you were already living in the. Living in the rhythm.
Sam Believ: But everyone was in the same wave. Yeah. It’s interesting. I can see the future where like we have a lot of people that come to our retreat. They love it so much. Then they wanna stay, like gay is one of them.
You can see her right there. Lady in black like she decided to come and retire and live with us. Yeah. So community is being built. So we’re being a building a little village. But at least we can pick and choose,
Ashley Glowiak: it resonates and it is completely multi-generational and I don’t know how the structure works, but it’s amazing to have people supporting your family who don’t have children, who are like the ones who have, like the energy and the capacity and the desire to help raise kids when they’re doing other projects and other things like that too.
Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s interesting because like specifically older people crave. Being with children, and children crave being with older people. Yeah. It’s like a match made in heaven, but now we just don’t have it anymore because I don’t even know why. Just, that’s just how we do it. Has anyone, any same person.
Would love to spend 20 minutes a day with a cute baby. It’s just something that you would do naturally. You get to opt not 24 hours. Yeah. Yeah. So if you have a community that has some babies running around, naturally people would just take care of them and some more, some less, and we observe it in my retreat.
Like people come and they’re drinking ayahuasca, so they’re more open. Everyone is loving and friendly. The kids are running around. Everyone loves it, kids love it. It’s just seems very natural. So yeah. It’s an interesting thing that hopefully is kinda getting some attention and people are getting more conscious about it.
So we’re very excited to see if we can go back to living a natural way. Ashley, thank you so much. Thank you so much for this conversation. You’re pretty cool like having all those babies and while still figuring things out and trying to help others. Where can people find you, learn more about your work.
Maybe somebody wants to consult with you about couples issues, family issues, et cetera?
Ashley Glowiak: Absolutely.
Sam Believ: Maybe somebody wants to give natural birth. We can help them out.
Ashley Glowiak: Yes. I have a website. It’s just my name, so it’s Ashley AK, G-L-O-W-I-A-K. And on my website you can find my offerings. I have, right now I have some course immersions.
I also have a private community. So it’s a private membership association where you can join. If you want to know more about microdosing, if you want to know more about plant medicine work within the family systems context, we offer education and we will be expanding out to supporting retreats and supporting people to come in.
And that will be very family centered. So that will look like. Having support for your children within our village while you’re engaging with your healing work, and then incorporating family support and the integration. So that’s all coming in the next year or so, as I navigate my own next postpartum and continue to ship away on my PhD in research as well.
Sam Believ: Yeah. Nice. Very busy. Thank you, Ashley. Guys you’ve been listening to our Oscar podcast and I will see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a like wherever it is you’re listening.
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