The Menstruality Podcast - 201. Healing Grief, Fear and Loneliness after Pregnancy Loss (Iris Josephina Verstappen)

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

A few months ago, our guest today, the founder of Cycle Seeds Iris Josephina Verstappen, was hosting a retreat in a goddess temple in Malta when she began to miscarry. Having accompanied many women through pregnancy loss, both as a doula and a holistic hormone and cycle coach, she’s witnessed the storm of emotions that can arise with miscarriage, as well as the taboo surrounding it. So she decided to publicly share about her experience with her 60,000 followers, to be a permission slip for others, so that they don’t have to suffer in silence. In our conversation Iris shares generously and vulnerably about how she has navigated the grief, loneliness, confusion and earth-shaking fear that it could all happen again, as well as the paradoxical feelings of love, possibility, and gratitude for how the experience of pregnancy opened her up. Our hope is that if you’re one of the one in four women and people who experience pregnancy loss, this conversation helps you to feel less alone with whatever you’re feeling. We explore:The imposter syndrome that arose for Iris when she tried to go back to work, and found herself questioning how this could have happened to her when she was doing everything “right”, especially as an educator in the field of cyclical living and women’s health, and how the antidote was simply to lie with her belly flat on the earth. The lack of community support around grief and loss, but especially in the post-partum window after miscarriage where the body is still recovering from the pregnancy, and Iris offers some great ideas for how to support a friend going through this. How Iris is navigating the identity crisis that comes with inhabiting the liminal space between maiden and mother, between becoming and unbecoming, as well as being in a body that looks and feels different after her pregnancy loss.---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyIris Josephina Verstappen: @cycleseeds - https://www.instagram.com/cycleseeds

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for being with us today. So a few months ago, our guest today, who's the founder of Cycle Seeds, Iris Josefina Verstappen, was hosting

a retreat in a beautiful goddess temple in Malta when she began to have a miscarriage. And having accompanied many, many women through pregnancy loss, both as a doula and as a holistic hormone and cycle coach, she's witnessed firsthand the storm of emotions that can arise with miscarriage, as well as the taboo that surrounds it. So she decided to generously publicly share about her experience with her big 60,000 people who are following her and with all of us as a way to be a permission slip for others to speak about this so that they don't have to suffer in silence. And in our conversation today, Iris shares very vulnerably and openly about how she's navigated the grief and the loneliness, the confusion and what she calls the earth-shaking

fear that it could all happen again, as well as the paradoxical feelings of love and possibility and gratitude actually for all the ways that the experience of pregnancy opened her up and our hope really is that if you're one of the one in four women and people who experience pregnancy loss that this conversation helps you to feel more accompanied and less alone with whatever you felt or whatever you're feeling about it. So let's get started with this conversation with Iris. Hi Iris, thank you so much for joining us today on the Menstruality Podcast. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me and for inviting me on. I really appreciate it. I know that we can go quite deep with this first question because

you are, you've been immersed in tracking your menstrual cycle and working with the menstrual cycle for a long, long time. So I'm curious to hear, this is the question we always start with on the podcast, where are you at in your cycling life, in your cycle today and how's it influencing you and impacting you? So I'm actually on the second day of my period today and I feel really mellow and really happy and like you said I've been immersed in my menstrual cycle for so many years and I'm now I consider myself in my fertile years and we are in the process of me potentially hopefully becoming a mother between now and a couple of years so that's where I'm at yeah especially potent to feel you in your bleed

I'm in my I'm on day 11 and for those who've listened to the podcast for a while they know that this is my like hot spot of the cycle really this is where um I guess just for the last few years I feel like I've been in a process of negotiating stuff from my maiden years in my kind of inner maiden phase of the cycle in this pre-ovulatory window so it can be anxious for me um but I find that no matter where I'm at in my cycle this is the thing I love doing the most just being woman to woman having conversations about this so I'm delighted to be with you. Actually before we get into speaking about the topic today I wonder if you could walk us into a little bit like why you got so interested in the cycle like what called you to this work

and what inspires you to keep doing it? This is a this is a bit of a layered question so my initial background was in cultural and medical anthropology, and I was absolutely fascinated by how people perceive the body and perceive health, perceive healing, perceive ritual, perceive rite of passage. And I've always been focusing on that in my university studies while I was not thinking like, oh, I want to go and work with menstrual cycles. But my final research was in pregnancy and birth experiences among women in India. And I traveled there, I lived in a village there, did participant observation,

and I ended up witnessing birth there at the very tender age of 22 years old. And these experiences changed me like as a person forever. And then I thought, have I chosen the wrong field? Should I maybe become a midwife? And then I became a doula. And through my work as a doula, I realized, and I was working with like highly educated people with PhDs. I noticed that people didn't really know so much about their biology and how their body works. And I noticed that a lot of the consultations that I had, which were actually aimed at pregnancy and birth preparation and postpartum preparation were a lot about, but what actually happens in my body

now? And I was like, shouldn't we have this information before we go through all these massive thresholds? And it frustrated me a little bit because I just wanted to do my doula work and I was teaching basic biology to mostly people who were older than I was. And I was like, I want to like shift my focus a bit from pregnancy and birth work and then move through a cyclical stage before that, like menarche our fertile years, what happens? How can we root in this era of our cyclical continuum. So that whenever we choose to, you know, take on the path of parenthood, that we are at least rooted in some knowledge of our body and are aware how our physiology can change. And then we also have a more solid understanding for when we enter the next phase, which is perimenopause, and then eventually the moment of menopause so it was a very organic way in which

I rolled into this work I actually never intended to do this work I wanted to become a professor in medical anthropology that was my wish but this is how I kind of organically rolled into this work and then I you know started educating myself more and here we are today and I'm still doing this it's like never stops being interesting to me to hear how people get into this work because it's like I don't think I've ever heard someone say I just knew it was my calling from the beginning it's like it finds us doesn't it it does I do want to get onto our topic but I just realized I've never sat with a medical anthropologist before and I wonder like through that lens what you would say like how would how you would describe why we don't know about this biology when it's right there with us every day

like what what stopped us from knowing this well I think like this is just my personal view on it it's not what like medical anthropology books say but from the knowledge that i have gained over the years is that there has been a shift in society where and this is like thousands of years i'm not just speaking five years thousands of years where we have moved away from ritual and reciprocal relationship with the land. And we have moved all of these sacred practices to something that stands very far away from us, like a God up in the sky that is unreachable for us. And I think when we were still very much land-based, we were also much more body-based and closer to the body.

And as, you know, ancient midwives did empirical research, like they would do trial and error, which herb works for this body? What happens in the body when we put this in the body? And I feel that because of this perceptual change of what is sacred and where do we seek refuge as human beings there has become there has begun like a disconnect between seeking this understanding and the sacredness within our own bodies and and looking for it very far away disconnected from us and you know then we also have the whole like patriarchy capitalism also the diversion of how we perceive time like that's a big one for me like we were in body based time for a very long time like we would live with the seasons earth live with the seasons

earth would give us food in specific seasons in specific in other seasons we had to go look for our food to nourish ourselves and everything was surrounded around how do we nourish our bodies like where do we have to go and look out for to nourish our physical bodies for survival and with the with the coming of the industrial revolution, our perception of time shifted and changed. And our time management was in service of someone else, to the benefit of someone else, not our own bodies anymore. And I feel that that has created a big discrepancy between where we are in our bodies and what our bodies can handle, and what the external environment is asking from our bodies. I believe there is a very big

disconnect on true perception of time that has brought us into this mess that we are in. Because our bodies still go on these natural clocks, not very much has changed from an evolutionary perspective but we have started to ask environmentally way much from our bodies than it's designed for and that's how i how i perceive these shifts like the perception of time and also the perception of environment and what is important in the environment to benefit us in reciprocal relationship yes yes I feel like you opened up about 18 different fascinating conversations and I want to follow all of them but I'm going to stay loyal to this topic because it's so important and you used that the term then body-based time and as I've sat with your writings about your pregnancy loss

experience where you've shared so generously with us you, in a way that is very radical in and of itself what you know all the all the capitalist um colonizer culture ways that we keep things moving yeah thank you for calling us all into body-based time here and now together I wonder if we could start the conversation about your experience with a piece of this poem, this post-suit, which is a poem for our little one who briefly chose to land in my womb and then left my body at the temple of the goddess. Is that okay if I read a part of this? Of course. So you said,

this loss has activated a remembrance of everything I'm angry about and grieving about in this lifetime. And I know anger is an alchemical force so I give into it completely and surrender may the goddess hold me and all the women going through this in her ancient lap and may we be cradled in gentleness held in softness and witness in our rage and grief I know this makes me more human more woman woman, more alive. Even though everything is numb right now, this too is life. And I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about the temple,

where this began and why it means so much to you. Yeah, so a couple of years ago in 2018, I felt a very big pull to visit the lands of Malta and Gozo in the Mediterranean Ocean Sea, Mediterranean Sea. And my whole experience there was magic upon magic upon magic. I didn't know anything about this place. I arrived there because of a book that I was reading, and they spoke about the temples. There were no pictures. I Googled the pictures, and I had a very physical response to seeing these temples.

I was instantly crying, instantly emotionally very, very moved. I was like, wow, that's a lot to respond to a Google picture. I was like, I really want to go there. I really want to go and see these temples. And I booked my flight and booked the car, booked Airbnb. And a month later, I was on the plane to Malta and I arrived there. And the evening I arrived there, my Airbnb host came to me because I was staying in people's house.

My Airbnb host came to me and he said, there's something I need you to know. I'm like, okay. He said, yes, my partner, she went into labor. There's a baby going to be born here while you're here. Just so you know. Oh, okay. I'm trained as a doula if you need any help just you know let me know and he just like dropped his cutlery in the sink and he looked at me and he said we've been looking for a doula for nine months and I'm like oh that's why I'm here it like it just landed in me and I was like oh okay I understand

why I had to go now and I ended up you know witnessing and supporting this beautiful home birth of this baby on the first night of my stay at the Airbnb and

the next day I went to visit these temples and it was an immediate homecoming. And there was a lot of mystery around these temples. Nobody really knows who built them, how old they actually are. But there is a very strong feminine connection to it because there were a lot of feminine and female figurines found there, which makes archaeologists think and anthropologists think that these places were places of worship specifically for a female deity. But the way that these temples are built, there is something that happens in your body. Like I ascribe it to the electromagnetic field that is created to the positioning of the stones.

If you've ever been to a sacred site that is beyond the time that we are living now, you know what I mean. And this specific temple, Jagantiya, is like, for me, like a nerve center. There is something that happens in the nervous system when you're there and you're in're instant rooted relaxation and i have after this first experience that i was there i've moved to malta i've lived there for multiple years and i would visit these temples regularly just for my

own spiritual work and to immerse myself in these ancient stones because they they talk they have a they are there because they have a message just like with churches they are there because they convey a message and with ancient places it's the same and they are built in a specific time because in that moment in time there was a message to be conveyed and these constructions they survived they survived time and they're still here and nobody knows how old they are but it was very profound for me to um to experience my loss in that temple because it's it was very auspicious how it happened and i feel it it had to happen there because i was in my most open relaxed receptive

surrendered state i wasn't in a state of stress or turmoil or fear or it was very very peaceful and i always feel that way in these temples there hasn't been any moment where i felt out of place it's like homecoming and it's it's there's something that happens in the body that i cannot explain from a scientific perspective, but you just feel something in you opens. There is a reverence, there is a acceptance, a gratitude, surrender. Like those are the only words that I can actually give to being in a place like that. Yes.

Yeah, the moment in which it happened was when I was actually hosting a retreat for women in Malta and this was on the first this was the first initiation to the land and then this happened to me there. You shared in your post about your pregnancy loss that this was different that you have experienced pregnancy loss before but this was a different experience and can you explain a bit about why this impacted you so strongly? I think there's like two ways in which I can explain this because the previous times that I experienced pregnancy loss was with different partners and not with a partner that I truly trust as the father of my children.

So in the other moments, I was also much younger. So I feel that in the moments where I got pregnant at a younger age, in my early twenties, I wasn't ready to become a parent yet. The idea of children excited me somehow, but I know I was not ready to take on the commitment of becoming a parent because that's something very different, I feel. And in this moment, it happened with a partner that I love, that I want to grow old with. I trust him as, you know,

the future father of my children. And I think this is why it hit me so much harder, because it was something that we were both really happy about. We really wanted this. And I, for the first time, felt I was really ready to open up to the mystery of motherhood and open up to the complete surrender and identity shift that comes with that. I was fully aware that that was what was waiting for me on the other side. And I was trusting enough to take on that journey without thinking oh I actually don't want to be pregnant this was the first time that I was like I now am going to surrender to this entire process I experienced infertility for four years like really longing

for a child every single month and every single month the blood came. So I haven't experienced pregnancy loss, but you know, we have different flavors of these different longings and, or we can get into it later, but the kind of sense of betrayal that we can experience. Just before we get there, as I've said, you've been so generous with sharing this story what was it that called you to be to speak about it to write about it to tell us all about it and to open this very intimate experience up for for us to experience with you I have accompanied a lot of women in this process in this journey through my work i work with women and their menstrual cycles and their fertility and sometimes these experiences are part of it and i always found or i always heard the feedback like you're the only one i

can talk to on this very deep level about this and then I immediately already thought like it must feel so lonely for these women to only have one person to be able to share fully with and then I felt like to, I think, set an example of how it is possible to share about this because it's very much in the taboo sphere. And maybe that is because the people who have not experienced it, or people who cannot relate, cannot relate to losing a person that you've never met, or hasn't really existed outside of the womb. And that's very hard, because we conceptualize through physicality as human beings very often. So losing a pet or losing a person, it's very easy for people to perceive. But this feels

very invisible, because it's something that grows inside of you that nobody sees. And then when you experience the loss, maybe only you and your partner witness the physical remains of this full life that existed within you. And I wanted to bring that out because I know it stays in the taboo sphere very often. And I know from witnessing that a lot of women suffer in silence and I didn't want to suffer in silence. So I was like, I just want to talk about this because it is really

hard and I want people to approach me with respect as I go through this and it's my responsibility to make people aware that this is happening I first focused on telling the people around me, but then it felt really wrong as a person who works around this to not share it with my followers and keep that part away from them because I'm always very open with my followers. So I wanted to honor that part too. And yeah, maybe in some way, I don't want to say be an example, but maybe be a permission slip for other women to also talk about this and maybe also show like, oh, she works with the menstrual cycle every single day and she does all the right things and it also happens to her and I think I wanted I wanted to share that because it felt very wrong to just keep that for myself and then pretend everything was okay and then maybe in the future show a positive pregnancy test as if I

haven't struggled like any other woman so and that just didn't feel right and it all if it I think it was also part of my process actually to just share about it in the most real raw unscripted way that I could every post I made was just I made it and I posted it I didn't like sit on how to write it or how to share it it was just like this is it this is gonna go out now and yeah I've I've had a lot of response from people to that that they recognize that there were women who were going through it at the same time so people who shared their stories with me and I think it just made people feel less alone and I think that's essentially for all women what we want to feel we want to feel less alone because it's such a lonely experience yes yeah because there is so much still to reclaim

yeah in a world that's still really interested in silencing and dismissing our the experiences in our bodies there's so much space to reclaim inside and outside and in the thought space and yes yeah well thank you I'm gonna say thank you a lot Iris I'm just so grateful because I I felt less alone reading it even though now I have my son he's four years old I've been a mother for four years although I felt like I was a mother as though now I have my son. He's four years old. I've been a mother for four years, although I felt like I was a mother as soon as I started my journey to trying to conceive. But the part of me that is still grieving those four years was like, because it's so rare that I hear someone speak with the level of precision

about the different feelings that these experiences can evoke and I think he said somewhere in one of these posts that it's like the pro the the process has somehow awakened like a new oracular capacity in you and that's what I was feeling I was like wow she is I'm not I'm not sure about the term channeling she is like receiving life's wisdom through her and it's flowing through unfiltered is the sense I got reading yeah yeah and I feel that we this is just my personal feeling I don't know maybe someone researched it but I feel that with every significant threshold that we move through, whether it is our first blood, whether it is our first charted cycle, whether it is our first pregnancy, our first loss, our first full-term

birth, each of these experiences comes with wisdom and it's unwritten wisdom. It's just like this inner intuitive system that we have that gets like fueled by every threshold and every rite of passage. And for me, like I've always felt very connected to like the unseen world, if I can call it like that, and intuition and inner knowing. And I feel with this experience, there were so many deeper layers that I could reach in that. And it made me connect deeper to my own inner intuition and my trust for these oracular messages coming through that is very far away from hard science or rational one two three four it's like it's a deep inner knowing that i cannot even put it into words but i know that my my intuition has been sharpened by this experience. I know things and I feel things and I smell things and I hear things more than before that this happened.

I interviewed a brilliant woman recently. She's called Dr. Cynthia Ingar and she's an anthropologist. She's sat with and studied with andean grandmothers for a long long time and now teach you know shares their teachings and one of the teachings she shared with us in the podcast was that when we bleed when we um experience pregnancy postpartum pregnancy loss menopause that we enter this realm that in Quechua is called the Ukupacha, the realm of the feminine. I've just been sitting with this ever since that these thresholds take us deeply into this different realm. And we can't explain it through science, but we know it, we feel it. So some of the pieces that you unearthed from this

Ukupacha time that were most resonant for me were this list of things that you said you were feeling after your pregnancy loss. I mean, the first one, you've already pointed to it, a sense of imposter syndrome, like how could this happen to me when I was doing everything quote unquote right, which I think is an experience that so many have we make it about us there's something wrong with me I failed I've done something wrong yeah yeah this was one of the things that not the first thing that that that part actually came when I had to go back to work when I got back home and I was like in front of my computer and I was like how I'm like a changed

person how am I going to continue my work now as this different person I'm not like wanting to teach some of the things that I taught before and then also how could this happen to me because I'm teaching all these things and I'm doing all these things. And then something like this still happens. Like, how do I weave these things together as my reality and as truth? So I was, it was very hard to come back to the body and then go like, look, but this is what happens. Like one in four pregnancies ends in a loss and that is very normal and our womb is a space of creation and it's a space of death and it's not up to you

to choose when these things happen and I had to really like sit with that and not let my rational mind like take over and rationalize my way in and out of it because that would make me feel really guilty and really bad about myself while maybe there was a higher purpose like maybe this baby just had to go and my body just wanted to do like a tryout with this man you know like how how well can my body cope with his DNA like let's let's try it out like how that is happening you know and we often see it that way like we often see that the first try is a early loss and the second time is a like a full term that's something that you've seen in your work with women yeah so I feel that there is maybe also even a biological purpose to it that I cannot like scientifically explain but maybe there is and it's not up to me to then go into my narrow narrative and go like oh my body failed me like it's not helping me

it's not helping anyone it's not like it doesn't lead anywhere if I go into that loop so I really have to like navigate myself out of that I feel like right now I'm doing way better with that, like sitting the two-month mark right now. And I feel that I'm back in a space where I can trust my body again. Yeah, trusting our bodies again. Yeah. I can feel the fierce truth in you. It feels like menstrual truth, big, important truth. I'm going to pause the podcast for a couple of moments. We really hope that this episode is supportive for you if you've recently experienced pregnancy loss or a healing from previous

experiences. And as I've spoken about today, although I didn't ever experience miscarriage, my time with fertility challenges and treatments gave me a sense of much of what iris has been speaking about in this conversation and throughout all of that the practice of menstrual cycle awareness was a lifeline for me it's tracking my cycle helping me to understand that everything changes everything moves everything shifts and so much more and so i want to share about a course that Alexandra and Sharni have created. It's their most comprehensive menstrual cycle awareness course ever. It's called Cycle Power.

And you can find out more about it at redschool.net forward slash cycle power. And as you might know, the doors for the menstruality leadership program are going to be opening soon and if you're thinking of joining bed school this year for the menstruality leadership program lots of our graduates have shared that the cycle power course is a really good way to prepare for the depth of the MLP so it could be a good first step for you and here's a story from Shalise who recently graduated from the menstruality leadership program and she did cycle power before that. So she says, for years doctors told me that I probably don't ovulate because of my PCOS. This has made my relationship with my inner summer feel empty. As someone who is currently trying to conceive, this season is

filled with both uncertainty and pressure month after month I've spent this season desperately hoping that my body will work but time and time again I've been left disappointed because of all of this my inner summer has been anything but summer for me but the good news is that now I've learned how practicing cyclical self-care can change how we experience the different seasons of our cycle. On the Cycle Power course, I feel so much hope. Thank you so much for sharing that, Shalise, so you can find out more about the Cycle Power course at redschool.net forward slash cycle power. Let's get back to the conversation with Iris.

Can you remember back to what lit a spark, which lit a light in you to help you out of those thoughts and to help you front of screens, not consuming anything, but really going out on the land, in nature. And one of the things that really helped me move through was laying with my belly flat on the earth and just being there whether it was on the beach or in the forest or in the water in the ocean um i live in portugal so i have access to to these landscapes and that is i think the only thing that would soothe me in the beginning and then the more often I did that the more often I felt like this is the right thing to do like and you know I could go into the whole like quantum biology of like negative charge of the earth and how that works into our bodies but and the light and the water but that was what helped me and I didn't go into these scientific parts like oh it's now helping because the earth is negatively charging me and the sunlight but I didn't go into that I was just like I'm just going to receive progress because she's always here and that's what I did

yeah we know so much and then like just putting our feet and bellies on the earth is almost always the answer. Yeah. You've spoken about this already, but the second thing that you named or one of the other things you named was loneliness. Like a sense that what I read from what you wrote was a sense that I should be being held right now it makes no sense that there isn't just just a natural holding that should be happening and it sounds like one of the ways you navigated through that was by sharing with your community yeah because one of the things I found like so odd going through this is like why isn't the world like dropping everything to support a woman going through this because this is like really really big and essentially we are postpartum yes but there is just no physical baby so there is no reason

for other people to come to the rescue or to come for support because when there is a baby people come for support obviously because everyone wants to see the baby but what if the baby never comes like what if the baby decides to leave and the mother is there alone and that was like it even makes me emotional when I think about it and it didn't make me feel like I was angry but it made me feel really sad like how have we come to this place that this is not what we do and it also made me feel like whenever you know someone close to me is going to move through this like I'm going to be there for them. Like regardless, because I needed that and there was no one like for me giving me food or coming to support me with my body.

I still feel like I have like some pelvic pain from this whole experience and there is just not like no support also if you just look at the medical system you don't get like physiotherapy appointments from your insurance after miscarriage like it's not a non-existent you just have to go and look for it yourself you have to reinvent the wheel, like what to do, like what will help me right now. And then there was also the part of rediscovering your body because you're doing life from this body

and the hormonal changes from pregnancy, they do something to your body. So it also shifts like how you experience your body and even for that like from a community perspective there is no support if you go to the gym and you say i had a miscarriage please help me because i don't know how to move now people are like i don't know, and then, you know, you have to do the emotional labor of going to look for where is the support, who to find. And it just felt really wrong to me. Yeah. How can it be that me in my grief, and I don't want to like sound like I'm like sad and everyone needs to support me but

just in general how can it be that a woman has to sit through that grief and then get through her days and get back to work while she's still grieving making meals I mean I don't have children yet but women who go through this when they have children they just have to care for the kids and do the work and then there is like nothing like support it just wakes up this always this visceral fire of rage in me of like this is where life comes from and it's another way that it's dishonored and not not acknowledged intended to and cared to in the way that it needs to be thank you so much for naming naming all of this when I was walking around each month bleeding when I didn't want to be I felt like I was carrying death with me everywhere I went and that wasn't okay there wasn't any space I had two soul friends two girlfriends who were

going through a similar journey and that was my space they were holding me yeah I guess I guess we turn something in our culture many of our cultures just turns away from from death yeah from the unbecoming rather than the becoming yeah I very much feel that and I you know there are some changes like I heard in some European countries are now like thinking about miscarriage leave good you know honoring this time because it's not something that is medically considered like bad enough to not go to work how is your body doing now I feel right now it is slightly better but I'm still struggling with like my pelvis feels very floaty yeah like my my stabilizer muscles are not doing what they're supposed to be doing

so I feel I need some support with that yeah um but my cycles surprisingly have returned like fully I've I chart I've charted since I was 22 years old my ovulation returned immediately after the loss and you know I was like wow my body just you know picks up where it left off and it was very special to witness that because it made me also like honor the intelligence of the body in this whole process the resilience as well yeah yeah I'm thinking of abortion care as well, because that's also postpartum, you know, there's not at all enough awareness around what a big process that is and the care that's needed around it and after it. No, and with abortion, it's also like, ah, but you chose it yourself, so you have to deal with the consequences. Yeah, yeah. yeah like regardless of of the the reason why someone chooses that path like it's so vast there are so many reasons so many layers to it and society very often is just very insensitive

like oh well yeah that's how you deal with it I've had women in my practice who were approached that way and I'm just like how yeah what would you say to someone because there is likely that people are listening or have either just experienced this too or have friends or family or you know people in their community what would you say to someone who is connected to someone experiencing you know after pregnancy loss what what should they be doing what could they be doing to reach out and help I would first recommend to check in with the person who is going through it and see what it is that they need and I can only speak for myself because I don't want to give like tips on on this because it's so bio individual and it's so unique but what I missed is just

support with the basic day-to-day like cook for me clean my house do my laundry so I don't have to think about these basic things that seem like mountains like that's how I felt and you know in the first weeks that I was back home I just ordered food at like an organic kitchen that I know that has really good food because I just could I just could not use my brain to think oh Iris has to eat three times per day and I find it really important to eat healthy but I just couldn't get myself to like drive to the market or drive to the supermarket and then think out a whole meal and then prepare the meal and then meal prep. Like, no.

So I just ordered my food from a good source. So I would say the most tangible way to help someone is to do the basics that can feel like a mountain like laundry eating cleaning making sure someone drinks enough taking care of the children uh and in and around the house yeah and these are exactly the things that are needed postpartum it just it is a postpartum time do the postpartum things yeah cook clean yeah one of the other pieces that you spoke to was, you've named this already, this identity crisis that you found yourself in this liminal place, no longer maiden, not mother, like in a process of becoming and unbecoming. Yeah. How's that unfolded for you? I think it's like a constant journey. There is constantly new layers revealed.

I feel that with every luteal phase and like the, like the threshold from not bleeding to bleeding, that's the moment where like the new insights and all of the grief just comes up about this um and how to like position myself in this in between because i feel i i have to remain in this in between until i fall pregnant again because there is no way to like project my mothering like the only this is probably very funny but the only like way to like soothe this for me now is like with a huge desire and then hopefully action to get a puppy like it's my exactly what I did exactly what I did yeah

sleeping next to me right now yeah so and this is something that I've like I I mean you can ask my partner how how many times I bring up this topic of this puppy because there is like this motherly becoming that just was cut off and I just feel it has to go somewhere but I'm not ready yet to like get pregnant again because it feels really scary and I don't think it's healthy to get pregnant within three months after you know going through this like there is time that is needed but then there is this feeling that wants to land somewhere and I have you know friends with children and friends with dogs so there is like it can land somewhere but I think it would I think it would be very helpful for me to to have a puppy

I want that for you so much what kind of puppy would you get I really want to have a multi poo which is like a mix between a Maltese and a poodle that's quite quite a cute small fluffy one yeah I can see that for you having Frodo's little sleeping puppy belly on my lap was everything yeah yeah I could cry it was everything yeah so that's that's something that I feel would be really really helpful because it kind of like helps me continue that cycle of becoming in a more gentle parenting way that is not like having the responsibility over a full-blown human yet and going through the whole process of pregnancy but having a place where that love can land and is received. And yeah, there is a reciprocity that can be grown there. Yeah. A place where the love can land. Yes. Two other pieces that just feel so important to name, because I imagine for those listening, their experiences that they're having their own version of and the first one was you said um grief love and possibility existing all at the same time yeah what I experienced was a massive

expansion of my capacity to be with paradox because there's nowhere to go apart from insight into that right yeah and I feel for me that was like a deeper landing into that because I have experienced this in a different way in my life when I was I'll share this for context when I was 19 my father passed away and one day after he passed away my auntie who was his sister gave birth to her baby so in that moment we had like this coexisting as a family we were grieving my father and we were celebrating the birth of Noah and it was it was all at once we were like so full of love for this new baby and so full of grief for my dad and I feel that with this pregnancy loss this feeling was familiar to me because I had experienced it long time ago in a different context and there was a deeper landing into this coexisting of love and grief but with this experience there was the extra dimension of possibility because my body had proven it could become pregnant and I could feel the whole cascade

of hormone changes and my body doing that felt like a huge, not an accomplishment, but like a possibility, a mystery possibility that I had now fully felt in my body. And it also gave me like, hope. I myself, I'm born like two months months early and it always like worried me that that would mean something for my own fertility um but this experience showed me like no you can actually fall pregnant and there you know your body can do this that was the possibility part for me thank you so much for naming your father and I'm so sorry to hear about his loss your loss there um I wonder I'm curious about because you're such a poet if you can tease out some of what you what you learned from that experience of holding that contrast with the loss

of your father and then the birth of Noah and how you could sort of translate some of that to hold yourself in this experience of everything all at once yeah I think that in in in this question like all these different experiences come together so there was the passing of my father which was a very profound experience for me um and then the birth of noah wasn't present but then when i was in india i witnessed birth for the first time and i noticed it was the same energy that was in the room when my father passed but just the direction was different um and so in this experience, I experienced both. So I could feel life landing into my womb and I could feel life exiting my womb. And I could feel these directions of this energy that I had already felt in the room as a witness. But now I could feel them or experience them both in my in my own body and I feel that I now have an

embodied experience of these directions of energies of life and death that we can sense in our in our body yeah it's a whole new rainbow prism spectrum opening up of the idea of a womb as portal like how amazing is it that we have these wombs these gateways of life and death the last piece that feels really important to bring in is you mentioned that you were experiencing fear you called it earth-shaking fear that it could happen again yeah I think the fear part was more about the being alone um because at the time this happened I was with a group of women in Malta I wasn't with my family I wasn't with my partner and I was very much supported I was you know with a group of amazing women we had an amazing chef who was making the most amazing high protein high fat meals every day so I felt

very grateful um for that but it was the coming home and I had to come home alone at the time that was the most heartbreaking part for me like the being with such an immense grief and having it having nowhere to for it to land truly and having to move through that all on my own before meeting my partner not being with my family and not being with my family, and not being with like the community of people that I really intimately know. I don't want that to happen again, because it really messes with your mental health. I really feel that the community part is like a buffer or like a protection mechanism for your mental health not to like spiral too much and it was the spiraling part that was so scary and that made me feel fearful for this to happen again

because it felt that the spiraling and like the feeling of like depression and the mental mindfuck almost um they had everywhere to go there was like no buffer and i had to then get myself out of that on my own a human cannot regulate themselves on their own like we need other people we need mirrors we need community to co-regulate that part as well um and it felt just really scary to see where my mind could spiral into and then no one to say like hey let's get out of that right now or distract me from it because i also had to be that person for myself in that moment I think that's the part that felt so scary for me um because it's not normal to to be in that and um that's why I was saying like I and I said this to like multiple people I don't want this to happen ever again and I've been like very clear, like with my friends, with my family, I don't want it to happen like this ever again. And if that means I have to wait longer until my partner and I can like fully, fully live

together, I will do that. I'd rather wait than have this happen again. And me having to go through that part on my own, it's it's not natural and it's this is where the mental health issues start because there is no community community is a buffer for mental health issues to go spiral their way into directions you don't want them to go in yeah there's so much more understanding of this these days that like self-care is community care community care is self-care thank goodness yeah yeah thank goodness for community yes yeah I wanted to ask you finally about how you're rebuilding after just before I do that

is there anything else that feels important to share about like some of the feelings that you had after your pregnancy loss I think maybe just to normalize that a lot of feelings come up and maybe feelings that you have never felt before and layers of feelings that you've never felt before um they can all come up and they can all surface all at once. And for me, even things of my childhood came up, like totally like random, like, oh, remember this shitty thing happened in your childhood? Here it is again, like feel it through, you know? So I think what I want to say is that it is normal for a lot of things to surface and it is normal that grief is not linear when you're healing from this and there's always like new layers new triggers that you know can

touch something and make you cry or dissociate or feel not so good about yourself or feel lonely or sad or anger and you named that you've you've been letting yourself cry wherever whenever letting it happen yeah there's even been a couple of times where I was like in public or in a supermarket and I just had to cry and that's that yes yeah been there um thank you love the the last piece I'd love to ask you about in the last couple of minutes is um you shared a final post about how nobody talks about how hard it is to rebuild after pregnancy loss yeah and I'll drop a link to these posts in the show notes for the for the podcast because they're beautiful and such a resource for people I'm just curious yeah how

is it how is the rebuilding going what's supporting you it's going really slow I have to really accept this this body time that I can think my way into rebuilding, but my body had like very different plans. I didn't work out for about eight weeks, just like postpartum. I didn't go to the gym for eight weeks. I just couldn't, you is reformer Pilates with a physical therapist, which is really helpful for me. Having such a skilled support. And I'm in nature every single day. I'm doing barefoot walks for my negative charge. I'm in the sunlight. I allow my circadian rhythm to be as balanced as it can be because our menstrual cycle and our infradian rhythm is very dependent on our circadian rhythm. I eat three meals per day and I try to make them really nourishing, high fat, high protein. I communicate with my partner, with my friends, with my family, where I'm at.

And I have canceled all like big collaboration things until summer because I was like, I just can't, like, I need to rebuild everything. And also my business, you know, I work for myself and I couldn't really work for like one and a half months because every time I sat down I would just either break down or have a panic attack like what the hell am I doing why am I doing this what to do so it was it was also a financial strain so I'm also like rebuilding financially and seeing how to how to do that and I want to be really open and honest about that it's not been easy yeah yeah yeah thank you for naming that that was a big part of over my four years of like how am I supposed to work while I'm going through this but I guess I have to because I've got to pay the rent

and yeah it's a thing we can have a whole other conversation about that but thank you so much it's what a rich conversation if um those listening would like to hear more about you and your work where's the best place to to find you and to connect with you so on social media i'm the most on instagram over at cycle seeds my website is cycleseeds.com and i have a podcast called the inner rhythms podcast and those are the the best ways to reach out to me. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing so generously. Thank you for the, yeah, the beauty and the depth and the breadth of the wisdom

that you've shared with us today. And I'm, yeah, sending you so much love as you continue your healing and rebuilding. Thank you so much, Iris. Thank you so much for having me. And I really hope this helps other people. Yeah, I know it will thank you love take care thank you so much for being with us today thank you for tuning in I hope this episode has been

supportive for you as Iris mentioned at the end there and if you know someone who has recently experienced pregnancy loss or is still healing from a process from the past then please do forward this episode to them and that's it for this week I'll be with you again next week and until then keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm