Jessica Austin is a powerful woman and doula, living with metastatic cancer and mothering her 1-year-old. She is a carrier of so much community medicine and she is basically a magical unicorn. 

If you love the authenticity in her sharing here, you might also listen to her podcast "If I'm Not Here To Tell You" which she has created so her kid can always hear her stories in her voice. She explains in this conversation how she decided to share it with the world to promote the idea of community learning as we can all learn through listening to a real human share their truth, even (and especially) when it holds the pain and the beauty of life and death.

In this episode, we discuss women as storytellers and explore the importance of sharing around birth and birthing. 

She shares in this Shakti conversation around how:

~ Birth is a wild mammal having a completely spontaneous process (5 mins)

~ Birth is traditionally a community experience - until it got put behind closed doors and how we started viewing the body and the baby as an object (8 mins)

~ We're glorified "scientific knowledge" and kicked community learning to the side (10 mins)

~ If we don't share our stories, they die with us... sometimes social media can be a way to share our true stories and document our personal legacy (20 mins)

~ Your Story Matters! (40 mins)