Restoring the Village: Reimagining Postpartum Care Through Community

For Lauren Felts, the path into postpartum care began with a desire to find meaningful work that could exist alongside motherhood. With a background in nutrition and a growing interest in Ayurveda, food as medicine, plants, and traditional wisdom, she eventually discovered the Sacred Window Studies program.

What she found there was more than a professional training. The teachings gave language to questions she had been carrying for years and introduced her to a way of understanding postpartum care that felt deeply familiar.

Lauren describes Ayurvedic wisdom as a kind of remembering: knowledge that we have already known, that has always been within us, but that we may have forgotten. That sense of remembering became part of her own journey into caring for mothers and families.

From One-on-One Care to a Bigger Vision

Lauren began her work in the homes of postpartum families, offering the intimate, practical support that new mothers often need during the early weeks after birth.

As she worked with families, she began to see how many questions continued to arise after a practitioner left the home.

What should I eat?

How do I care for my healing body?

What happens when I cannot sleep?

How do I navigate this new relationship with my partner?

Where do I turn when something feels emotionally overwhelming?

For Lauren, the gap between in-person visits became especially clear. Postpartum mothers could spend hours alone in the middle of the night, overwhelmed by questions and uncertainty, without knowing where to turn for trustworthy information and support.

She began asking how the knowledge she had gained through Sacred Window could be extended beyond the hours spent physically in a family's home. Her answer became Birthing Mothers, a grounded and curated space designed to provide support, education, and connection in the spaces between appointments and visits.

Bringing Different Ways of Knowing Together

One of the central ideas behind Birthing Mothers is integration.

Lauren had experienced both conventional medical environments and holistic spaces, and she saw how often mothers were asked to choose between seemingly opposing approaches. Her vision was to create a space where evidence-based medicine and traditional and holistic wisdom could exist alongside one another.

Rather than asking families to choose one worldview, Birthing Mothers seeks to bring different practitioners, perspectives, and forms of knowledge into conversation.

The platform includes practitioners working across a range of disciplines, allowing families to encounter different kinds of care while also helping practitioners understand when another person's expertise may better serve a family's needs.

For Lauren, this kind of connection is essential. When practitioners understand one another's work, they can refer, collaborate, and create a wider network of care rather than working in isolation.

Caring for the People Who Care

As the vision expanded, Lauren realized that supporting mothers could not be separated from supporting everyone around them.

Partners matter.

Practitioners matter.

Caregivers matter.

The wider household matters.

Lauren speaks about the postpartum period as an interconnected system. A mother does not exist in isolation, and neither does the person caring for her.

This has led Birthing Mothers to create resources not only for mothers, but also for non-birthing partners and practitioners. The platform includes dedicated support for partners as they navigate the enormous transition of becoming parents, including the grief, resentment, uncertainty, and changing roles that can accompany that transition.

Lauren has also developed resources for practitioners themselves. Her Foundations offering began as a gift to the practitioners within the Birthing Mothers community, recognizing that those who spend their lives caring for others also need nourishment, restoration, and support.

Nutrition, breathwork, meditation, nervous system practices, healthy home practices, yoga, and movement are all part of that broader vision of caregiver care.

Rebuilding the Village

At the heart of Lauren's work is a recognition that postpartum care was never meant to happen in isolation.

The old idea of the village may feel distant in a culture where families are often separated from extended community and where practitioners work within increasingly specialized fields. Yet the need for connection has not disappeared.

If anything, the postpartum period makes that need impossible to ignore.

Lauren's vision is one of rebuilding those connections in a contemporary way: bringing together mothers, partners, practitioners, educators, and communities so that care becomes less fragmented and more relational.

This vision also reflects a core principle of Ayurveda: nothing exists entirely on its own. We are constantly responding to the environments, relationships, rhythms, and systems around us.

As Lauren's work has evolved, so has her understanding of what it means to care for a mother. Supporting the mother means looking at who is caring for her, who is supporting the household, and who is supporting the practitioners themselves.

A Shared Spark

Toward the end of their conversation, Christine and Lauren return to the importance of community and the unique contribution each person brings.

Christine reflects on the many Sacred Window students and alumni who carry what they have learned into the world in different ways. Each person takes a piece of the work and allows it to become something new.

For Lauren, that has meant transforming her experience as a postpartum caregiver, her Ayurvedic education, and her own lived experience into a larger ecosystem of care.

The work continues to grow, but the underlying intention remains simple: to help people feel less alone.

There is power in practitioners knowing one another.

There is power in mothers having somewhere trustworthy to turn.

There is power in partners understanding their place within the postpartum journey.

And there is power in caregivers remembering that they, too, deserve to be held.

Lauren's story is ultimately a story about what becomes possible when care moves beyond the individual and back into relationship. As she reflects in the conversation, there is so much more we can do together.

Perhaps restoring the village does not mean recreating the past exactly as it was.

Perhaps it means remembering what was always true: we were never meant to do this alone.

caring for women requires looking beyond physical health alone. Birthing Mothers brings together evidence-based Western medicine with nutrition, Ayurveda, movement, meditation, breathwork, mental health support, and other integrative practices—giving women trusted education, practical tools, community, and access to experienced maternal-health practitioners in one supportive space.

Born from Lauren’s own experience of pregnancy and motherhood, Birthing Mothers is working to create a more connected and human approach to maternal care—one that supports the body, mind, and heart while helping women build greater self-trust throughout the transition into motherhood.

Lauren is also passionate about building a connected network of maternal-health professionals and creating meaningful collaboration across disciplines. Birthing Mothers is currently welcoming new practitioner partnerships with aligned providers and organizations interested in education, referrals, events, community, and expanding integrative support for women and families.

Links:

Learn more: www.wearebirthingmothers.com
Practitioner Partnerships: https://www.wearebirthingmothers.com/practitioners

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Podcast Music is Composed by Sara Emmitt, graduate of the Center for Sacred Window Studies. You can hear more of Sara’s incredible music at www.saraemmitt.com.