Community Highlights: Meet Sarah Green of Sacred Wild Midwifery

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Green.

Hi Sarah, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
At around 20 years old, I was in school to become a veterinarian when my older sister had her first child. She had a natural, unmedicated labor and birth and was attended by midwives and I was fortunate enough to be there to support her through her labor and be present at the birth. When my little nephew finally emerged after 24 hours of labor, I knew that I’d found my calling–to become a midwife and support women in this most incredible journey of bringing new life into the world. My mother had birthed all of us at home with a midwife and home birth always seemed like a very natural thing to me, once I knew I was called to this sacred work, I felt deeply connected to serving women in their own space, at their own pace.

Soon after that realization, I switched my studies to nursing with the goal of becoming a nurse midwife. I immerse myself in everything about pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum, educating myself, and started supporting friends in their transitions to motherhood as a doula. I soon began volunteering as a midwife assistant at a free-standing birth center and completed my Bachelor’s degree in nursing, becoming a registered nurse in 2009. I started working in labor/delivery and postpartum units in downtown Los Angeles with a majority of Latina women. My intention was to spend 2 years learning all about birth from a medical perspective and figured it was good to learn what high and low-risk birth looked like. I was mentored by amazing nurses and midwives and gained tremendous experience from serving thousands of women through their labors, postpartum periods, newborn care, and breastfeeding journeys. I also witnessed countless acts of obstetric violence, and a complete lack of informed consent, especially given that the majority of women spoke Spanish and had little to no comprehension of the English language…most providers and nurses did not speak Spanish.

I’d studied Spanish extensively and was an exchange student in Chile as a teenager and had moderately good Spanish-speaking skills and made great use of them working in LA. I realized how critically important it was for women to feel safe, understood, and respected during these very vulnerable situations, and the desire to be an advocate for ALL women regardless of background became deeply rooted in me. As the road of life often does, my path to becoming a midwife became more of a winding path rather than a straight one. My plans to go straight to midwifery school after 2 years of nursing became many more years exploring other ways of enriching myself as a would-be midwife and support to women from all walks of life. I love to travel and explore, pushing myself to my limits and testing my own resolve and capabilities and decided to take an opportunity to do a mentorship with a midwife (Rosita) in Santiago, Chile. She worked in a very low-resource clinic doing obstetric and gynecologic care for women of low socioeconomic status. I learned so from Rosita and those women, seeing their strengths and struggles, and wanted to continue to support women in any place I could be of service. I later moved to Chile and re-validated my nursing degree there (took about a year of studying learning medical Spanish and 4 Spanish language written exams!).

I worked in 2 different hospitals in Santiago, thinking I’d want to study midwifery in Chile, however, I soon found that the majority of midwives in Chile were very “medicalized” and did not really support normal, physiologic birth, let alone out of hospital birth and instead used a lot of common interventions that I’d seen much of while working in a hospital in the USA that were often the cause of, or contributing factor to, a cascade of further interventions that many times led to a woman feeling powerless, disrespected, and traumatized as well as experiencing physical and emotional harm. I found that many women in Chile had similarly experienced trauma as a result of a medical system that did not truly inform, support or honor them and they sought alternatives. While studying with a traditional midwife, I became friends with a prenatal yoga teacher who saw an opportunity for us to combine our experience and skills to create a set of childbirth education courses coupled with prenatal yoga.

It was such a beautiful experience and several women approached us to support them in their labors and births at home. The first home birth I ever attended was in Santiago, after gathering what supplies I could find at flea markets and medical supply stores, studying, and preparing–she had a lovely, 20ish-hour labor ending in a beautiful home birth with a strong and healthy mama and baby, I felt so completely sure that I was doing the work I was put on this earth to do! There were so many women there looking to be supported in the work they knew they could do, I wanted to be there for all of them but knew I needed more thorough training so decided to return to the USA to finish my midwifery degree. Once home I did an experiential learning program with US-based midwife and indigenous Mayan midwives in Guatemala at two birth centers, ACAM (Concepcion Chiquirichapa) and Manos Abiertas (Ciudad Vieja).

Studying traditional, low-resource midwifery with these midwives was an experience that really brought the call of being a midwife to a deeper, more spiritual level for me. Seeing how these women did their work, how their level of understanding of women, pregnancy, labor, and birth was at a depth I’d never known. The presence, awareness, and stillness that abounded in being with these mamas and midwives drastically changed how I saw the role of the midwife. I saw how much more intuition and knowing could flow when one was quiet, nearby but not always needing to “do” anything but be present with each woman was profound. This is where I saw how sacred this work of mother, baby, and midwife is and how deeply I respected and honored this process, feeling humbled and amazed. I soon started my “official” midwifery studies at Frontier Nursing University, the first official nurse-midwifery school in the country (check out the old school midwives going out on horseback! incredible) and completed my Master’s Degree in Nurse-Midwifery in 2020 after having my own homebirth in 2018.

I completed the majority of my hands-on clinical work in 2019 at a local birth center in Phoenix (Babymoon Inn) with a really incredible staff of local nurse midwives and professional midwives (shout out to Maribeth, Kimberly, Mary, Kate, Kathy, sue!). I was so unbelievably fortunate to learn from the amazing breadth and depth of experience and knowledge of these midwives, I am forever grateful to them. Babymoon hired me right out of school and I worked there until mid-2022 when the call to pursue my own home birth became very loud and it was clear to me that, despite some of my own nervousness and apprehension to leave the very supportive environment at Babymoon, it was time for me to honor my deepest heart’s desire and start my own practice. I left Babymoon and took a temporary nursing position on the Navajo Reservation in Tuba City with another group of incredibly talented and devoted nurses and midwives serving the Navajo and Hopi population, this was to save up some startup money for my business and support my family while getting my own practice up and running. I founded Sacred Wild Midwifery in August 2022 and got a website up and running with the help of a very talented mama whose second baby I “caught” a couple of years before (shoutout to Mama & Company).

I’d planned to just work out of my home until a dear friend who I’d met working together at Babymoon and unparalleled chiropractor, Shana Gorman-Dunn from Thrive Chiropractic proposed we open an office together with the intention of creating a sanctuary of wellness and integrative medicine together. We founded The Root in central Phoenix and have been building a really beautiful community space for our clients. I started taking clients almost immediately doing routine gynecologic care and prenatal care with my first Sacred Wild Midwifery client going into labor the same day as our grand opening (#midwifelife). Since then I’ve met so many more midwives and doulas in the homebirth community and have been blown away by the support of this community, not to mention the very essential support of my amazing partner, Seva Simran Khalsa, who has also joined The Root providing Acupuncture, yoga & meditation, and biofeedback for the Phoenix community.

Shana and I have opened our doors to the Cherry Blossom Doula group to use our beautiful space to meet with their clients on this side of the valley and I’ve partnered with Alex Barr from Dare to Birth Childbirth education and doula services. We are so thrilled with how we’ve been received in the community and plan to continue to grow our space to include more community events to support families in Phoenix and surrounding areas.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Nope. not smooth, not even a little!! I am 100 % sure I wouldn’t be where I am if I’d had a smooth road getting here. I’d gotten married at 19 (which seemed like a good idea at the time!) which was a very difficult relationship and ended about 9 years later (soon after completing nursing school). I’d struggled with depression, terrible anxiety, and eating disorders from about puberty until my mid/late 20s. Being in a difficult marriage exacerbated my underlying mental health issues and I found myself suicidal at times, I was lucky to get the help I needed and find support through my family, friends, and spiritual connection.

I was also very fortunate to know my calling. This was always an anchoring place for me, if nothing else in life was ok, at least I knew why I was on this earth, and had to keep moving and trusting myself that despite the challenges, I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep getting out of bed, keep trying…not to say that I didn’t have days of surrendering to that heavyweight, I did, often. I was able to start on a path of deep personal work to unwind from the knot I was always in, I did years of work with therapists, rebuilding damaged relationships with family and friends, taking chances, and trying new things. After my divorce is when I moved abroad, which was both an unbelievable experience and incredibly difficult as well, as anyone who has ever lived away from their home country can attest. Living in Chile was both exhilarating and lonely, eye-0pening and frustrating. Moving back home after several years abroad was also a shock, all the problems I thought I’d escaped by getting a divorce and moving away were still there, I was just more aware that there was more personal work to do.

Entering into another long-term relationship has had its own challenges, I’ve continued to learn to cope with at times very overwhelming anxiety while learning what love is in a true, non-romantic sense has been a painful road. When I’d become pregnant myself, my partner and I was not in the best place relationship-wise, we struggled with our own demons and now had an unplanned pregnancy and soon a baby…all while I was working, studying for my Master’s degree and being on-call 24/7 for births and moving to Arizona so that myself, my partner and baby daughter could be closer to my step-son. There are so many challenges to opening a new business, it’s not easy to get things started, to worry over finances, to take a leap of faith…but there is the deep rewarding sense that I’m doing what I’m meant to do and those surrounding me along with the universe have supported me in this effort. I’m incredibly privileged to have had so much support and resources to have access to education and opportunity.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Sacred Wild Midwifery?
I am a Certified Nurse Midwife, which means I hold degrees in nursing and midwifery and am a nurse practitioner. I have a private midwifery practice, which is to say that I am a primary health care provider for women from puberty through menopause, including through pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum periods. I provide evidence-based and holistic care for those that come to me needing anything from a physical exam, contraception, gynecologic care, menopausal care, nutritional guidance, fertility, prenatal care, birth attendance, breastfeeding, and much more. I also provide education regarding health and reproduction, preventing pregnancy, hormone testing, etc.

For pregnant women, I’m currently supporting those women who are low risk and planning a home birth, or those planning a hospital birth but desiring midwifery care and support or co-care with an obstetrician if they are higher risk. I share an office with an incredible prenatal and family chiropractor, Shana Gorman-Dunn from Thrive Chiropractic. We’ve created a beautiful space for wellness, healing, and community events called The Root. At The Root, we also offer Acupuncture and bio-feedback by Seva Simran Khalsa, LAc, childbirth education by Alex Barr at Dare To Birth, Doula services by Cherry Blossom Doulas, and will soon have a massage therapist as well, and will begin offering workshops for tincture making starting in April.

What do you think about happiness?
I’ll answer the “why” first. All the things that make me happy ultimately stem from when I can be my most authentic self and when I’m most present, here’s a list of a few:

-Spending time with my 4-year-old daughter is so joyful (of course I get burned out from time to time like any parent!) being with her really fills my heart, she’s got a lot of fire and spirit and I am so grateful to have her.

-I really love being a midwife, I’m so humbled and honored to do this work, and seeing the faces of mothers at the moment they first see their babies after hours of so much hard work, tears and grit is one of my favorite moments, it never gets old (same with seeing fathers and partners cry at the sight of their new baby emerging!).

-I love hiking and spending time in nature, being a midwife is such a blessing but it is very demanding and at times very stressful, I find time in nature to be very grounding and rejuvenating.

-Time with my oldest and dearest friends is always that feeling of “coming home”.

-Traveling! I love packing up and heading off on an adventure, hopping on planes, busses, and trains, trying new cuisine, and interacting with new people and languages.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sacredwildmidwifery.com
• Instagram: @sacredwildmidwife @therootaz
• Facebook: @Sacredwildmidwifery

Image Credits
Happy Hippo Photography