Ricci Flow Nutrition Podcast · Cameron Borg

Eyla Cuenca: Conscious Conception, Pregnancy & Birth

·1 hr 13 min·4 clips

Cuenca dates the shift to male physicians in the birth space to the 1880s and hospitals to the 1890s.

1. Ricci Flow Nutrition Podcast focuses on Isla Cuenca and conscious conception, pregnancy, and birth. 2. Cameron Borg hosts the conversation, and Isla Cuenca is described as a holistic birth guide, childbirth educator, doula, health freedom advocate, and birth trauma alchemist. 3. The episode asks how conception, pregnancy, and birth can be approached with education, sovereignty, and trust in the body. 4. Cuenca says her earlier work as a guardian ad litem for the 11th Judicial Circuit in Miami showed her a “huge deficit” in family support. 5. She connects foster-care problems to earlier life stages and says the issue goes back beyond funding and resources. 6. Cuenca describes birth education as a way to support intentional conception and to “desexualize” birth as a sacred rite of passage. 7. She says many women are working from birth trauma and need space to process it before parenting and partnership deepen. 8. Borg shares that his mother and he “almost died during childbirth,” which shapes his interest in natural birth. 9. He contrasts that experience with a rainforest birth story and notes that about “a third” of births in Australia are planned C-sections. 10. Cuenca says women often think their choices are only hospital induction or spontaneous labor, when that is only “one fragment” of what is possible. 11. She dates the move toward medicalized birth to the 1880s, when male physicians entered birth spaces and midwives were edged out. 12. She says hospital birth spread in the 1890s and that by the 1940s, 50% of women were birthing in hospitals. 13. Cuenca quotes Dr. Bradley’s phrase “the knock them out, drag them out era” and describes chloroform, formula, and postpartum concerns. 14. She argues that modern home birth in unsafe tenement conditions was different from traditional home birth in supportive settings. 15. Cuenca says women who choose doctors while healthy and low-risk often enter a “cascade of events” that leads toward emergency C-sections. 16. She says fear-based pregnancy testing in the United States can have psychological effects that spill into the body. 17. Cuenca describes her preferred clients as women who are curious, receptive, and trusting rather than highly controlling. 18. She says the husband’s role is containment, and she links relationship strain after birth to failures of holding and communication. 19. Listeners interested in home birth, preconception planning, and maternal trauma work are likely to get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners looking for a short, strictly clinical discussion of obstetrics may be less interested.

As heard by us

A serious, body first conversation about birth, trauma, and rebuilding trust in the body.

Isla Cuenca's conversation stays close to birth, trauma, and agency, and it keeps returning to a simple but hard question: what happens when people stop trusting their own bodies.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a birth conversation that treats the body as more than a machine, this episode stays with embodiment, sovereignty, and the body's innate intelligence.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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