We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Britta Okes Carlisle a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Britta, thanks for joining us today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

A defining moment in my career has been a profound awakening this year into my soul’s purpose: to deeply serve people in pregnancy, birth & postpartum from a healing, energetic and alchemical perspective. This moment came for me after two different initiations into healership via the Neo Emotional Release & Spinal Attunement methods. Going deeper into the subconsious body, into the energetic and etheric bodies really tied things together for me in terms of what I had experienced personally in pregnancy, birth and postpartum as well as how I witness and support clients through this time period.

What I see is the opportunity for the most profound time of creation– giving birth– as this initiation into the mysteries of life that are often unseen or hidden during our daily lives. I have been deeply bringing this wisdom to my clients, but I envision this wisdom making its way more to the aware or mindful mother. I am so inspired by the ways we can now spread knowledge, wisdom with technology, and I feel this deeply mirrors the way energy moves in our world, whether we are aware or not.

In 2019, I had the seed of an idea to create an app– and in the fall of 2023, this spark grew into a flame as I recognized the need for holding women, families and birthers of all kinds in a deeper emotional, spiritual, social, physical and energetic way. This has brought me to pivot my work from high dollar offerings in 1-1 and group healing offerings, into translating this wisdom into an affordable daily-drip app that really holds and carries the user back to their own intuition with deep guided wisdom from ancient, present and future wise women, birth keepers, healers and energy movers across space and time. This app is called The Birthing Soul and will launch in 2024.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I come into this work with a lifelong passion and awareness for babies, mothers, parenting and the opportunity for healing and transformation that is available during the perinatal time. I have worked first as a social worker, in spaces supporting refugee and immigrant women to connect to other women in their ethnic and religious communities, recieve training and support to earn wages and grow their own food in urban farm plots. This evolved to working with unaccompanied refugee minors, becoming resettled in the US, before returning to graduate school where I studied Organizational Leadership & Policy Practice as well as the Spanish Speaking Diaspora & social & emotional systems for education. From there, I was on the founding team for a school for pregnant and parenting teens in Aurora, CO where I built the maternal health and wellness department, including training as a birth doula myself, and later establishing birth doula training for staff and students to increase empowerment and access within the community. After four years, I moved to Seattle, Washington and trained under an LGBTQIA specialized therapist practice, where I met my own community as a queer femme and niched myself even more into queer emerging families and perinatal mental health. I founded my own therapeutic private practice in 2021 and have since embarked on even deeper somatic healing modalities, traveling to Portugal twice to learn the depths of the mind-body connection, as well as the energetic bodies and etheric human experience. All of these diverse pathways have brought me so many varied experiences, communities, and wisdom that I am now curating into my new project, an app called The Birthing Soul, which will host daily wisdom, education and embodied practices aimed to align birthing souls to their deepest intuition and social connections during pregnancy, miscarriage and loss, and beyond 1 year postpartum. Eventually we will grow to include Sovereign Parenting, Partner/Father, healing for parents beyond the childbirth years & preconception supports.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

I believe the most important element for success in the field of healing, humanitarianism and therapeutic practice is the work you are willing to put into yourself. I find that as a therapist, healer and birthworker, I am only able to take clients (or app users in this case) to the depth that I have gone myself. The excavation of shadow, of the hidden self, which is what we see manifest in our mental health crisis. In doing this, we all grant ourselves the opportunity to fully understand ourself, our story, our lineage, our pain & trauma as well as our gifts to offer into the world. I deeply believe that when we can all operate from a place of transforming our pain into our gifts, we could creatively solve more problems than we ever believed possible.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

A lesson I have had to unlearn is shame and projection, resulting in giving my power away. Our attention is our greatest power and establishes how we spend our time, what we focus on, and what we ultimately take action on. In our world of social media, we are inundated with distorted images of loved ones, celebrities, influencers and widespread bias and propaganda in our media streams, it can be incredibly difficult to center and find our truth. Given this reality, we all tend to project our inner pain, shame and fear onto those close to us, or make them manifest in the workplace, systems and society we work for. For me, unlearning shame in expressing my deepest fears, my need for support, my pain, my humanity, my ability to ask for help has been deeply transformative. It has allowed me to release myself from stories of perfectionism and really take a deep responsibility for myself. This is especially true while parenting, I notice our generation of parents is highly triggered, having not learned valuable emotional regulation tools as children, but I also see us taking back the responsibility, practicing forgiveness, and mustering the energy to break the cycle for our children. Overall, this lesson has guided me to have the courage to embark on a huge journey of founding a new company, as well as collect a diverse team of advisors and supporters to make The Birthing Soul a reality.

Contact Info:

• Website: TheBirthingSoul.com & brittacarlisleintegrativetherapies.org
• Instagram: the.birthingsoul & soul__midwife

Image Credits
Sarah Virginia Co. – Spinal Attunement Images House of Resonance- Graphic Design for The Birthing Soul