Today we’d like to introduce you to Morgan Lynn.
Morgan, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I am a birth and postpartum doula, a cook, a gardener and a student of Zen Buddhist meditation. Cottage Inside is my doula practice, based in Los Angeles. I support families through various phases of conception, pregnancy and postpartum transition, and I advocate for the babies. The families that come to me share my trust in the highly intelligent physiological process of birth. Together, we curate birth plans to be family-centered, lovingly supported and conducive to optimal bonding. Throughout this precious time, I encourage practices that support parents and baby to stay together immediately after baby is born and throughout first few weeks of a baby’s life – this has massive positive effects for the physical, emotional, and spiritual transition into parenthood for mothers, fathers, and their newborns.
I also cook delicious, carefully-sourced and seasonally-inspired whole foods for fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and the family table, and teach cooking classes virtually and in person. In addition, I oil mothers’ bodies after birth in a Ayurvedic treatment called Abhyanga, support breastfeeding foundations and create a cozy and supportive container so that mother and baby can acclimate gradually over the first six weeks, as is a rite in many traditional societies the world over.
In my “other life” at home in my garden and kitchen studio, Laurel Greens, I do my best to honor my garden teachers, including my grandmother, who so gracefully taught me to grow pristine vegetables rooted in highly mineralized soil. In addition to cooking within my doula practice. I also write garden-inspired seasonal recipes, test recipes written by others, and cook for retreats and events near and far.
I’m actually southern – I grew up in Kentucky and spent my summers at a kid growing food, either in our backyard gardens or at my grandmother’s on our family’s place, Henry Farm. One summer we had at least 4 garden plots and grew all kinds of small-scale avant-garde crops – experimenting with growing peanuts, cotton, watermelon, castor beans, tracks of potatoes and garlic among the usual vegetables. We’d try to grow anything, often just for the fun of it. I attended college in Kentucky at a wonderful small liberal arts school called Centre College, a place with a wonderful spirit that affected me deeply, it was an incredibly inspiring educational experience. My college years were a time when there was a big back-to-the-land movement happening with young people flooding into small-scale sustainable agriculture, and central Kentucky was definitely an epicenter for that culture, with the affordable land prices at the time and the influence of the nearby writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry inspiring us all to engage with the land in more intentional ways.
When I began my work as a doula a few years later, I had been apprenticing on organic farms, first at Green Gulch Farm in Marin County – part of the San Francisco Zen Center where I was also training in Zen Buddhist Meditation, and then switched coasts to farm on the east end of Long Island, at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett. I started my doula practice in New York in 2014, in the fall after the summer growing season had ended, and then moved to Los Angeles the following spring. LA has always been such an open canvas for birth work. I truly believe it is the best place to labor a baby – there are so many options for care and so many wonderful practitioners of different philosophies and styles available to families during this precious time.
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?
Well, I think with lots of heart-based practices, it takes a while to feel into how to show up authentically in our work, especially when you’re designing a practice as an entrepreneur or small business owner with the freedom to curate your own offerings to clients however you like.
Over the years, I’ve gotten more confident and creative in finding ways to integrate my various skills into a cohesive practice. My cooking classes are really the showcase of that – I grow the food, harvest it, source whatever else I need from the farmers’ market where I’ve built relationships with farmers rooted in my prior connections in organic agriculture, and then we run it through the doula scope to offer nutritional support to women throughout pregnancy and into the postpartum time. It’s a patchwork of all the phases of my life, spent farming, training at temple, sitting with suffering, self-inquiry, cooking and hosting. It’s a niche offering that I’ve found lacking in pregnancy and postpartum care. Evidence-based nutritional information in pregnancy and postpartum is hard to find and many of the common recommendations are outdated. Even when we do find it, many families then get stuck in knowing how to integrate the recommendations into daily life, especially when they’re not used to preparing food or don’t feel that they’re so savvy in the kitchen. I want my clients to know how to take care of themselves through simple, enjoyable practices that they look forward to.
Early in my practice, I felt that I was constantly being misunderstood as a nanny or childcare specialist, particularly in my role as a postpartum care specialist. I struggled with the fear that no one would want what I specifically wanted to offer and what I understood to be proper postpartum support, preceding by a positive labor and birth experience. My goals are to help families curate a birth that they will remember in a positive light, cared for by a provider team they trust, and then after the baby is born, to create a container to allow the new family a supported period of time to stay together with their newborn.
I look mostly to medical anthropology in understanding how we, as a mammalian species, are biologically designed to co-exist with our newborns after birth. I understand the first few weeks postpartum to be a precious, fleeting time that we will only get once with each child, and I come in to encourage a heightened sense of presence and to honor this time through traditional practices like preparing special foods, telling stories with new moms and listening to them as they process the story of their births, and to encourage and validate their experiences in the transition.
I love each and every baby I know – and I tell them often, “I have known you your WHOLE life, and that is a very special thing for two people.” My collection of tiny friends is one of the most precious things in my life – but first and foremost, I want them to be with their parents in the beginning, not with me, because I know that the baby wants and needs to be with their mother – right on their chest, skin to skin, where they can ground and root into life earth-side. This is where they feel safest and most secure. It is my offering to the babies to advocate for that – both with my clients and in the greater world. I may be able to show new parents how to be confident with their newborn and listen to their instincts, but my practice is ultimately to help foster an optimal bond between baby and parents, not to take over their care myself.
Still now, I’ve found that even birth doulas commonly misunderstand the physiology and needs of the mother-baby dyad in the postpartum time and the role of the doula in the postpartum transition, sometimes explaining postpartum care as “helping with the baby” – but this is not the offering in my practice. Our country, which is lacking in proper postpartum support almost entirely, also unfortunately exhibits some of the lowest breastfeeding success rates, some of the highest perinatal mood disorder rates, and some of the highest maternal mortality rates of any developed country. The postpartum time I refer to often as “the last frontier” in improving outcomes. We’ve made great progress identifying how to improve families experiences in labor and birth – the postpartum time for many families is still challenging in ways they weren’t prepared for, and it’s difficult in the moment to find good support when you need it. It’s a phase in the childbearing year that still has light to be shed across it, generally speaking, but we’re making progress – slowly but surely. My wish for the families I work with is that they think back on their first few weeks as parents with nostalgic fondness, when their own needs were met so that they were allowed to simply rest and be together with their babies through the precious and vulnerable first few weeks of the newborn’s life.
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
Los Angeles is the only place I’ve ever lived where I don’t wonder if I should be living somewhere else, if that makes sense. I’m very grounded here. A few years ago, I went back to Marin County for a practice period intensive at Green Gulch, the farm center of San Francisco Zen Center, and I thought at the time that I would stay up in the Bay Area permanently. After the intensive was over, I moved to Point Reyes Station and began taking doula clients in the area – but I became so homesick for Los Angeles it really took me by surprise. I would come back often and as I descended into the valley on the I-5 my whole body would relax with relief.
I’ve never been in a functional love with a person, romantically speaking, but I feel like I do have a functional and healthy relationship with the city of Los Angeles. It really is the City of Angels. I feel like I experience miracles here all the time. I actually talk directly to the city’s spirit often. I say thank you a lot. I feel like Los Angeles trusted me right away and it’s important to me to honor that trust in the way I live and interact with the city. For example, I always apologize to the city whenever I’m in a bad mood, particularly after I’ve spent time in my hometown and come back a little disgruntled because I feel disconnected and cut off from the place I was born and am missing my family. I don’t want LA to feel that I’m ungrateful for a minute and I don’t think at this point I would be able to live anywhere else. Los Angeles has given me everything and I have such a beautiful life here.
I would love to have a place back in Kentucky though – I dream of building a little stone Shaker-style house in the woods near my hometown and having a place to land for visits where we can experience the beautiful seasons – hunting for morels and foraging wild onions and poke greens to have with wild turkey in the spring, when the daffodils are blooming, for example. It’s mushroom season there right now with the spring rains. Kentucky is really the most special place, home of Bell Hooks, Wendell Berry, the Shakers, and so many incredible craftspeople and environmentalists. There are so many treasures in my home state and I miss it constantly,
Contact Info:
- Website: www.cottageinside.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cottageinside/
Image Credits
Shelby Moore Carson Meyer Chelsea Prestin
