Today we’d like to introduce you to Evonne Smith.
Hi Evonne, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Since starting my career in 2014 as a newborn care specialist, I’ve been dedicated to bridging gaps in care in maternal and newborn health. One poignant encounter with an overwhelmed new mother, desperate for sleep and struggling with breastfeeding, propelled me to train as a newborn care specialist and subsequently establish my business New North Natal. My philosophy is rooted in the knowledge that attachment with your parents or caregivers early in life shapes one’s worldview, resilience, and relationships with oneself and others.
As a newborn care specialist, I witnessed firsthand the practical and emotional challenges so many new parents faced. I spent seven years working in the trenches with new parents in the middle of the night and teaching them how to connect with and care for their babies and themselves. Much of their tougher struggles centered around sleep and feeding difficulties, so I started my path to becoming a lactation consultant in 2015 and an integrative sleep consultant in 2017.
As I worked with more breastfeeding parents, I realized that technical advice on breastfeeding wasn’t enough. Even after receiving information on how to fix their feeding issues, these new parents were still struggling with guilt, shame, self-blame, anxiety, and self-doubt—patterns that, for many parents, started in their own early childhood. In 2020, this realization and my own journey healing from core emotional wounds spurred me to start training in energy healing and craniosacral therapy.
When we heal, we have more capacity to deeply attune to our children’s needs and to be with them in all of their expression instead of inadvertently teaching them to fear their emotions or suppress who they are.
Through my work, I aim to foster deep, loving connections between parents and their babies, knowing that such bonds are foundational for raising individuals who are emotionally healthy, have great self-esteem, and attuned to themselves and others. This, I hope, will help these babies grow to be compassionate leaders and decision-makers in the future. I created New North because the world needs more help than I can provide on my own. Each service we offer builds toward this long-term vision: creating a world where love and connectedness form the basis of community and leadership.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’ve certainly had my fair share of hurdles doing this work, but it all feels really beautifully orchestrated. I have this deep inner knowing that this work is what I’m here to do, and I can see so clearly how all the challenges have prepared me for the next step of my journey. I’m grateful to have that perspective when the hard stuff comes up—it saves me some suffering.
The hardest parts of my journey have all boiled down to lessons about the importance of self-worth, strong boundaries, and trusting myself deeply. It just so happens that these learnings are the same things I teach to my clients and what I believe makes someone a better parent. I had to learn them well so I could teach them well.
My first major lesson came when a former mentor and employer—who introduced me to what became my life’s work—took advantage of me to the tune of $17,000 in stolen wages. Talk about a love/hate relationship.
It had been going on for months and I knew this person was exploiting me, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone…or to stop showing up to work, even though I wasn’t being paid. Years of talk therapy gave me a great intellectual understanding of my issues and why I struggled to uphold my boundaries, but it never seemed to help me actually shift those patterns.
Energy healing is what finally moved the needle for me. It helped me regain my voice and repair my sense of self-worth (shout out to my teacher, Cat Kabira!). I decided that I would no longer be accepting mistreatment and sent that person a fiery email that got me paid in full.
That fight to rediscover my self-worth makes me a better guide to others going through similar struggles. Birth and breastfeeding trigger those issues for many new moms and now, I’m well-equipped to help them.
We’ve been impressed with New North, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
New North is a maternal and newborn wellness practice specializing in lactation & infant feeding support, new parent education. We also offer energy healing sessions (pre and postnatal), baby blessing ceremonies, and craniosacral therapy.
I’m really proud of the sweet spot we’ve hit with New North. We have the perfect mix of the solid conventional approach and the more spiritual/holistic side of things, all grounded by a healthy dose of realism. So, if you want to host a baby blessing for your little one, I’ll prepare the special herbal bath and officiate the ceremony! And if there’s a tricky latch issue that’s bugging you, we can figure out which specific oral muscles are causing the problem and how to resolve it.
Rather than being confined to one specific way of thinking, we’re able to see the pros and cons of each approach, we take what’s useful from each, and discard the rest. That makes us better providers.
What sets us apart is our deeper goal for why we do what we do—we’re changing the world by changing who runs it, and that starts with nurturing the bond between parents and their babies. Our services are tailored to not only provide immediate solutions, like helping to improve breastfeeding or sleep but also to support the long-term emotional health and resilience of the family.
We’d love to hear what you think about risk-taking.
I love stability and comfort more than the average person (if you’re into astrology, I’m a double Taurus), and even still, I think risk is necessary for people with big dreams. You just have to be smart about it, and a little lucky.
A big risk I took was quitting my corporate “safety net” job to work for myself full-time. One day, I woke up and just knew it was time to leave. As the odds would have it, the month I decided to quit was the same one that my monthly housing costs were set to increase by $900.
Giving up stable income at a time like that sounded like a terrible idea, but I had enough savings to cover 2 months’ rent, a plan to market my services, and I had multiple skills that I could fall back on to make money if things got dire. I believed in myself strongly enough to take the risk AND I had practical supports in place to mitigate that risk.
The first months were rough, and I definitely got nervous, but I made it. 9 months later, New North had grown from a one-woman show to a team of three, and we had a waitlist of clients that were eager to work with us. Best risk I ever took.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.newnorthbaby.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/newnorthbaby/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/newnorthbaby
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@newnorthnatal
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/new-north-pasadena
