February 11, 2025
Intuitive Mothering with Dr. Gertrude Lyons: Podcast Episode #277
Kristin Revere talks with Gertrude Lyons, author of Rewrite the Mother Code (now available for preorder!). She also hosts a podcast with the same name and offers coaching services.
Hello, hello! This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to chat with Dr. Gertrude Lyons today. Our topic is all about intuitive mothering. Over the last 20-plus years, Dr. Lyons has worked to empower individuals, couples, parents, and families toward fulfilled lives. Her diverse certifications and training enable her to offer a tailored, integrative approach catering to the needs of these individuals and groups.
Dr. Lyons has many credentials: a doctorate in education, an MA in transformational leadership and coaching, MA in psychology, whole brain living certified coach through Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, level three breath work certification through Global Professional Breath Work Alliance, and a BBA in finance and accounting.
Welcome, Dr. Lyons!
Thank you so much, Kristin. It’s just a pleasure to be on the show.
You have such an impressive background, and I know in prior conversations with you, you started out in finance and accounting and then you moved into the psychology and working with holistic health for individuals as well as families.
I did, yeah. We were talking about it because I said sometimes on paper, these things look like giant leaps, but there were through lines and interesting connections. Even though I was an economic analyst in personal injury and wrongful death cases – I know. The person I worked for was an expert witness, an economist in showing damages for people who have had personal injury or wrongful death situations. And particularly in the personal injury ones, the facet that always intrigued me the most was the psychological aspect of it. They had to get psychological testing to show, what are some ways to measure their loss of value of life? This is relevant, too, especially for women because when a jury is going to look at what should somebody be given as an award for something like this, you’re calculating things like wages. So if someone is a full time mom at home, her wages would basically always get calculated at minimum wage or kind of the lowest house care person. So that was a big disparity between that and someone who maybe was injured but had a very high paying corporate job.
I loved my boss at that time because he found a way to show and put a lot more into the formula for how he could show these damages. One was particularly around our emotional and psychological health and the impact that it had. So as I worked in that field, I was like, where do I want to go? I’m in my 20s. Do I want to pursue becoming an economist and doing what he did? I was like, nope. I am quite clear that’s not the path. But I love working with the clients. And at the same time, I was doing my own growth worth and learning and growing. I found that to be what really pulled at my passion or what I wanted to do going forward.
That was a longer story than you may have wanted for that. It will probably tie into the bigger topic that we’re talking about, which is following your intuition.
Yes, it’s an incredible story to really find your purpose and passion. You do work with a variety of individuals, but your focus on your podcast, Rewrite the Mother Code, and your upcoming book is really on that journey of the mother. So how did you find your passion in that particular area?
Well, that was a journey, as well, Kristin. As I just shared that story with this boss and the loss of value of life, he was surprisingly, if you think about somebody who’s an economist, the first one to share with me, just working for him and his practice, that he and his wife had home births with their two children. I didn’t even know that existed at that time. I was totally poised to be someone who would kind of follow the path of least resistance or what everybody else is doing. But this was one of those first intuitive sparks. Something about it felt really good, and something was tugging at me. I wanted to explore it.
Now, there’s a part of me that thought, once you have more control over the lighting and food in a home birth situation, that might have been all I needed. Having control of those primal things felt really important.
He was that bridge. I stayed working with him up to the birth of our second child, and that’s when I was like, I want to take some time off and in that interim, kind of decide what my next direction is. We talked about working together but more in the psychology field where I would work directly with the clients in a different way. At the time, I was doing a lot of my own growth and personal growth work. But either way, I had a lot of experience and personal experience and work in this field personally, but I wanted to get the academics behind it. So when my daughter was a couple years old, I decided to get my first master’s, and that was a master’s degree in psychology. But I focused on family and how do we maximize potential in family. It kind of started out more in the family realm for me. Then I went to work part time at the organization that I had been a client at while I was getting my master’s.
Then I became a director of a couples and parenting program at that organization. Then we had two daughters. It wasn’t until I did my doctorate – and I started on that journey in 2013 – that I decided I really wanted to hone in on the experience of the mother. I realized that there were choices I made that were really following my intuition and I felt so good about, and my husband and I were parenting consciously, but along the way, in the heat of it all, I really stopped growing myself. And that’s kind of what hit me when I decided I wanted to study that. I wanted to look at what happens in a mother’s journey where you’re kind of going strong in this area; I was always leading the way in the family for us in our personal and spiritual growth. Probably a few years into my second daughter’s life – it’s more I realize it looking back, even though I had some realization when it was happening. It was like, you know, I think we’re just going to put that aside. I think I rationalized it as, like, I’m busy. But really, I was scared. Things change. Now I have a different responsibility. I have these two daughters. My husband has been very amenable to me rocking the boat, putting us in new territory, but what if he doesn’t keep doing that? These are things I realized later that were going on with me, fears and insecurities of new motherhood and all of that. I felt like I had enough to deal with in that.
Fast forward, now my kids were about to start high school and college and it really started to hit me – wow, I am surrounded by people in the growth environment. I am coaching and working in the growth environment, and I still struggle to stay with myself, I’ll put it, and really stay focusing on myself, which is then what I chose to study in my doctorate. What I realized, and why I ended up naming it Rewrite the Mother Code, is we’re wired really strongly from our family upbringing and our culture on how motherhood should look and choices that we have and what’s available to us. Unless you have some inkling that more is possible, we all just kind of fall under that neuro wiring, and those forces are really, really strong.
Society tells us one version of mothering, but your journey to helping your clients and your podcast listeners to trust their own instincts – I am all about that as a doula, so I love your focus.
That’s what I love. We talked about this when you were on my podcast – empowering that mother. She doesn’t know she has it unless somebody starts encouraging that out of them, encouraging them to look inside themselves and start attuning to their bodies and all the ways your bodies speak to you, your spirit. I don’t know where that idea came from, and rather than just dismiss it, explore it. That’s what you’re bringing to light there, and that’s such a beautiful thing. I think it’s so powerful and important, having people in your arena and someone like a doula who has trained in it and has a lot more knowledge and has the capacity to share information across the board on the pros and cons of what happens in the hospital to oh, there’s these other – we call them alternative because they’re just not as common, but meanwhile, in the rest of the world, it’s way more common to use midwives and not see birth as a medical emergency or medical event, until it is one, right, and then yay for Western medicine. But it’s not that until it is. Having doulas and midwives in my midst, to this day I can picture my midwife at various junctures when I didn’t think I could do it or – I mean, I was at home, so I didn’t have the option of pain medication anyway, but at some of those really scary points, she really held me in that space of what’s possible and empowerment. I have so much wisdom inside me, and I can trust it. She was there if I said my intuition was telling me to do something really bizarre. Anyway, I can say more about that, but let me know if that’s where you want me to go.
Oh, yes. I am all about, again, just having experts to rely on, but I feel like we are made to mother, and if you trust your instincts, then – and not listen to, say, some of the advice from those mom groups or friends and family and really check yourself with experts or evidence-based information to make sure that you’re right on – because of course, things change. I mean, let’s look at everything from safe sleep to car seat safety – I mean, we have to keep up with recalls and things as parents to keep our baby or babies safe. But other than that, we know how to care for them and bond with them and even birth our babies. I mean, women can give birth in a coma. Our bodies will instinctively push.
Yeah, that’s beautiful! I haven’t heard that before, but I know we can under some extreme circumstances, that our body will still do that even when we’re disconnected in that way. That’s powerful.
Right, we’ll still have contractions. Our body can push.
That just had me think about how disempowering it is, this wiring in our culture, that we need an expert, that we need an authority, that we can’t do this without ourselves. So that’s to me heartbreaking because it just can potentially rob a woman of an experience that could be ecstatic, pleasurable, that will have moments of pain but also moments of pleasure, and even that, it’s not talked about. But I think the biggest disservice is it just gives more data of, like, why we should turn down or turn off our intuitive sense because it’s like, well, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll just keep looking outside myself. And then that gets wired in to not just me, but the child I’m giving birth to, and then the modeling that I’m showing and giving throughout. Like, I even go as far back as preconception to conception, that whole space and span. If we’re disempowered or we’re believing that we can’t do it, then when tough stuff comes up in parenting or in new motherhood, we won’t turn to ourselves first. Or we’ll think we’re crazy. You hear so many stories where moms are so sure that something’s wrong with them or the baby and outside people are telling you, no, you’re fine. It’s just this or just that. I was doing research for a TedX talk, which I’m super excited about, and talking about this very topic. And I didn’t know that Serena Williams had gone through – just looking for different anecdotes of a variety of women. You know, there’s countless of them. But how much someone – even though it’s a Black woman, because Black women face having to advocate for themselves and have more issues at many times the rate of white women – but even this very well known super star had to fight to be heard about symptoms that she was feeling and that she knew was a problem and she had to fight until they found out, wow, it turns out you’re right. And if she hadn’t, it could have been potentially dire circumstances.
So yeah, following my intuition is a nice thing. One, it can save our lives. But if we don’t feel like our voice is going to get heard, or we feel like, well, they know better, and okay, if they say so, if they say I’m fine – like, I want to think I’m fine, but I may not be. We have to practice using it in these not so stressful or intense situations so that that muscle is already built before, during, and after these kinds of events.
Like you said on my podcast, train like you’re training for a marathon. Train like an athlete mentally and physically. I’d say spiritually and emotionally because not only can it protect us, it can also give us some really incredible, almost other-worldly to ecstatic experiences if we open ourselves to it.
Right. And my parting advice, whenever I’m on other podcasts, is usually that no one knows your body or baby the way that you do. And as you mentioned with the example with Serena Williams, advocate for yourself. Speak up, because otherwise, something can go wrong. Like, you know your baby and what is normal and abnormal, with cries and wet diapers, whatever it might be. And what might be considered something like colic might be beyond that or with your own health and how you’re feeling, especially postpartum and advocating for yourself. So that is one thing that I will talk about as frequently as I can, that we do know our bodies. Serena knew her body! She’s an elite athlete.
Well, and she’d had prior circumstances. It was a blood clot issue or a potential pulmonary embolism issue that she’d had issues with.
It’s in her chart, right.
It’s in her chart, right. She’s at high risk for something like this. So even with that. And that isn’t demonizing the medical world. We’ve overwhelmed the medical world so much that they’re stressed so thin. It’s also that we can’t expect them to know everything and anything. For whatever reason, at moments when they’re like, no, you’re fine – I always trust and believe that these care professions have our best interests at heart. It’s just that there are various challenges in all of them.
Exactly. And I love that your training also includes breath work. We have some doulas on our team who are breath work practitioners, and in fact, in my office as I look at this sign, it says Breathe. Breath is so essential and can reduce stress and certainly help with labor and reduce any fear or tension and pain. So the fact that you’re a breath work practitioner, beyond all of your other degrees, is so perfect because it is essential in motherhood. I still use HypnoBirthing breathing when I am stuck in traffic or at the dentist. I don’t love the dentist, so I’ll use breath work for that to get myself in a calm space.
That’s beautiful, Kristin, and thank you for bringing that up, because it is a practice that’s one of my favorite things to do and practice. I do this modality, dynamic breath work, and it involves holotropic breathing, some variations of that, but I do it with people in the water and on land. But it made think particularly about a woman I worked with. Her journey went from when she first got pregnant, and she came from a very scientific background. She’s like, don’t even talk to me about any of this natural childbirth stuff. It’s off the table. I coached her. I coached them as a couple at that time. I said, that’s fine. If at any point you want to discuss it or put any of that information into the mix, just let me know. At some point, she did, and she came back to me, like, okay, what am I missing? What about this alternative? So I talked about things like being able to be present and in the moment, to be fully conscious and empowered in that way. We haven’t brought that up as far as this intuitive sense. It can bring us to the present moment, and that’s what breathwork does, right? It really gets you in the moment because you’re focusing on your breath. They ended up doing a 180 and shifting from a very traditional birth to midwives in a hospital, and this was in their third trimester that they decided to do this.
But then she reached out. She said, I think I’d like to do a breathwork. I facilitated breathwork for her and her husband at the same time. She’s like, I’m starting to get really scared. I don’t know if I can do this, kind of thing. Anyway, we do this breathwork, and she comes out of it. She’s like, oh, my God. I realized that I’m not afraid of the pain. I can handle that. She said, I’m afraid of the aliveness and the energy and this full bodied experience that I’m going to have. Can I handle it?
And it was so beautiful because without breathwork, it still would have been in her head that she was just afraid of the pain. Not that we can’t be afraid of pain, but once she tapped into that, it took her into an awareness and into a reality. Then when she did go into labor, she opened herself to that and trusted herself. This was a birth I was supposed to be at, but she labored at home. She’s like, okay, we’re going to make our way to the hospital. By the time I got to the hospital, things had gone so well. She’s sitting there blissful, holding her new baby.
The way it was meant to be! That’s what I believe.
I know! The power of breathwork is where we’re going with that. Because in my world, it’s about getting us out of our heads, into our bodies. We trap emotions in our molecules that have been there – well, I think generationally, but even in this lifetime, that when we breathe into those, people have remembered their births in breathwork. They’ve gone back and have validated evidence. They picture the whole thing. I’ve done breathwork where I’ve literally tasted smoke in my mouth, and my mom was a smoker while she was pregnant. These are the kinds of things – it’s like, why isn’t this mainstream? This isn’t weird woo-woo stuff. It’s just our bodies, and it’s possibilities.
I would love to address with breathwork and a calm intuitive space, how not only the well being of the mother can be affected, but how that impacts the baby in the postnatal phase, and in the womb, honestly, with the lack of stress, anxiety, fear. The baby picks up on all of that.
All of that, right? Think about the gift that you’re giving. We all say that we want to be the best mother or parent that we can be. Well, any of these things that we’re doing for ourselves, like calming our own nervous system – so I look at it two ways. One, it’s just physiologically, going from a high anxiety space to a calm space through our breath, especially the baby in utero, but then beyond. They’re so sensitive. We all are. We’re all picking up on the anxiety and energy and atmospheres of people around us, but we’re particularly open and sensitive in those spaces, so not only are we spreading that, because it’s contagious. That’s proven. But we’re modeling for our child, oh, Mommy takes care of herself. I’m going to be safe. It’s okay, even though the world says I’m supposed to sacrifice or give myself over, my mom is modeling putting her care high up on the priority list. And I think that’s one of the biggest gifts we can pass down and break some of that generational thinking and beliefs in some of those arenes that we are part of for so long. We can shift whole systems by doing that. That’s what I think is additionally powerful.
100%. So Dr. Lyons, what are your top tips for our listeners to really trust their own intuition as a mother and begin that process, even preconception, of understanding intuitive mothering?
That’s such a great question, Kristin. I’ll start with one thing. There are now books written on this. There are studies that have been done. It’s kind of like where you’re inclined to explore, right? The first way I like to learn about something is to find the data on it and always be open to looking at both sides. Both sides, like intuitive decision making is bonkers to, no, the most trusted form of decision making you should follow. The second may seem a little bit different but you brought it up with the breathwork – this tuning in to our body and our emotions. It’s directly tied to having access to our intuition. Because sometimes we do; we get maybe a lightbulb of an idea or something, or you hear about something and you’re like, oh, that’s like lighting kind of a spark. So rather than put the flame out on that or rationalizing it away because it’s not in your normal sphere, tune into it. Where do you feel that in your body? What emotions come up when you think about it? If I use the example with this client of mine who went from being so sure that she was going to do it this way, but something clicked for her and she followed it. So she had that inclination, and she followed it. But some of that was tuning in to her emotions and her body. So start to really – I find a connection to this practice no matter what the question of how-to is. Spend some moments in your day just asking yourself, what am I feeling in this moment? So that practice is that moment. Right now, I’m feeling joy because I’m talking to you and excited to talk about this.
Right. Mindfulness, in a way.
Mindfulness. It’s something you can do with your family, with your spouse, with yourself, where at some point in the day – we would do this at the dinner table. Everyone would have a chance to share. Where did they feel – I call them five primary emotions. Fear, hurt, anger, sadness, and joy. Just name one time in your day that you were feeling that. So whenever my kids would say, oh, I didn’t have fear. It’s like, yes, you did. Just find it. That connection is a really critical one, and we’ve gotten so programmed out of honoring our emotions that it makes it difficult to then follow our intuitive senses.
I tried to make that not too complicated, but also at least a literal practice that we can do.
I’ll try that at the dinner table! I love that discussion point.
Yeah, we started when our kids were babies and not talking yet. He and I would do it, so we were modeling it. And I’m certainly not going to say my kids, throughout their upbringing, were always like, yay. Sometimes they were like, no, I don’t want to. But I’ll tell you, they’re in their 20s now, and they are so grateful to have that training and that social emotional intelligence, I guess we would name it. They know that practice was a big part of it.
I love it so much! So how can our listeners connect with you, Dr. Lyons?
Absolutely. Everything that’s going on can be found on my website. There, you’ll see my podcast, Rewrite the Mother Code. That can be found anywhere you listen to podcasts. I’m getting a page up for my upcoming book, which launches in May, but you can sign up for my newsletter, which I put out a couple times a month, and there’s a place to do that on my website. You’ll find out all the things that are going to happen between now and May 6th when my book, Rewrite the Mother Code, from Sacrifice to Stardust, a Cosmic Approach to Motherhood, hits the stands. So those are the ways!
So exciting! I will be on the lookout for your Ted Talk! I’m sure that will be on your website.
Of course. It will take a prominent spot. That happens in February, and I’ve been told it can take anywhere from three to six weeks for it to go up. I’m excited. Scared and excited.
I’m excited for you! And your favorite social media channels for our listeners?
Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are where I mainly have a presence. Everything is @drgertrudelyons.
Well, thank you for sharing your wisdom!
It’s such a blessing to be with you!
There’s so many directions we can go. I’ll have to have on again in the future.
Same with you on mine. Absolutely, Kristin. Thank you.
IMPORTANT LINKS
Birth and postpartum support from Gold Coast Doulas