Olivia Colombo  0:13  
Hello friends and welcome back to the To the Heights podcast a production of the Grexly Podcast Network. My name is Olivia Colombo and I am a young Catholic Changemaker journalist, and soon to be social worker. And I am on this journey of sharing stories of people who are reaching to the heights in terms of social justice and making sustainable changes in this world. This season, which we're calling hope in humanity, we're focusing on people and organizations secular or religious, who are social justice oriented and have creative solutions to the many problems that our world is facing. Today I am sharing a wonderful conversation with Leah Jacobson, co hosted with my dear friend, Ava Kelly. Ava is a religious Ed coordinator at a local parish collaborative. She's a college student, and we have quite literally traveled the world together. We grew up in the same life team program. Ava is helping me co host this episode because of her passion of holistic health care, which introducing Leah Jacobson now, Leah is the founder of the guiding star project, a holistic women's health care organization. Ava and I stumbled upon guiding star at SLS, this year's focus conference in January and we fell in love with them as an organization. We spent so much time at their booth. They're all about recognizing true value of the female body, D stigmatizing what our culture has shamed and embracing the wholeness of women and their feminine genius, mind, body and soul. They have several health care centers across the country. They do tons of trainings, even for very young girls. And overall they foster a really important discussion in both secular and faithful context is of how our bodies are incredible. And we need to work with them and understand and value their dignity, our dignity as women. We talked about the overuse of birth control and modern medicine. How Lia used to live and father Mike Schmitz his house before it was father Mike Schmitz his house. And we talked about how as young people we can have less shame and fear around the topic of women's health care. So here is Leah's story of reaching to the heights.

All right, so we are here with a very exciting guest today. And we have a co host today to Ava Kelly. Where should we get started? Ava, do you want to quickly introduce yourself and then Leah, you can introduce yourself.

Ava Kelly  2:49  
So hi, I'm Ava. I am 19 and I am currently a sophomore in college. I work at St. Joseph's parish and St. Thomas parish. So they're a Catholic collaborative in Medway in Millis and I'm the Religious Education Coordinator there.

Olivia Colombo  3:06  
Yes. Awesome. What about you, Leah?

Leah Jacobson  3:10  
Um, well, I'm a little older. I'm like twice your age. I'm very young at heart. And I am a mom in central Minnesota. I've got seven kids. I've been married to my husband, Josh for 17 years. And I work in women's health care. I'm a board certified lactation consultant, and I'm the founder and CEO of the guiding star project, but my past was actually in dialysis and work at the parish level, but it was actually the campus ministry. So I ran the campus ministry at the University of Minnesota Duluth with my husband for the first three years of our marriage. So it's, yeah, fun stuff.

Olivia Colombo  3:48  
Yeah. Um, so we all kind of met in different directions at the SLS focus conference in January, which was super fun, and we got to record an episode with Father Caspi Stinson and that's super cool, retro van podcast recording studio. And we always actually recording an episode after us on a different show. So that's how we connected. But today I want to talk about kind of the story of getting star project which we are you can tell us all about what that is, how you got involved, how it came about. I want to know now how you came from working kind of parish diocesan into this movement. And then Ava, and I, as a young woman, kind of battling this not culture of life, want to talk about how do we build a culture of life? What do we need to be aware of what like lies is our culture feeding us? And how do we combat all of those?

Leah Jacobson  4:47  
Sounds good. I am so looking forward to this conversation because this is my favorite stuff to talk about. So I'm hoping that what I've gone through in the past, you know, 15 years can kind of help you guys to see what's coming. Hopefully for you to be able to use your gifts and talents in the church. And in the name of building up a culture of life guiding star, it came out of my work in campus ministry directly. Like I said, we my husband, Josh and I, the Newman house at the University of Minnesota Duluth is located right in the center of campus. It's got student housing kind of all around it. Father, Mike Schmitz lives there. Now, my husband Josh, and I started there. The first I was a student there, and he was a student as well. And I graduated early, I graduated when I was 21 years old. And I asked the bishop, the diocese at that time, there was an older priest living in the home. And it was close to the students. And I asked him, I said, Would you ever consider hiring a young couple to take over campus ministry? And shockingly, I don't know why. But he said, Yes. And so he allowed us to move in there right after we got married, newly 22 years old, fresh, 22 year olds, moved in, and began running that campus ministry program. And it was the most fun ever. So if you guys have worked in focus, or you know, focus missionaries, it's like focus, but when you have, like you're actually at the house, like it was just like focus on steroids for us as a married couple, with students in and out of our house, like, all hours of the day and night, it was so amazing, we got permission to have the Blessed Sacrament moved into the homes, we had adoration going on, like, all the time, we had just the creativity and like the excitement, and the energy that was coming from this, this experience was just fabulous. And I was working with a lot of young women at that time, just, you know, unknowing, their dignity and their theology, the body their worth. And at the same time, I got pregnant, and I became a new mother. And so it was that it was that collision of me for the first time, really understanding the the capacity of the female body and fertility. And the beauty of, you know, the sexual relationship between a man and a woman when it's in balance, and when it's open to life, and really understanding it and seeing it in front of me that I could see what I didn't know, as a college student. And I can see very clearly that most of the young women around me didn't have an understanding of yet and had honestly a lot of fear. And it wasn't just a lack of understanding. It was it was subconsciously accepting some really huge lies about the female body about sex about marriage. And so it kind of became this quest as a campus minister and a young mom to normalize, you know, the natural, healthy processes of a woman's body. And so I remember being on campus and breastfeeding my baby. And I was modest. I wasn't, you know, sitting out there in front of everybody. But the looks and the discomfort that I could just see on the faces of every student that walked by, they were so uncomfortable with this idea of a baby breastfeeding, and some of the comments even that I got from professors, and from staff. So as my baby got a little bit bigger, and he started walking, we had mass on the third floor of the Student Union and there was a staircase that was open all the way down three stairs, three storeys, and the slats, so my baby is toddling around. And the slats between the railings were about, I don't know, a foot apart, a baby can walk right through them, like to his death. And so every week, when we had mass, we always had a group of students like preventing the baby from dying because the baby wanted to die. I met with campus administration, I just met with the building people I said, Hey, I don't think this is up to code. And I just I brought it very gently. And the response that I had, I'll never forget this to my dying day, I'll never forget this. They said, babies don't belong on college campuses. struck me like just so hard. And it was just so clear that it was that education and children are not supposed to mix. And that made me really mad. And it really propelled me forward. And so guiding star was kind of born from those experiences on a college campus as a young mother, and working with other young women and just trying to help them get over the lies that they believed because they didn't trust their bodies. They didn't trust their fertility. They didn't think it was a good thing. They thought it was a barrier to their success. And we have to change that culturally. We have to change that if we're going to build up a culture of life.

Olivia Colombo  9:12  
Yeah, yeah. Agreed. That's, that's a lot. And like, I don't know, I can only imagine how many pregnant and parenting like students like that's, that's just not the culture we want at all. Um, no.

Leah Jacobson  9:28  
Yeah, no interesting, I'll say like, so I started to kind of get active then to figure out how to make this campus more baby friendly, mother friendly. And I found some, the group feminists for life. They're a fan group, and they do something called like a campus symposium, and they'll come to your campus and they'll look at all your resources and they'll look at everything and see how it's supporting pregnant or parenting students. And so we had feminists for life come to our campus, and they engaged the Women's Resource and Action Center, which is out of the Women's Studies program. On, which is traditionally very pro choice, they engage them in conversation, and it was very effective dialogue. And so they were able to say, you know, women, you know, we, as feminists, we believe that women should have the right to education, you have single mothers on your campus, how can we help them. And some of the things that came out of those dialogues, actually, we're, we were able to get lactation rooms set up on cam for women. And that was a partnership with kind of the other side. And that was also a very influential moment for me to recognize that there are things that we can agree with all women on almost almost every woman out there can agree that we should have a right to breastfeed our baby if we want to. And then we should have a right, you know, to a positive and empowering birth experience. If we can start from those points of connection and agreement. We can make real progress.

Olivia Colombo  10:51  
Yeah, yeah, I agree. We actually had feminists for life come to Boston College. Last fall. In spring, we had Kristin Hawkins, come and speak in the fall. And then I did social media for them at the time. And in the spring, they came and did this symposium with all different campus leaders, we partnered with the pro choice group on campus. Unfortunately, we haven't seen the effects of the symposium yet, because it actually happened the night that they announced that we were moving home because of COVID. So it all got messed up. But

Leah Jacobson  11:23  
that makes it a little difficult. Yeah. And one of the other things and I will say they did put up Plexiglas as well through those slats on the stairwells, because that point, I said, babies are a danger on this campus, like they can't even walk on this campus without dying. And they also put diaper decks in not only men's bathrooms, but the men's bathrooms, which was a really nice nod to that complementarity of fatherhood, that there are really great men that are fathers that may be pursuing higher education as well.

Olivia Colombo  11:54  
Hmm. I love that. Um, all right. So how did how did that your experience in campus ministry, how did that happen? And turn into guiding star? What did that process look like?

Leah Jacobson  12:08  
Um, yeah, gosh, you guys, honestly, it's one of those things where if you are, just be, don't be careful. Don't Be careful, be reckless with your abandon, like with your willingness to say yes to God. But I can just tell you that honestly, what it was was me just saying, God, please use me. Because when I left campus ministry, I had two little babies, I had two little boys that were three and under, at the point where we moved out of the Newman house and father Mike moved in. And it for, you know, for about maybe six months there, I felt kind of like, I don't know what's next. I don't know how you want to use me. The culture around me, everyone is telling me like you're a young mom, like, you kind of can't really do anything now. Like your life is kind of over. Enjoy dishes and patrol. And so I was getting that kind of pressure, feeling like I didn't have anything to give. But yet I knew like there's just this deep burning within me from my previous years working with these women. And so I went to adoration one night, and I thought what I thought I was going to be doing, I thought I was going to go back to school to become a nurse midwife. I thought, you know, I have this great passion for pro life cars. And I want to help women that want to have empowering births. And so I'm going to go back to nursing school, and I even had already implied I was already accepted. And I finally went to adoration three weeks before classes were supposed to start. And I told God, my grand plan, I said, aren't you so happy god, I'm going to do this thing for you. And that's the only time I've ever heard an audible response and prayer was in the adoration chapel in Duluth, Minnesota. And the only word God has ever said to me was no, I audibly heard the word. No, I was alone in the chapel. I turned and I looked and I kind of jumped. And that really stopped my heart for a second. And it was kind of confusing, but then I immediately understood that it was not know that I had nothing to do, but it was just not this. And so then I just said, okay, Lord than what, and I just really opened myself up to whatever he was trying to give me. And in prayer that night, and in my prayer journal, I sat there for about three hours, and I journaled out just kind of this vision of a women's center. I was like, What do the women here need? What do these girls on this campus need to know their dignity and worth? What do young moms need? What to older moms that are overwhelmed with five kids need? What do women need to know that they are good? and guiding star was born in that moment, and I didn't know what it was going to be at that time. I thought it was going to be, you know, one local center in one city in this country. I didn't realize that God had this bigger plan for it. He's gracious like that. Because if he said, we're going to do this all over the country, I would have been like, I'm out. I don't know what I'm doing. But it's slowly grew. And it's just been growing ever since then. And I've become, I've come to see through that openness to God that he really only ever tells me the next Tuesday. steps, maybe I can always see as far as I can see. And then when I get there, I can see, as far as I can see, again, you know, I can't see the whole thing. And I think that's been a mercy that he's granted because we got to be overwhelming. Otherwise, turn very turn, and

Olivia Colombo  15:17  
so easy to back out if you saw the grandness of the plan and think that you're not worthy for it at all.

Leah Jacobson  15:24  
Exactly. That has been probably one of the biggest roadblocks and you're talking with young women like you like that's just something that they want to emphasize over and over again, is that sometimes we can really get caught up in a false humility, like, Who am I to do this? Who am I? Who do I think I am, like, we sometimes stop ourselves because we're afraid of what others might think, or what we even think of ourselves. We're like, I'm not worthy. I'm just a, you know, I'm just a sinner. I'm just this, like, I can't do these things. But really, that's a great insult to God, because he gave you the exact gifts and talents and skills that you have uniquely. And that really, I really didn't understand that until my 30s. I didn't even through my 20s, I was still kind of like hesitantly like, we shouldn't women have this. And I was putting the vision of guiding star out there. But I didn't believe enough in myself to lead it to put the infrastructure in place properly. And so it was when I actually took those steps of saying, No, God, actually, if I don't do it, no one will, like I am the one that he is asked to do this particular thing. And if I don't do it, it won't happen. And when I finally just accepted that, and embraced it, it was so much fun, then, like before that it was like drudgery. I hated it. I was like I don't want to do this. It's embarrassing. I don't want to speak I don't because people would ask me to come speak. And I'd be like, I don't really want to say anything, but it was kind of that Catherine seanna quote, you know, be who God meant you to be in your life on fire. And I was thinking about like, had she not stepped out and been vocal and been brave, like, the church would not look like it looks today. Like it was her it was particularly her that had to do that thing. And so we as young women in the church, we have to recognize that we are called sometimes to do very hard things that are outside our comfort zone and are outside the norm. But God will equip us.

Olivia Colombo  17:23  
Yeah. Yeah. So true. So beautiful. Ava, do you want to kind of talk about or ask about the culture of life and death and how that has infiltrated and shaped this project? Yeah, so

Ava Kelly  17:40  
sorry. How did you become like so passionate about holistic women's health? So how and how is holistic women's health different than the way that our society kind of views? Women's Health?

Leah Jacobson  17:56  
That is such a good question. So in middle of this process, so when I found out I wasn't supposed to go back for to be a nurse midwife, I still had this kind of like color within me, like I was really interested in helping women. And so when I think I was pregnant with my third child, or fourth, I don't remember someplace in there. I've seven now it kind of gets confusing. in there, I decided I do still want to do higher education, specifically in the field of women's health care, because so much of the field right now is synonymous with abortion and contraception rights, like just women's health is just like abortion and contraception. I was like, No, that's not true. Like, well, healthy life for a woman should not depend upon either of those things. And so I did go back and did my master's degree in health and wellness with a specialty and lactation consulting. So breastfeeding, and when I was writing my master's thesis, it started to dawn on me, this idea of whole ism, like whole with a W, you know, complete, whole integrated, that, you know, we have many arenas of our life as women, you know, socially, academically, career wise, relationally, we've got kind of all these areas of our life. And we always just kind of lump physical body, like, you know, Mind, Body spirit, and we kind of just say, well, your body has to be whole, but then I started to really look at that and say, what does it mean though, for a woman's body to be whole in this culture? And I really got kind of obsessed with this like, okay, what's the difference the biological physical difference between a man's body and a woman's body.

Olivia Colombo  19:32  
It's editing Olivia interrupting here, as is quite common with COVID and the working from home life. We encountered some connection issues that interrupted our conversation. So we'll pick it up where we reconnected with some Wi Fi in a moment. But this is a perfect opportunity to share with you our sponsor for this episode, monk manual. The monk manual is a system of being and doing it's a quarterly plan. It's a quarterly planner. The monk manual is a system of being and doing. It's a quarterly planner inspired by monks and designed to help you live a fuller life. By combining the best practices and psychology, productivity and spiritual growth, the monk manual provides a daily system upon which you can build an intentional daily life. I have really, really been wanting to try one of these, and I'm really excited to as The holidays are coming up, we have a 10% off discount code for listeners. The code is heitz, h e i g h t s, Titusville heights, I definitely could use some more grounded methods of being and not doing and reminding myself that I am indeed a human being not a human doing. So I'm excited to give it a try. Again, you can get 10% off on monk manual.com by using the code heights.

Leah Jacobson  20:56  
Okay, yes. So as I was doing my master's degree work, and my final thesis, I started to write and think a lot about just that idea of whole ism of like, as a woman, what does it mean to be whole, and we always focus on you know, the mind, the body and the spirit that those three things have to be integrated in order for us to be whole. But we don't look uniquely at a woman's body as what is a whole woman's body and natural woman's body, that's whole will say like, Oh, well, you just you know, you have to be content and love your body and that. But that's really just generic. And it's really not fair, that we don't dig deeper into that for the sake of our girls. Because the honest truth was that I was working with these girls in campus ministry who are very faithful, and they had a beautiful mind and a beautiful spirit. But when it came to their body, it was very incomplete because they didn't have the education or the awareness or the understanding of their own fertility, they couldn't tell you when they are related. It couldn't even tell you, you know that if something was really abnormal, they weren't tracking or keeping track of their body, they didn't know their body. And so I started to really try to figure out what are the three kind of well, what are the unique functions from a man's body in a woman's body to the things that only our bodies can do. And I realized that we can all relate, we can just state and we can lactate. And men's bodies should never do those things. Unless there is a serious disease present, they should not be lactating. They can't oscillate, they don't even have the parts. And of course, they can't just stay because that's growing human being. And so we have these three unique kind of superpowers as women. And this is not like a religious truth. This is a basic biological principle. This is the biology of a woman, this is what you are, as a woman, if you're healthy, and your body is optimized, and everything goes as it was created to you will oscillate and just ate and lactate in response to sexual activity. So I wrote my master's thesis on that. And it really began to crystallize that our idea of whole ism and holistic health is falling incredibly short, unless it is acknowledging that you should never suppress or alter or destroy any of those functions of a woman's body. And if you are, that's not whole ism, you've just divided somebody up and said, part of you is okay, but part of you is not. And subconsciously, what that does to us is your mind can't actually be fully healthy when you're doing that, because you're creating kind of this dichotomy, this subconscious feeling that, well, I don't quite work, right. And as electric, it's all I can tell you, I have seen this dozens of times when I'm working with a mom who just gave birth, she's newly postpartum. She'll say something to me, I'll come in, you know, how did your HUD your labor your delivery go? And oh, it was terrible. And I say, Okay, well, let's get going. How's breastfeeding going? And she'll say, Well, I don't think I'm it's not going to probably work out, I'm probably not going to make any milk. And just this immediate, self defeating idea that my body doesn't work. I don't trust it. I don't think it's going to work. And when you start to dig back and go further back, you know, chances are good that way back 1015 years ago, her cycles were probably messed up. They probably were inconsistent. And so they said, well, let's regulate your cycle. Let's put you on this pill to do. So then she started birth control. And then she decided that she gets married and she wants to get pregnant, she comes off birth control. Her body won't get pregnant then because of the effects of the birth control. So then takes her three years to get pregnant. So she's thinking, Oh, my body's not working very well. I can't even get pregnant. Then she has a pregnancy, which, you know, they happen to be hard. Sometimes it might have been difficult. Maybe labor and delivery didn't start when it was supposed to. And so maybe she was induced. Maybe her labor was augmented. Maybe she ended up with with an epidural and then she pushed for 14 hours in it. didn't go anywhere. And so then she had an emergency c section. And then she felt like I can't even give birth, right. And so at the time it comes to breastfeeding. They're convinced, like, my body just doesn't work. God didn't know what he was doing, it doesn't work. And so this is a deeply, deeply ingrained wounds that women have that our society is inflicting on women through health care. It's through our doctors as through the delivery of health care that we are telling women that their bodies don't work, when you don't think your body works. And you don't see it as this incredibly sacred process is very easy to extend that then to the baby, to the baby, that you're growing, that it's just it's, I'm not special. Why is this thing special? You know, you don't extend that same dignity that you you don't dignify yourself? Why would you dignify the life within you? It's sad. It's really sad.

Ava Kelly  25:53  
Truly, yeah. And so you were mentioning how we are told lies about the female body. And we're told that we have to regulate all these things about ourselves where it's actually just causing damage, because we're putting things in our bodies that aren't supposed to be there, or are not natural, like projection versus progesterone. So what lies have you encountered from the beginning of those stages? So what starts women to start questioning their body? And then just lean into all of those things?

Leah Jacobson  26:31  
Well, I think you know, what I mentioned right away there is right when we're starting to men straight. I mean, most girls are getting sort of mixed messages about that, like, depending on how good your sex education or your puberty education was, I think some of the very first lies are dropped on us very young, you know, 910 years old. We're being told no, we're not understanding it or being told things about like our cycles, embarrassing or menstruation, it's this thing, you really need to hide at something we need to be super ashamed of, in many ways, like, heaven forbid, anyone knows you have your period. And that is creating, it's contributing to this culture of shame is contributing to this culture of like, hide myself hide my true needs. So I think those very first lies start there. And then it goes, I think that first encounter with healthcare with the first exam that a girl has, is probably aware, the biggest, most authoritative lies, because that's the thing lies spoken by your peers and my spoken by, or you can sometimes fend them off. But when you have an authority figure or a doctor telling you, well, you're 12, you know, you had your first period last year, when you were 11. And you haven't had another period in the last, you know, 10 months, your periods are irregular, let's get you on the pill. That right there, medically speaking, is negligent. Because that's normal, that's normal for our cycles to, you know, be very sporadic in the first four to five years as a young woman, you know, but we seem to have these impossible, like, almost uneducated standards of what is the norm for a girl's body, because we've just adopted, we've had a whole generation of women who have just regulated, you know, they're just regulated their hormones, I'm not regulating anything, they're creating a false cycle completely. Your body thinks it's pregnant, if you're taking oral contraception, your body thinks it's pregnant, that's why it's not oscillating. You're not having a period, you're having a withdrawal bleed. So that's a really interesting one for me that when I started working with college age women, many of these girls had been on birth control for four to five years, the average age for contraception is 16, that most girls start contraception by age 16. By the time they get to college, you know, they're three to four years into it. And we would i would say something like, do you track your cycles? Like, do you track your fertility? And it's, uh, yeah, I absolutely track my fertility. And they're like, I'm gonna get my period on this day. And then I come to find out, they're on birth control. And I'm like, you're not tracking anything. There's nothing to track you don't have a natural cycle. And so it's a lie for them to think that they're cycling. That's a lie. You're not cycling. And it's a hard one to break through for whatever reason. Women don't want to accept that that's the truth. But that is you. You don't have a natural cycle if you're on contraception.

Olivia Colombo  29:29  
Yeah, yeah. It makes me think about how like there's so many like perfectionist standards for women in society in general, like across the board. And like it's as if we come up with another like deeply embedded in trench standard that like you must like get your period once a month for X amount of days. Like this is the standard and like, just like every other like beauty standard, like here is a way that we are going to pitch and sell to you To fix it,

Ava Kelly  30:05  
Even the control of our society like we are so controlling of everything that happens around us, we have to have everything planned out, we have to have everything perfect everything, Instagram worthy everything in check so that everyone knows that, yeah, I'm in control, I have control over my life, I have control over everything. So why shouldn't I have, quote unquote, control over my own body,

Leah Jacobson  30:29  
and you guys are gonna see this far beyond fertility. So that's where I began to really see it as like, we're we're obsessed with control, but it goes right into pregnancy as well, like there are really set standards of this as the norm for pregnancy, like, it should not go longer than 40 weeks, like this is the end of it, like, at this point, you must have your you must, you know, augment it, you have to induce it. It goes into every natural function of our body that if we were off in the woods by ourself, and it just did its thing on its own, every one of those natural things are really standardized. And really, this is how it should perform. And it's, it's not necessarily looking at the actual experience of women's bodies and how they naturally would want to do it on their own. It's not trusting them. It's not trusting women's bodies.

Olivia Colombo  31:19  
Hmm, yeah, yeah. I have a question. It's more like a half formed thought.

Leah Jacobson  31:25  
Go for it.

Olivia Colombo  31:26  
So in the Catholic realm, like, I feel like there's a little bit of so on one side, there's like a holier than thou like, we're Catholic, like natural, like, an iffy like, we're, we're, we don't associate with the culture of death and the rest of the world. But then at the same time, like, I feel like in young women, and I know, he will agree, like, there's so much fear instilled in us of our own bodies, that like, I don't know, we just like we don't fear and just ignorance, but ignorance that is not that we're not culpable for that we've been trained to have. That it's like an outlandish topic. We don't know anything about it, and we're just afraid of it. Um, so what would you What advice would you give to young women about kind of combating that fear? How do we get over that hump, it's,

Leah Jacobson  32:15  
it is so hard you guys, because I can see it. I mean, it's the it's the response to a culture that swung so far, you know, like, sexual revolution, and it was free love and like, have sex with whoever and like, your body is so much fun. And so there was a lie, that went too far to this way. And so it's like the counter of it right now. Like, we've come so far back, that it's like, That's bad. That's bad. That's bad. But here's the thing with every lie, it's based upon some element of truth, there was something that was true about that. And the truth piece in it that resonate, and the reason people bought the lie, and you know, embraced that free love idea is that your body is good, your body is beautiful, your body is supposed to be enjoyed, sex is a beautiful thing. It just took it outside of all the boundaries, it took it outside of all of the the protections, because unprotected and like just out there in the world, sex can be very hurtful, it can be very wounding in our bodies to like, how we use our bodies outside of those guidelines, and those like gentle parameters of the church gives us and here's the thing, we have to understand their gentle parameters, like it is it is giving it to us in love. And in charity. And just in mercy, the church is saying, you have free will, you have free will to use your body however you want. However, it's going to hurt you if you use it in this way, or in this way. That's going to hurt you ultimately. So please don't do that. But our church is never going to say, Okay, well you had sex outside of marriage, you're out. You're done. That's not how it works. The Church says, Okay, did we learn a lesson? Did we was that not good? Come back, come to confession come back. Like we you've learned this now. We still love you, of course and in God's infinite love in like, understanding of what we need to truly like internalize the lesson. He may have even given the gift of an unplanned pregnancy. People need to start to understand that and see that that when a baby is conceived outside of marriage, that is one of God's most merciful things that he can do for us because it awakens us to the reality of who we are and how we're using our body and that God needs us to like step up and correct our patterns like correct our life like I've seen more. I dozens I've seen dozens of young women who have unexpectedly become pregnant outside of marriage. Who that baby was the thing that saved their life. It is a thing that corrected their pattern it put them on track. They now have purpose. They now have drive. They've made amazing lives for themselves and their families.

Ava Kelly  34:57  
Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. And it kind of makes me think of this quote that I saw recently, it was, I wonder if that's what why God hated sin, because of the destruction it caused for a moment I felt for God who loved me enough to hate the things that hurt me, without hating me for causing them. So it's like all of these things. And all these, quote unquote, rules that we have, they all just flow for a relationship from a loving God who doesn't want us ever to be hurt or to be broken or to feel as if we're used or in any of those situations.

Leah Jacobson  35:37  
And it's because we haven't been paying attention to how God actually made us. It's because we've been able to, like our culture has said, our bodies don't matter. They're inconsequential, like, our culture has gone so far, as to truly like, adopt heresy that like our mind and our body are not connected, that you can have a male mind and a female body like massive heresy, huge live, like your mind, your spirit, like your body, you are all one, like the whole of who you are, can never be separated. There could be illness, and there can be, you know, sickness within that. But the way God made it was it is one it is together. And so we don't even understand how much it hurts God when we, you know, take you know, so Oh, like, you guys are great theology here. This is such good theology. Because the act of you know, maybe having sex outside of marriage, yes, that hurts God. But the thing that probably hurt him even more was that you were willing to, if you were using contraception, or if you were, you know, have been sterilized, or if you have, if you have done something to how he made you, like he made you exactly the way he wants you like, he loves you so much if he gave you the exact body that you're supposed to have. And if you altered it and broke that and changed it in some way so that you could then go on and do something else that also hurt you. It's like, his heart was broken. At that moment. Reset. I don't trust that you made me the way you wanted me.

Olivia Colombo  37:13  
Yeah, so true.

How do you respond to people who I guess there's two questions embedded in this when someone comes to one of guiding stars locations? Or you guys call them twinkles? Right? The locations that have like adopted?

Leah Jacobson  37:29  
Yeah, the ones that are in the works are twinkles. And then the ones that are our affiliate centers. Yeah.

Olivia Colombo  37:35  
Nice. Um, what kind of services can people expect there? And what to do there, this could lead us on a whole nother tangent, and I'm happy to go there. But what do you say and do in situations that, like modern medicine would say, like, Oh, you should go on birth control for reasons that are not about like, regulating your cycle? You don't mean for other medical reasons. It's just kind of used as whatever. Um, how do you respond to that?

Leah Jacobson  38:06  
Yeah. So first question is what can you expect in a guiding star center? And that's a great question. And so our, our kind of our service promise to any woman coming into one of our centers is that we have four, we have four core services that are every one of our centers has, and the first one, and the first three are based on those three functions of a woman's body. So Fertility Care, there's always going to be education on how your natural fertility should work. And that also includes infertility here, if you're struggling to get pregnant, we work with all the different methods of NFP charting, we help them to really truly understand what's happening, the second service is going to be based on gestation. So childbirth education classes, if one of our centers, we have kind of two levels of centers, some of our centers are fully medical licensed health care centers. And so those centers, you can get your prenatal care. You can, if you're pregnant, you can come in and get your care all the way through your pregnancy. In the centers that don't have a doctor full time on site, you can do your childbirth education classes, you can meet with doulas, you can just get totally prepared to give birth. And then that final body service is lactation. So we have lactation consultants available and all of our centers, breastfeeding classes, care for postpartum. And then you know, that also addresses things like postpartum depression, helping women, you know, adjust to motherhood really. And then the fourth area so the first three are based on the physical body. And that fourth service is just it's called family life. And so that includes every one of our centers, has a drop in child watch. And that's has to be there because just as a mom, as I started to have more kids, it each child that you have is almost in our current culture, it's like another barrier to getting help. So when I had to go into the doctor, you know, when I was pregnant, my fourth child, I had to take three toddlers with Me to most appointments. And it was so embarrassing, and it was so demoralizing and the things that the nurses would say, it was just like I could understand at that moment why somebody would choose to have an abortion, like I got it, I was like, This is horrible. I hate this. I'm like lugging these children, I'm pregnant, I'm uncomfortable. And so side note with that pregnancy, I actually just stopped going, I stopped, I opted out of prenatal care. And I called a midwife at like, 30 weeks pregnant, and I said, I'm going to give birth at home, I'm not going because I was so sick of going to the doctor. And so she came to my house, and we did a home birth, and it was beautiful, and I loved it. Um, but that's what you can get in a guiding star centers, those four core services. And so then obviously, our worldview on women's bodies is very different than traditional medicine in our country right now. Like we said, anything that alters, suppresses or destroys a healthy, natural part of your body. That truly is like a negligence malpractice and misogyny, like that is that is what feminism should stand against. If you're going to just take a system that's functioning and say, well, let's just shut that down. And there's, like, that's not okay, that's not okay. And so somebody who has an actual issue happening, like, you know, maybe you have severe pain, and Dimitri osis, you know, whatever is going on, we're going to actually try to get to the core of that, we're going to actually get to the root problem, we're not going to just cover it up. It's important that we know what really is wrong. You can mask the symptoms, you can hide them for sure. But you didn't actually deal with the problem. The second you go off of birth control, the problem is still there, you still have, you know, polycystic ovarian syndrome, or endometriosis, whatever it is, it's still there. And it's continuing, it's getting worse. It does no good not to get to the root. And so that would be just a short answer. But we really try to encourage everybody as a standard of care that you are able to bring in your chart, you know, it's really it's really your fifth vital sign, you know, we take vitals, we check blood pressure, we check all those things. We should also say, let me see your chart. You know, your charting your fertility cycle, it should be it is just as much an indicator of your overall health as your blood pressure.

Olivia Colombo  42:25  
Huh, I love that. Yeah, pretty sure. Um, we have to wrap up in a few minutes. This has been wonderful. Um, I do want to know about the book that you're writing, would you like to tell us all about? Oh, please, please pray for me.

Leah Jacobson  42:41  
Yes, called holistic feminism. And it touches on a lot of the things that we just touched on, it's definitely not written specifically for our Catholic audience. It's written more for women, who maybe see themselves as a feminist to really look at the effects of the women's movement on the delivery of health care and on hot women's self image, like how we feel about ourselves now as an effect of a feminist movement. You know, that's told us our bodies don't matter. And so it's trying to create and hoping that we can launch a new feminism that is no jump to new feminism. That's holistic and sees us as whole. Yeah, please pray for us. It should. It hopefully it will be available before Mother's Day this year. So good.

timing.

Olivia Colombo  43:32  
For sure.

Ava Kelly  43:33  
Yeah. So good, too, because I feel like whenever, sometimes when I'm in conversation with women about birth control, or all these things, it's like, the responses. No, it's because you're Catholic. That's why you don't like it. When in reality, like, no, I could be any religion and say all these things, too.

Leah Jacobson  43:55  
Yeah. Being Catholic just gave you a little bit of insight as to that it might not be the best for you. I mean, that's you just had a little bit of an advantage and that the church said, let's just question this.

Olivia Colombo  44:08  
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It Those are some of my favorite types of books, but it's like a Catholic. Specifically, I'm thinking of I'm not Fred's the porn myth. It's like a Catholic, like influencer of sorts, writing about, like, using their faith to inform them but using only like science, secular philosophy and such to, like, deliver that message so that everyone can be open to it. And like I said, like, don't just shut you down. Be like, Oh, that's Catholic. Like, of course, you're pro life. You're Catholic.

Leah Jacobson  44:39  
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is one of my favorite quotes, actually. I mean, truth is truth. And I think it St. Augustine's quote that, you know, truth is a lie in like, you don't have to defend it, just release it and it will defend itself. Like just deliver truth and then let it go.

Olivia Colombo  44:54  
Yes, I love that so much. Um, if I do have any other questions,

Ava Kelly  45:00  
I guess the final question that I have is what can we do as like young women and young Catholic women to incorporate holistic women's health into our daily lives and to also encourage our peers to include it?

Leah Jacobson  45:17  
That is such a good question. And I'm going to this is something that is probably a little uncomfortable, but be willing to challenge your healthcare provider to learn what a natural cycle should be be willing to hand them peer reviewed research that says, actually, you know, this is women's fertility and how it looks and works. Because we find that healthcare is actually a consumer driven, believe it or not, it's a consumer driven industry. And when patients are saying this is the type of healthcare I want, then providers are incentivized to learn it. And when providers start learning it and start doing it, you see this whole cascade of effects where then insurance companies then are now you know, reimbursing it, and all of a sudden, it is totally legitimize as authentic health care, it is health care to go in and have your hormones checked for your fertility panels. That's normal. And that's where we need to get so you guys have to just as young women, be willing to be uncomfortable in that appointment with your provider and say, Actually, I really want to use FEM or I really want to use naprotechnology, or I really want to use Marquette. And when they don't know what you're talking about, say, Well, this is the doctor that's been doing all that research and educate them.

Olivia Colombo  46:32  
Yeah, yeah.

And, like, it takes courage for that first step.

But like,

I don't know, like, if you hand over the research, like, it's what you're saying the truth, the truth can do it on its own can stand alone. Yeah,

Leah Jacobson  46:46  
for sure. And the other piece of it, ladies is just you know, you guys are as drivers of culture change, you can do that through challenging the systems that are in place. But really, it's so begins with knowing your worth, and just demanding, you know, that relationships with men that your worth is always you know, dignified. It's just holding the standard is holding the standard for how we should be treated in our culture.

Olivia Colombo  47:12  
Yeah, I agree. Yeah. This has been so good. Thank you so much, Leah. Um, is there any other advice parting words that you would like to leave us with where people can find out more about the guiding star project and such?

Leah Jacobson  47:25  
Yeah, please, please follow us over on social media, if you can. I also have my author page, if you want to follow there for book details, and book updates, just my name, you'll find it. I am starting I don't know when you guys are sharing this. But later this month, I am going to do a four week mini course with the book content with a group of women. If you find my website, Leah, a jacobsen.com. You can sign up for and then we're just going to do like a kind of a mastermind group of women from all over the country about what these ideas and how to apply it to your to your life prior to Christmas before you have to go home and deal with relatives.

Olivia Colombo  48:01  
I love that. Yeah, definitely. And I will totally share the details on the podcast, because I think a lot of our audience will be interested in that. Yeah. Because we've agreed.

Thank you so much, to Leah, and to Ava for being on this episode of the podcast. And thank you all for listening to it. Right after I hit stop record, Leah said something absolutely magical. And we had a great conversation that I wanted to share quickly here, give a little recap of we were talking about control, and how that's what society presents us with mainstream health care. And she said, quote, every month when you start to bleed, it's a reminder from God that you are not in control. The female body is a reminder of surrender. We live out our Fiat through the wholeness of our bodies, which were made good Ava and I also reflected on the fact that there's such a push toward clean eating and holistic health, essential oils, etc. in society and media. And yet, we are convinced by doctors and the same society and media, that putting something in our bodies that doesn't really belong there is always just the blanket answer to all of our woes. We have a friend who always points out to her girls and youth ministry that everyone's all about Whole Foods and juice cleanses etc. And then they go ahead and put plastic in their arms. The truth will defend itself. We will be back with a another new episode next Monday. So be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Starting with this episode, we are slowly expanding our Grexly podcasts to be more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing. So transcripts are available in the show notes. Share with any friends who might benefit from that. As always, you can find this podcast and all of the other Grexly podcasts on grexly.com as well as our merchant Patreon page for exclusive looks from the podcasters... we have two new podcasts joining the fam on November 16 that you won't want to miss. So get pumped. If you have a guest recommendation send it on our way at Greg slate comm slash to the heights in the contact form or email us directly at totheheightspodcast@gmail.com Additionally, if you have any questions for me about social justice, anything we've talked about this season, or just life, send it on in for our next ask Olivia episode also using totheheightspodcast@gmail.com. I hope you are all well during this crazy time to talk to you next week and keep on reaching to the heights

Transcribed by https://otter.ai