Fueled by Compassion
After decades as a Midwife empowering families and care providers with her innovative birth approach, Gail now embarks on a new journey to integrate her life with this paradigm shift rather than be quite so desk-bound. Gail feels there are many individuals who are also shifting their understanding of themselves. This website is an invitation to explore the lives we live.
About Gail Tully
Gail Tully is a midwife, author, and the creator of Spinning Babies®, the globally recognized approach to physiological birth and fetal positioning.
For over 45 years, Gail supported grassroots birth organizations. Beginning with a homebirth newsletter, then doula organizing and trainings, moving into homebirth midwifery, and finally launching Spinning Babies®.
Gail has dedicated her life to empowering the birth world with innovative and now evidence-based techniques that promote safer, more satisfying birth experiences.
After passing the torch at Spinning Babies®, Gail continues to inspire, educate, and support others through transformative workshops and the creation of new experiences for similarly curious seekers. Please join our mailing list to keep in touch.
Halfway through a workshop for nurses on shoulder dystocia, a nurse spoke up and asked, “How do you know this stuff?!” My unplanned and spirited reply was,
“Because I didn’t go to school.” I learned midwifery by closely observing women and listening to their bodies and their babies in labor. What I read in books wasn’t always what I saw at birth. Not exceptions to the “rule,” but that what we assumed about birth wasn’t reflected by birth itself.
My Background
As a teen mom, I was very interested in my child’s healthy development. I took a Montessori teacher training while he attended a school overseen by Maria Montessori’s close colleague and co-creator of the English, math, and music areas, Elizabeth Caspari. I followed Madame Caspari for a school year, creating a student manual that taught me to observe, respect, and systemize information for the teacher within the child.
I applied Montessori values to my midwifery, paraphrasing Montessori’s famous phrase, “The Teacher Within” to recognize “The Birthing Goddess Within”. Assumptions, therefore, didn’t block me from seeing and feeling how babies rotated. I could actually feel how the body releases the baby, which didn’t quite match the “dilating cervix model” of labor assessment.
Next, I simultaneously sought a degree focused on family therapy while learning midwifery from a variety of homebirth midwives. To get more experience, I attended hospital births and later became a doula and then a doula trainer, first with Sage Femme and then with DONA International.
In 1987, I attended the birth of a woman who planned a physiological birth after a previous cesarean birth of her first child. Her baby was in the posterior (sunny-side up position) which slowed her labor and added discomfort. The few comfort measures I knew weren’t helping. I felt very ill-equipped to help her in any intelligent way. But her baby eventually turned around and was born under her own power. She felt triumphant. And I felt a longing to know more. So off I went to the medical library. There was little practical information on the subject. But the antique texts and drawings were fascinating. Studying anthropology sources on birth in diverse cultures, it occurred to me that the birth positions and strategies that lasted through the ages were repeated because they worked and I became curious as to when and how they worked. Sometimes they worked at one labor and not at another. Why?
Doula activism was a vital part of my development and included grassroots gatherings, offering my DONA-approved doula trainer status to create access for indigenous, Black and Somali trainings to qualify for DONA certification. I led two hospital doula programs, one of which was a doula pilot project boasting a 3.94% cesarean rate. With these experiences, I wasn’t affected by nay-sayers against doulas.
I invited Penny Simkin to Minneapolis in 1998 to train us. Penny Simkin taught me much about how to interact with a variety of birth professionals. She taught me to be ethical in writing and speaking by avoiding absolute statements. She inspired my curiosity by her own. She led us to question studies respectfully and, always, to see birth from the woman’s perspective. For me, her greatest gift was her intriguing questions, sometimes given rhetorically, about birth issues that she sprinkled throughout her lectures. I would take a few years seeking to answer each one. This teacher-student process led to breakthrough understandings about asynclitism and transverse lie, deep transverse arrest, and “the 7 cm stall” as well as breaking ideology about posterior positions of the fetus. She knew many birth positions, and I wanted to know why they worked. In 2004, she told me that as soon as my approach was studied and proven, I would become quite famous.
With Penny Simkin uplifting me, I continued my path. Jean Sutton’s Optimal Foetal Positioning book renewed forgotten concepts with her own midwifery observations and skills. Her knowledge of right obliquity of the uterus (an 1800s topic in the literature) and flexion/extension differences between babies on the right and left sides helped me connect the dots. I was so excited that in 1999, I began to write the book Spinning Babies to share a new approach to preparing for and supporting physiological birth. But in 2001, I thought, let me check these ideas with my peers before I presume to publish. For the next 24 years, the requests for workshops grew into a business called Spinning Babies®, a necessary way to meet the myriad requests for this information.
In 2006, I attended Dr. Carol Phillips’ Dynamic Body Balancing® Workshop. She brought in easy-to-replicate techniques to address the soft tissues and joints of the pelvis. With them, Dr. Carol has revolutionized physiological birth around the world. I was happy to be her ambassador; she was happy to allow me to use her Dynamic Body Balancing® techniques in Spinning Babies®. With my midwifery background, I could understand when and how to incorporate which technique for the most direct effect. Ten years later, Marcello Windolf brought a deeper understanding of the fascia, and Jenny Blyth brought The Jiggle to Spinning Babies® first world conference in 2016. The fascia became our teacher of how to connect, not only our bodies, but also our fields of birth and body work.
Spinning Babies® grew, and in 2015, I began a trainer team. Soon, I identified Jennifer Walker as my successor. As the company grew, my role reduced. Studies began to appear proving the approach I’d put together was reducing the cesarean rates. Italian Midwife Anna Maria Rossetti, taught the team behind the 13th journal article published on Spinning Babies®. This Milan study by Melchionda and Aloi examined the rate that a posterior baby will turn to anterior using our approach. 93.3% as it turns out, and that compares to 63.6% without Spinning Babies®. Fetal rotation is why we see up to 50% reduction in cesarean rates when Spinning Babies® is applied in labor.
Spinning Babies® is the location for fetal rotation!
Think what can be done if we begin activating and balancing fascia in pregnancy and add the continuous support of a doula into a midwifery model of care, including nutrition and herbs for the protection of health and avoidance of routine intervention?
Today, it’s time to let my approach go into willing hands. As passionate as I am for the topics of birth and compassionate for the needs of the world, I’m discovering myself in areas that I haven’t explored while owning a business. I wish to keep one topic of birth active in my life, and that is the Resolving Shoulder Dystocia Workshop, now under Nicole Morales and ReStory Birthwork. I also want to continue writing. I have friends who know about writing, so I’m bringing them together for a workshop. I want to learn the writing craft. Yes, I’ve written several non-fiction books, but the creative side of writing is inviting me!
And for you, dear visitor? Is there a place where you and I might sit down together and share a cup of tea?
Perspectives
The prerogative of the crone is to free herself of the bondage of social convention and live fully in a crafted story of a life now worthy of her.
Even at five years old, I saw birth differently. Two friends and I sat together in a young apple tree soon after one of their mothers gave birth to a younger sibling. “Where do babies come from?” I asked, intrigued.
“The doctor cuts them out of the mother’s side.” My friend said with the confidence of a young child. She used the word “side” because the body education of a preschooler in the early 1960s would not include intimate words as “uterus” or even “abdomen”!
Hearing her explanation, a swirling ribbon of images suddenly flowed past the left side of my head. Somehow, extending behind me, I saw ancient peoples going back to earlier times. Closer to my ear were images of leather-clad families on grasslands. I remembered hearing that long ago, people lived before metal tools were made. Therefore, there were people living before a knife could be used to cut a baby from a mother. No, there had to be some other explanation. Babies got here, but how?
I asked the adults the same question, but answers were lacking. A cabbage patch, a stork, God’s blessing on a marriage… Wait, would God bless my atheist parents? If the answer was yes, then that answer gave me a model of how to see limits of human ideology, which also grew my view of birth and seeing past the easy assumptions. However, that’s not part of this story.
Next, I became fascinated with where we went when we died. My brother, three years older, answered that “They put your body in a box and take you to the cemetery in a station wagon, where they bury you in the dirt.”
“Oh, come on,” I scolded him, “You’ve told me a lot of tales, but this one is the most unbelievable! How do you even think I’d ever believe THAT story!?” So I pondered the question for years.
One summer evening when I was 11, after about 5 years of pondering, it occurred to me that we were here on earth to learn deep lessons. Eventually, we die, but then come back again in a new body, as a new baby, to learn a new lesson. Once we passed all the lessons, we wouldn’t have to come back. Given that I was in an elementary school where passing meant progress, the correlation made sense.
Since that evening, I’ve been pretty much attending to how to grasp the lessons, so I don’t have to come back. I’ve had to face a lot of lapsed lessons, old tardy slips, and repeat tests. But I think I’ve also gotten some insights about how all this life cycling might work. Something about being a spiritual being in a physical body on a return trip to Source. Something less about how humans see the world and more about the particles that make matter and what we do to them and with them.
Pretty much, I want to play with concepts about being Light, Sound, and magnetism. I ponder how we may release the physical body for the last time. One guiding concept seems to be that the Geometry of Divinity brings joy, and that it is Joy that is the evidence of God. How much the wisdom of the heart knows but the mind seems too busy with often pointless thought energy, regurgitated by habit to release the obstacles to Joy.
This glorious time of life is giving me the opportunity to let go of the angst of being in the wrong seat at the wrong table and re-engage with the quests of early youth from another angle. But rather than society’s assumption that elders revert to childhood, this phase is more consistent with the closeness of the soul that is easily felt by a young child.
Play time with wisdom sounds abundantly creative!