Birthing Naturally - 5 Part Plan
I meet women every week who express the desire to have a natural unmedicated birth. Whether already expecting or thinking ahead to a baby in the future, they tell me, "I've always thought giving birth to a child would be a sacred moment, a special passage to be treasured for the remainder of my life." I can see the despairing look in their eyes as they ask, "Is it really possible?" Many feel lost and unsupported in our predominant medical culture of assembly line obstetrics.
If you are one of these women you need to know, it IS possible to turn your unformulated desire into reality. Many women embrace a pro-active stance and take back their options in birthing. You can too.
Here is a Five Part Plan to build a bridge to the birth you dream of.
1. Intention
Turn inward: examine your desire--formulate your intention. Giving birth is among the most intimate and deeply personal experiences of a lifetime. What is the birth you want? There is no right or wrong way to engage this life-changing passage, it is 100% up to you. Perhaps after investigation you will decide birthing naturally is not your choice. Other women hope they can set the stage for a memorable peak experience they will treasure for the remainder of their life. Even though this stance is not culturally supported in this historical moment maps are available. Create the time, the space and the conditions to look deeply inside your own heart.
If you do want to birth naturally clarify your intention. Intention creates our reality. A focused intention clothes itself in power. Solidify your intention and commit to your vision. This is the path to strength and resolve. No woman can plan the details of giving birth but you can embrace it as a passage you want to engage fully. If you want to be an active participant and believe you have the innate capability to birth wisely and well then make a declaration of your intention. Write out or speak aloud to your partner your dream of giving birth and then proceed to step two.
2. Commitment
Turn Inward: commit to your vision. A declaration of intention requires the next step of commitment to your dream. Commitment is necessary to overcome the obstacles and challenges inherent in any significant accomplishment. The following poem expresses this well:
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy,
the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness,
concerning all acts of initiative (and creation).
The moment one definitely commits oneself,
then Providence moves too.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision.Whatever you can do or dream you can,
Begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.W.H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition
(usually attributed to Goethe)My favorite one line birth story came from a mom working in a children's clothing store. Her child was almost ten years old but her eyes beamed confidence and pride as she said, "I climbed Mt Everest that day and no one will ever be able to take that away from me."
3. Fear and Courage
Turn Inward: Unearth your fear - Embrace your courage.
Unearth your Fear: First time mothers naturally feel a healthy level of apprehension. To not do so would not be human. Facing the unknown requires a leap of faith. The variables of birth are impossible to control. In our culture and historical moment we are taught subtly in a million unspoken ways the process of birthing is broken, it is something to be feared and endured not experienced.
Using art therapy, journaling, meditation or hypnosis unearth your fears and expose them to the light of day. The monster in the closet will find an appropriate size when the light of quiet consideration is shined upon it. Write them down until you have a complete list. Step toward your fears and size them up, give them their due and decide how best to defuse the power they have over you. To do this you need to know you are bigger than your fears, this leads to the second half of step three.
Embrace your Courage. Does your heart tell you that you know in your cells how to birth wisely and well? Do you believe the body and the heart have their own wisdom? Do you believe we all carry reserves of untapped strength in our heart and mind? Do you believe the intelligence of nature is woven into women's innate knowledge of giving birth? Do you believe birthing well requires a journey beyond the confines of the cognitive mind? Invoke your heart strength and begin building a foundation of moral character by daily embracing your potential. Authentic and personal affirmations of your belief in the wisdom and power of your own body and spirit will create a unique link to the reservoir of the collective strength of women. Entice the voice of courage to speak and write down the confidence it whispers. All of us have an infinite source of courage in our hearts, start building a bridge to the well spring within. Create the time and space in your life to embrace step four.
4. Engage stories of strong confident births.
Feed your heart, mind and moral imagination with stories of strong confident births. Seek out women who have had strong confident births. Although a little underground some digging will lead you to a cornucopia of beautiful birth stories. Listen to them. Talk to midwives, doctors and doulas that can share empowering births they have witnessed. Seek out books, videos, audio stories and internet resources to nourish your heart, mind and moral imagination with images of powerful and poised birthings. The heart feeds deeply on stories as it creates its own unique mythology woven out of your own dreams and the enriching experiences of women who found giving birth a defining moment of empowerment.
5. Take Action
Create your unique plan of action. Traditional cultures viewed the journey to motherhood as a right of passage. It was often seen as the initiation of women, a passage of testing which has the potential to reveal the reserves of power and strength within. Touching that source of strength lays a firm foundation for one of the most challenging roles life offers, being a mother. Giving birth is challenging. The pain of childbirth is interwoven with the totality of the experience at every level. It is not meaningless pain but pain with a purpose. As a psychospiritual being you can work with both body and mind to safely navigate labor and delivery. Mind-body medicine modalities are effective and make the pain of labor manageable. Investigate and decide which of these techniques suits your temperament. Whether you choose hypnobirthing, mindful meditation for birth, yoga or acupuncture preparation and classes are required. Most modalities require practice and mastery to be available during labor. Do you want the support of a birth doula? Sort through all the options and decide what best suits your temperament. One size does not fit all, only you and your partner can decide what you want to have in your psychospiritual tool belt the day you give birth.
Birthing babies in the United States has been monopolized by allopathic medicine since the early 20th century. Allopathic medicine has long defined treatment through the lens of pathology and disease. The presuppositions of this medical paradigm have curiously been overlaid upon pregnancy and birth, which by definition has nothing to do with illness. Along with this paradigm of medicine has come the long-entrenched view of the patient as the passive recipient of the recommendations of the all-knowing medical professional. Most obstetrical care, both figuratively and literally, puts women on their backs while their babies are "delivered" by their doctors. The new model of a collaborative physician-patient relationship has not seemed to penetrate obstetrical care to date.
"The perceived need for ritualized medical care during pregnancy is more cultural than medical."
Thomas H. Strong, Jr. M.D., Expecting Trouble
The cultural blind spot regarding childbirth is undoubtedly part of a convoluted story. Unfortunately, prejudices regarding women are still deeply embedded in our collective thinking. These unexamined proclivities are part of a complicated history involving psychology, philosophy and religion. Freud's theory that women unconsciously recognize and despise their own fundamental inferiority molded the secular landscape of thought for almost a century. Philosophers whose influence spanned thousands of years such as Aristotle wrote, "The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness." This perspective has deep roots in our collective cultural attitudes. Western religion contributed the view of women's existential connection with Original Sin and made birthing a painful punishment to be endured by the daughters of Eve.Although the feminist revolution of the 20th century created some in-roads into these historical perspectives, they are nevertheless so subtly buried in cultural prejudices it may take many centuries of consciously questioning and revisiting them to eradicate their pernicious influence in everything from our thought processes to societal institutions. The emerging field of social healing which seeks to deal with the wounds of large-scale oppression and identify how they have shaped consciousness seems relevant to the long shadows these misconceptions have cast.
These perspectives have been instrumental in laying the foundation for the mistaken notion that a woman's body is somehow broken in relation to birthing. Scientific research each year pushes the boundary of our quantification of the elegant intelligence at work in our interwoven system we call our mind-body-spirit. Each new discovery further confirms the subtle intelligence at work in the larger economy of the natural systems in our body. For example, only in recent decades has science quantified exactly how precisely human breast milk nourishes the human infant. Subtle enzymes (that cannot be replicated by formula manufacturers) uniquely feed the infant's brain and critically contribute to its quickly unfolding development. Meantime, as the new mother breastfeeds, the astonishingly interactive intelligence of nature releases hormones that stimulate contractions of the uterus, returning it to its pre-pregnancy size.At the same time breastfeeding itself stimulates a release of hormones in both the newborn and the mother which facilitate the flow of love and what we now call bonding. Within days after birth a miraculous dance of reciprocity develops as the mother's milk lets down in direct response to the hungry cry of her baby. As an example of our cultural confusion and its complicated history surrounding women, sexuality and birth whether a mother can breastfeed in public is still hotly debated in the 21st century. While it is widely accepted that women's breasts can be used openly to sell beer and automobiles, where and when she can nourish her infant is regulated by specific laws. In seemingly liberal Marin County, California an upscale and chic gymnasium was forced to create a private room out of the potential gaze of offended members who could not tolerate a woman discreetly putting her child to the breast at poolside.
Integral medicine has also begun to quantify the power and purpose of the body's perpetual tendency to restore equilibrium. If we can eliminate the human tendency to be our own worst enemy, to remove anxiety, eliminate stressful environments and situations and stop making life-style choices that create impediments to health, the body will find its own way to heal itself. What about childbirth? Has the economy of nature somehow left this one human experience devoid of intelligent design? Women's heath issues have long been unconsciously placed at a lower rung of priority. The notorious 1988 study on heart disease, which had 13,385 male participants and remarkably concluded women were not at risk, is only one glaring example. In 1990 the National Institute for Health was publicly criticized for devoting 13% of its funds to research regarding women. Women were diagnosed for decades with hypoglycemia based on sugar levels established in men. Only recently it was discovered women's levels are not the same. Breast cancer received the least focus in cancer research until female celebrities took up the cause, creating focus and necessary fund-raising.
The cultural blind spot regarding women's health in general is uniquely compounded in obstetrics, with its direct association with long-entrenched social reserve around sexuality, menstruation and the primal act of childbirth itself. It is remarkable how little has been scientifically quantified and researched, especially regarding the psychological dimension of childbirth. In the 1990s a study revealed for the first time that women retain a heightened memory of giving birth to their children for the remainder of their lives. This memory remains a locus of vital energy (positive or negative) in the coloration of consciousness from empowerment and pride to anger and victimization. Why does this particular memory have a unique longevity? Why do more women in the United States experience post-partum depression than any other industrialized nation? Is there a connection between a traumatic birth experience and post-partum depression? Is there a connection between post-partum depression and Cesarean section?How common is post traumatic stress disorder following birth? What is the connection between a positive birth experience and bonding? What is the impact of the birth experience on successful breastfeeding? Does the newborn likewise have a positive or a negative birth experience? How does Cesarean section impact the newborn? What is the effect of common interventions such as a vacuum extractor, forceps or internal electronic fetal monitoring on the newborn? How do newborns experience trauma? How do newborns assimilate and heal from trauma? Studies aside, it would be exciting and revealing to ask women themselves, "What is the birth you dream of for your child?" It would also be informative to ask new mothers and fathers immediately after the birth how they would quantify their birth experience.
The incessant drumbeat of birth has lead to a sense of ordinariness which no doubt also has contributed to a lack of creative questioning. Before the appropriate questions, can be raised, we need to stand back and reassess our presuppositions about the meaning of birth. What is the significance of a new human consciousness entering the larger human story and what does it mean for a woman to have life pass through her? If one embraces a divine plan and metaphysics of spiritual connectedness, then birth stands at the sacred center of life. If that is true then birth matters. Consciousness in birth matters. How a woman births matters. How a woman births matters to her baby. How a woman births matters to the consciousness of the planet. Birth is a journey across the threshold into a completely new life. It is often the single most profound psychological and spiritual shift a woman will experience in a life time. Identity, values and societal status alter dramatically and the process can re-define self-image and self-worth. A woman enters into the journey of giving birth having a mother and she will emerge being a mother. Birth is a journey across the threshold into a completely new life.An African proverb has it:
Being pregnant and giving birth are like crossing a narrow bridge.
People can accompany you to the bridge. They can greet you on the other side.
But you walk that bridge alone.
It is a boundary crossing and therefore a rite of passage.
You can't give birth and end up at the same place. The passage itself demands transformation, being among the most intense physical, emotional and spiritual experiences of life. With the proper preparation and support the passage can be joyous, triumphant, challenging, life-changing, and life-giving for both mother and child. It can be a peak experience which will eternally be a source of confidence. I have met many who have faced the challenge heroically and the glow of pride that lights up their faces when recalling their unique story, even decades after the event, tells its own tale. One mother told me, "I climbed Mt. Everest that day and no one will ever be able to take that away from me." Unfortunately our collective cultural ignorance teaches that birth is something to be feared and endured, not experienced.
What about the pain of childbirth?Is it as unbearable as we are led to believe? Is the only humane choice to deaden the body? The pain is interwoven with the totality of the experience at all levels. Childbirth is not meaningless pain but pain with a purpose. At the physical level the pain acts as a guide for the woman to respond to, she then moves in response to what she is feeling. Her instincts can take over using breathe and positions that help the baby move down and into position for its journey down the birth canal. As the pain builds, so does the release of endorphins, the body's natural anesthesia. The flood of endorphins and oxytocin will open the door to an altered state of consciousness which is simultaneously primal and transpersonal. The flow of oxytocin will increase as labor builds and this same hormone will cause her to fall in love with and bond with her baby after the birth. When the pain of labor is stopped entirely, nature's feedback system is interrupted. This is no doubt why the most common side effect of an epidural is for labor to stall. This then requires pitocin augmentation to stimulate labor and the cascade of interventions begins.
Rites of passage in all cultures involve challenge, suffering and trials. The obstacles encountered are the very things that create transformation, causing us to feel more capable by their mastery. It is by facing and overcoming a challenge that we discover who we are. The upheaval of birth is part of nature's grand design. Birth was meant to be overwhelming, it is supposed to shake a woman down to her roots, leave her in awe of the power of the experience and also the power in herself. To deny the pain is to deny the growth. To remove the challenge is to remove the potential for a unique form of spiritual learning. We don’t find ourselves when things are easy. Modern psychology defines peak experiences and flow experiences as ones involving absolute absorption, total commitment and complete concentration in challenging ourselves to stretch beyond our known limits. When we are invited to face our fears and work through them we emerge with knowledge of our own courage. Many women experience childbirth as a peak experience.
Conversely this is undoubtedly why women who are given early epidurals and manage to pass through the process without incurring trauma often feel let down, experience grief or disorientation as though the completion of the design of nature has been psychospiritually interrupted. Joseph Campbell in his consideration of the hero, says classical and aboriginal cultures saw childbirth as the heroic quest of women. He likewise acknowledged its lack of novelty perhaps detracts from the splash and dazzle of other outward accomplishments we deem remarkable or transformative for society. These cultures esteemed women's power in birth and she was often seen to be participating in the pure power of creation of a goddess. Campbell tells us among the Aztecs the mothers who died in childbirth went to the same heaven as warriors who died in battle. A critical element in his definition of heroism is it requires putting your life on the line for another which literally qualifies birth.
It is inspiring to imagine a cultural awakening around the importance of consciousness in birth. Imagine a woman who believes her body was designed to birth wisely and well. Imagine a woman who is confidant she has the psychospiritual power to traverse this extremely challenging yet rewarding passage. Imagine a woman who is trained in appropriate mind-body medicine techniques which give her the tools necessary to remain calm and conscious in both her body and her heart. Imagine a woman who can stay poised at the intersection between spirit, mind and body. Imagine a woman who can self-consciously choose to surrender and simultaneously support this mysterious juncture between heaven and earth. Imagine a woman who is able to fully embrace the heroic challenge of birthing her child. Imagine a woman who can be fully present to the sacredness of the first breathe of her baby. Imagine a woman who emerges from childbirth awake to her own power and purpose and who is ready to assume the awe-inspiring task of being a mother. Imagine a woman for whom the life-long memory of birth resonates with the confidence it has sealed into her spirit. Imagine the pure consciousness of the tiny bud of humanity we call a newborn baby being welcomed with courage and love.
