Posts Tagged ‘Books’

I have been reading Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin. Have you read it?

It’s a rich source for all things pregnancy. She makes a comment that reading about birth stories helps a woman prepare, and essentially the first half of the book is filled with birth story after birth story. I felt this way when I watched Elena Tonetti’s video Birth As We Know It, that if you don’t have a positive imprint about natural birth, watching natural birth after natural birth begins to give you a template that could assist you when it’s your time.

There is a lot of information in Ina May’s book that you may not have heard before, it’s direct, loving and clear. As I read it, I felt her embodied knowing about childbirth on every page. There is information on nutrition during pregnancy, what to expect during the birth, breastfeeding, and there are notes for midwives as well.

I spent the day in Ventura with Pam England and a group of midwives and doulas.  My favorite aspects of Pam are her focus on the soul of birth stories, and her guidance to caregivers, friends, and moms to be present with what is.

Birth trauma, if I am understanding her correctly, arises primarily from not being in agreement with what is actually happening, or what has actually happened, and not embracing the beauty and perfection of the birth experience, regardless of what it looks like. (And that most of this internal conflict or inability to accept what is actually happening arises from the unconscious, from expectation of how it “should be”, from decisions we made as children about how things are supposed to be, what the “rules” are, how to get love and approval, how to avoid pain).

Birth, like most things creative and truly, divinely feminine, is divine mystery. Our ability to focus on what is working, on what we are doing well, on knowing that everyone present is doing their best–these all seem to be keys for preventing and healing birth trauma.

Also, our ability to allow the transformation of birth, the initiation into motherhood, the unknown, the resistance, the stillness, the complete and utter dissolution of who we knew we were as women and re-birth into something entirely new–to look however it does, to take however long it does–to be exactly what it is for each woman…
…well, I will hold a vision for that to be the norm, for the wide expanse of possibility to be.

To be.