Powerful Birth

As humans, we have a desire to mitigate the unknowns in our day-to-day life. Oftentimes we are able to do this easily, feeling content in the false illusion that is it even possible to know or control what is coming next. When things are going as expected it seems easy to feel secure and confident, but when things are happening outside of our control it is more challenging to trust the process.

Pregnancy, birth and babies are anything but predictable and this makes us highly uncomfortable and even anxious. The inability to control this process externally leaves us feeling powerless and confused. Humanity’s current response to such mysteries is to make every effort to study, control and monetize such processes in an effort to be able to manipulate them to our benefit.

This effort on the part of medical professionals to turn the physiological process of pregnancy, birth, and feeding infants into medical events that women must be saved from has caused generations of women to be disconnected from this sacred and powerful process of bringing new life into the world.

Nearly every western mother has a horror story of a hospital birth where they or their baby were “saved” by their care providers. Yet despite being rescued, these women are still left traumatized physically, mentally and emotionally to the point that they are disturbed by the idea of a birth going beautifully.

It has not been unusual in my experience to hear women almost retaliate with a “I couldn’t have done that, because my baby/body wouldn’t [insert wild reason here]” when another woman shares an empowering birth story.

This isn’t an intentional reaction, it is a trauma response. These women have a deep inner knowing that if they had been “allowed” or even encouraged to trust the process and their ability to birth, they wouldn’t have had to endure tearing, forceps, emergency surgery, or a host of other interventions.

This knowing causes an anger that must be expressed and witnessed. Unfortunately, they often share their fear with soon-to-be-mothers without thinking about that seed of fear being planted. That seed of that sprouts and grows until it causes anxiety that gets passed on generationally.

For many generations now, women have been separated from this primal, physiological process of bringing babies into the world. We are separated from this process the moment we begin being physically capable of this miracle. From puberty onward, we are trained to hide and “control” our natural processes.

The reality is that none of these processes are controllable. We do not get to control a process designed to happen normally as a result of hormonal fluctuations, no matter how closely we attempt to replicate this process. We have proven over and over that we are not very good at taking control in this domain, as evidenced by the incredibly high maternal and infant mortality rates in the US specifically. (Not to mention the wide range of other health problems experienced by women after taking synthetic hormones long term.)

Pregnancy and birth are experiences whereby a woman is initiated into motherhood by traveling into the depths of herself, to the edge of what she thought herself possible of achieving and making it out the other side. It is about learning to trust a process bigger than yourself and to surrender to the unknown because that is what most of motherhood is about all the way through.

Pregnancy and birth are the foundations upon which a woman will build herself as a mother and this is why it is so important for women to birth knowing they are capable, competent, and powerful. When a woman knows this from the start, she will be able to advocate for her child for a lifetime to come.