My gurus tell me that the people in my life are my teachers, and I have found that is especially true of my children. However, it is a truth I forget regularly. When I find myself in pain, I learn it all over again!
Birth belongs in the same category as contraception and access to abortion as an issue of bodily integrity and autonomy that has health implications. The longer I study birth, the more I see it first and foremost as a women’s issue.
Into my head popped Juliet’s incandescent lines in the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep. The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.”
If you’ve ever made a To Do list, you’ll like this.
Thoughts on captivity and liberation — for dolphins and for mothers.
In one of the last calls of life coach training, our teacher, Dr. Martha Beck, told us a story about meeting a South American shaman. He told her that when people come to him, he always asks them, “When did you stop singing? When did you stop dancing? When did you stop dreaming? When did you stop telling stories? When did you stop playing?”
I just got off the phone with a dear friend who is planning to start a family within the year. We were talking about how she struggles to take care of herself. Instead she puts others’ needs ahead of her own and has trouble saying “no” to anyone but herself.
“It can work with a homebirth or at a hospital, and it doesn’t rule out intervention if necessary,” Evans (below right) says. “Basically, it teaches you to replace fear with confidence. The medical model of birth actively manages pain, whereas the HypnoBirthing model actively manages fear, helping the body relax so that it can do what it naturally wants to do.”
As viewers of One Born Every Minute will testify, one thing is certain: natural childbirth is excruciating. The Channel 4 hit series, set in a Southampton hospital maternity unit, ended its current run on Monday night. It will doubtless be re-commissioned as we can’t seem to get enough of women screaming in pain and men acting like hapless spare parts in the labour room.
