“Spiritual
birth recognizes that each and every birth is the birth of the Christ
child. The birth support person’s job is to do her best to bring
both the mother and child through their passage alive and well and to
see that the sacrament of birth is kept holy,” writes the great
American midwife Ina May Gaskin. When I visited Gaskin’s Farm in
Summertown, Tenn., earlier this year it was to further my training as
a doula — a birth support person.
My
first birth experience after my training with Gaskin was with a woman
who had an older child and was preparing for her second. This woman
remembered loud noises, and being directed what to do when she had
her first birth experience. She recalls being tense all over, which,
she says, made labour pains worse. She had a fear of that same
experience with her second child. Being mindful of this, I made sure
to allow her the space she required as she found her ritual of
walking in circles, stepping in only when she needed to be guided
physically.
She
paused every few steps and we’d rock back and forth together as she
hummed and swayed. She was somewhere else right now. A deep and
spiritual place, it seemed.
She
was completely at one with herself to the point that I knew that even
if an intervention needed to happen in her labour, she would stay in
this sanctuary she’d stepped into. She continued to hum and rock to
the beat of her own internal rhythm.
An
intervention wasn’t needed.
This
got me thinking … there is something ritual about labouring and
something ceremonious in carrying a child from the great unknown into
reality.
In her
book Spiritual Midwifery, Gaskin posits that if a woman allows
herself to enter a spiritual realm in labour, her pain will be felt
less, she will reach a new high and she will cross over from one part
of her life into a new dimension.
I have
to say reading those things before I had a child seemed wildly
presumptuous. But, as I attended more and more births as a Doula, I
began seeing these crossings more often. There seems to be a marked
point in labour where if a woman has enough of a connection to her
spirit, she goes inward to an ethereal place.
Almost
all religions have some sort of ritual, whether it’s the ceremonial
and symbolic drinking of wine, chanting, reciting or singing. It’s
that ritual that keeps the follower of a select religion coming back.
It represents something meaningful, comforting.
Labour
is an intimidating and scary ceremony to step into, but this mother I
speak of hummed her baby into the world. When the baby was born she
just stared straight ahead, breathing, with a fixed gaze. After what
felt like an eternity to me, she just readjusted her eyes and looked
at her baby with a smile that took up her whole face. She had come
out of her spirit den as it were.
There
are instances where the labouring woman can go to a place of
divinity. It takes faith, support and the desire to know one’s
spirit better. Trust it and let it lead you.
When
her labour was over, there she was, back in this world with her
newborn child feeling as though she’d rushed toward the centre of
her spirit for 12 hours and back again, reborn with a newborn. What a
blessing it was to witness.
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