What has the panicdemic got to do with BIRTH?
As a birth educator and Ecstatic Birth Practitioner, I know the affect FEAR has on your nervous system and how easily things can spiral out of control when fear is the driver.
In Chinese Medicine, fear affects the Kidney-adrenals and causes a sense of urgency, that action must be taken NOW, or there’s a shut down, or both! This fight-flight-freeze response hijacks the ability to respond from a place of calm and connection to your HEART, and instead diverts all resources to a survival reflex where reactionary behaviour takes over.
Fear causes shut down of bodily processes non-essential to surviving an immediate threat. In childbirth, this causes the birth process to slow down or even stop, increasing pain and leading to all kinds of potential complications.
This information was first published over 100 years ago in Grantly Dick-Reads, ‘Childbirth Without Fear’, yet the vast majority of Australia women still birth in fear and make choices based on this fear.
You can feel the affect fear has on your body and nervous system. Fear is gripping. It causes muscles to constrict and a holding on where your breath becomes shallow, and everything becomes tense. This is the complete opposite to the softening and opening, the releasing and letting go required for normal childbirth to proceed safely and with ease for both mother and baby.
So, rather than create conditions that support and trust women’s bodies to function optimally, we’ve created a birthing culture that has medicalised this healthy state of womanhood, and a belief system where many women and couples genuinely believe hospital and the medical management of birth is their safest option.
It’s an option that aims to deliver you a ‘living baby’ but at what cost? Without recognition for the mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing of mother & baby, the long-term effects of birth trauma have far reaching implications to the health and wellbeing of mothers, babies, the family unit and our society.
It doesn’t need to be this way.
I say this because there are so many parallels that can be drawn between our birthing culture and the spiralling cascade of interventions that we’ve all experienced as part of the panicdemic these past 18+ months.
It’s time to question our mainstream medical culture that OBJECTIFIES the body and focuses on ‘saving lives’ without recognition for the WHOLE of what it means to be human.
Its time mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing be given equal consideration, if not priority.
After all, its LOVE and CONNECTION to your Heart that most fulfils your deepest biological needs and creates the conditions that allow your body to function optimally – whether in birth or as an overall model of healthcare.
Human connection, reassuring touch, freedom to breathe and to breathe deeply, feeling loved, seen, supported and validated are as ESSENTIAL HUMAN NEEDS for LIFE as they are for BIRTH.
The future is ours to create through the choices we make today.
Peta
To find out more about Ecstatic Birth, or any of my updated services, go to: http://www.followtheyin.com
