Birth and Sexuality
Yesterday I had another Doula training day and the curriculum of the day was intervention and unexpected outcomes. Most of the day was spent on discussing the medicalisation of the labour and birth process, discussing things such as fetal monitoring, epidurals, caesarians etc.
My body felt extremely exhausted when I left at 5:30pm, the kind of tiredness I have now come to recognise as emotional tiredness and some kind of emotional shutdown. I went to bed at 9:30pm (very early for me) and this morning woke up feeling very fragile.
What came up for me was feeling like a very little helpless schoolgirl – in the world of adults/teachers/authority. There was also a deep questioning in my mind – “How do I correlate what I feel is such a wrong system of birth with my spiritual values of unconditional acceptance and love?”. I could see the mind wanted to land somewhere in the feelings that were coming through me – one second feeling helpless in the face of the medical insitution and supposed authority, the next second wanting to fight the establishment (and feeling very ‘David and Goliath’, a moving towards/aggression), the next moment a mental supposition of spirituality – telling myself to accept what is.
At my very core though was a purely physical response by my body of how wrong it is to electively cut a woman open. I felt like a bewildered child who is surrounded by adults saying this is ‘how it is/should be’ and the innocence in me is screaming “But this is intrinsically wrong!”.
Emergency Caesar’s – I only feel full acceptance for what ‘is’ in my being and an immense gratitude for that life saving skill.
Beyond that, today my body is hurting at all the unecessary interventions, there is vulnerability in my body - it feels weak, there is a pain and sadness in my heart.
I am amazed at the level of reponse in my body given my two daughter’s births were absent of any of this (besides a couple of vaginal exams to check dilation). Especially Ceasar’s – I am surprised at how much of a response that is bringing up in me, and I cannot even trace it to my own birth – I would have thought the forceps one would have affected me more. Seeing the video of a forceps delivery was disturbing. Still, considering I am a forceps baby, that part I just felt uncomfortable as I watched, the caesarian part has stayed and stayed with me. I realised this morning that out of all aspects of medicalised birth, it is this cutting of a woman open that feels the most violating to me.
So today I have been questioning why it is that Caesar’s bother me so much, why my body has such a strong abhorrence for this part of birth above all others?
What I have arrived at is that caesarians (please know that I am referring to avoidable or elective caesarians here, not life-saving necessary caesarians) are the symptom, the last unhealthy manifestation of a system that has gone very very wrong. Just like cancer in the body. In the end it is not the cancer which kills someone, it is what caused the cancer in the first place (the overload of toxic food, toxic environment, toxic emotions, toxic relationships etc) that is the problem. The body has been slowly ‘dying’ for a long time and the cancer is the recognisable manifestation, the nail in the coffin.
For me there is a horror of caesarians because it is the penultimate symptom of birth gone wrong, of humanity gone wrong – of being so out of touch with the spirit of humanity, the sacredness of life, the preciousness of divine human creation.
In my mind I decided to trace back to where this downward slide began, because the subject of pregnancy, labour and birth is so complex and detailed – the whole ‘cascade of interventions’ and ignorance which lead to our high caesarian rate. I sit and listen to all the doulas, midwives, women, mothers, doctors talk about birth, I read articles and my mind is boggled with information overload. When doulas/midwives speak so confidently and knowingly, medical terms and acronyms flowing freely off their tongues, I sit there feeling inadequate, because I am so not the type of person who retains facts.
Then I remembered the one thing that comes up strongly for me all the time. Like a child who sees things so easily as one simple equation, for me it always comes back to sexuality and birth. All I ever see is the huge issues we have around sexuality in our societies and how women have been so disempowered in their sexuality (despite the feminist movement and the ‘pill’) – that it is no wonder women have trouble giving birth through their vaginas! If one is not comfortable in her sexual expression (or her partner comfortable in her expression of sexuality because he is not comfortable with his own) then we have real problems.
Interestingly, even though progress has apparently been made for women to be allowed more sexual freedom, as women’s sexual freedom began to be realised, this correlates with the large spike towards the medicalisation of birth. Birth – the ultimate sexual expression of a woman – was slowly being repressed as women focussed all their attention on sex with a man. The disempowerment of women to stand in her own right, her own power of birthing, was eroded as the illusion of freedom was used to distract women by giving her more rights in other areas of life (work, sex, politics etc). Women missed the whole point of what they were trying to gain through sexual freedom – reconnection with the divine feminine.
Please do not mistake me – I see clearly the pendulum swing. I understand the need to bring balance into all aspect of life, including the dance of sexuality between the masculine and feminine. I am immensely grateful for the liberties and freedom I have sexually that wasn’t enjoyed by my mother, aunts and grandmothers. However, in all of that, I think women literally threw out the baby with the bathwater and forgot one of our essential expressions of feminity and sexuality.
At this point in time I see all my paths of learning, all my inquiries into life, converging as I realise what it is I am meant to bring as my gift in serving humanity. For me it is to open up women and men to their sacred sexuality and marry this with birth. After all, we are conceived in a moment of sex and our birth is just a continuation of that first blissful moment.
I let go of any need to be a walking library of facts. I highly appreciate the other women, doulas and midwives that are like that – I love having them as references. For me though it is literally about holding sacred space, of being an embodiment of the sacredness of life. It is enough just to be that, because when I rest purely as this presence – then something comes to rest in the other person and they remember their own divinity. In each moment, that is enough.
I love sex – I know that sounds funny – most people do. I mean I am literally ‘in love’ with sex, that I find no separation within me between spirituality and sexuality, between sacredness of sex and sacredness of life, between orgasmic and non-orgasmic. I love talking about sex, about sensuality, sacredness, energy, union, almost more than anything. I always have (and found that very hard to be with as a young child).
I have begun to notice that this ease I have is not something everyone else has and it is something they are grateful to find with me. That people open up and tell me their most deepest, darkest, shameful secrets around sexuality – because for me they are none of those things. And in them opening up, they find liberation – they literally open up and more sexual energy (life force) is available. Our sexual energy is our most primal energy and it flows into everything we do. Yet we have shut down so much of it through conditioning (no matter how sexually liberated or ‘experienced’ we think we have been).
Then along comes birth, the most forceful and full-on expression of sexuality and no wonder so many women (and men) find it hard to open up to that much life-force when they have so many blocks in place around it!
So this is my starting point – sexuality. I choose to do my doula service at this point and not try and tackle the symptoms. And I will continue to allow my sensitivity to the unhealthy manifestation – caesarians and all other invasive interventions – because I trust my body’s response. I trust this spirit, this mysterious life force as it flows through my body. If something is out of integrity and resonance with this divine force, then I want to be able to register that in my being. I bow to this greater wisdom and allow it to guide me into the unknown.
A woman’s right to birth
When a woman gives birth, she can have the best support people around her: a loving devoted partner, a friend, a sister, a mother, a midwife and doula, beautiful ambience, best medical support. All of these things are nurturing and supportive and definitely create the most optimal conditions for bringing life into the world. It is certainly my passion to help women attain the highest ideal birth environment, creating these conditions by education and example.
Beyond all those things being in place, whether they are in existence or not (and having them is definitely better than not), in the end, it is only the woman alone who can deliver the baby.
Once a baby knows to be born, there is nothing you can do to stop the progression of birth.
During birth, there will always be a time when the mother reaches her absolute limits, of feeling that she just cannot take anymore, where all the support around her means absolutely nil in her mind. It is in that place, in that moment, that a mother must dig deeper than she has ever known in her life. So she digs. She goes even more inwardly focused than she thought possible, she searches and reaches into herself and finds strengths she didn’t know she had. In doing so she reaches a place of knowing and this knowing can be terrifying: “I am beyond the point of no return, I cannot deep any digger, there is nothing else to give, nothing else I can do”.
So she does the only thing she can … she surrenders. Because that is all she can do – all knowing, all formulas, all options, all thought, all plans – all of it disappears.
Then life, life that knows it’s own timing, it’s own pace, it’s own magical mystery, takes over. And life births the baby through that transition. Then once again, life gives control back to the mother and says ‘Push!’ – but the mother knows now it is just an illusion. She has no control over pushing, she can only follow the urge and ride the wave, maximising it’s potential.
“Aaah”, but you say, “you are wrong, a mother doesn’t need to do it all alone, she can choose to have someone else deliver her baby, she can have a medicalised, scientific approach to life and have the baby excised from her”.
Why would I, as woman, choose that? When life gives me the opportunity to embrace all that it is to be feminine, all that it is to feel the absolute power of life course through my body, to feel it in it’s rawest, most magnificent, most divine and scary form, why would I allow myself to be deprived of that by choosing something cold, harsh and clinical? Why choose man-made instruments over the natural wonder of our bodies?
Giving birth is not just a physical act. Being present to the symbology of birth, to have the opportunity to dig deeper into yourself than you ever have before, to feel at one with the very creative force of life, to work with nature, prepares us for everything in life – not just birth.
I find it in myself to get up in the middle of the night, when I am so tired I feel disoriented and distraught, because I have already learnt from the experience of giving birth the amazing capabilities of my human body and spirit.
I find it possible to keep my heart open, to embrace all of life, even the painful harshness of the door to love sometimes being slammed shut in my face, because I have learnt through birth that pain and fear often walks hand-in-hand with magnificent triumph.
I have no problem with science and the marvellous creations of man, of the fantastic ability to problem solve and find helpful solutions to the misfortunes of life. A caesarian has it’s place if it saves lives – but too many people choose it over the naturalness of birth, of being this beautiful flesh and body machine we already perfectly are.
I am grateful for what science has given us – it expands our thinking, our way of being, it enables us to know ourselves as creators and masters – but it should never be mistaken for reality, for life itself. Science may help a woman and baby from potential death, but it should never be used to clinically remove us from what it means to be human, to deprive a mother from the initiation into that which will sustain her as she raises a child. When a woman gives birth naturally, with the support of loved and trusted family, friends and mentors surrounding her – we all become aware of the fact it takes a village to raise a child, that everyone has a purpose and investment in the sacred life of that child. When a woman gives birth in a cold, sterile environment, willingly handing over all responsibility of welcoming her child into the world to a stranger, a dangerous detachment happens across all levels of consciousness and physical reality.
Medicalised science has done much, well intentionally, to ease mankind of pain. Yet time and time again I observe how science has taken what should be used as a tool to assist – and made it an across the board ‘one size fits all’ solution. In this regard, science has been no better or worse than religion. People speak of religious horrors and atrocities, of countless deaths and injustices. Yet the same people will forget the millions of deaths that still happen every day across the world from mistakes and mis-managment by science. Hospitals have become a very stark reality of this.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to anything, even the Journey process is only one of many tools that can help people to freedom. Yet if one knows the Journey as a way of life, then it becomes, just like birth, a pattern for being present to the flow of life.
There is always a better way. Giving birth can be orgasmic, can be ecstatic and intoxicating. Living life is orgasmic, ecstatic and intoxicating. Not by trying to avoid pain, but by embracing pain and going so deep within pain, so deep into the inner landscape of our human body and psyche, that pain is transcended and liberated.
Women in birth are at their most vulnerable … and most powerful. A woman in birth cannot run away from danger and all her senses are heightened to everything around her and within her. Simultaneously, woman in birth knows herself as part of the most powerful expression of life force, the energy coursing through her body to deliver this new life into the world. Women know how to embrace both the spiritual and our humanness, to embody the dichotomy of what it is to be human, through their experience – not through concept.
Science has it’s place. Just like having all the best support people around a woman at birth, like having the most beautiful music and soft environment – having medical support nearby is prudent. But to think that science could replace all of that is to take away a basic human right, that of the women’s ability to do it alone.
