We need to rediscover, during pregnancy and birth, the silence of awe and the reverence of divinity as we evolve towards greater degrees of enlightment in our understanding of our capacity to create human beings imbued with divine love and compassion.
Pregnancy and Birth Information
Useful information to help guide you through your pregnancy and about how to achieve a spiritual birth experience and how to avoid unnecessary medical interference and/or intervention during the birth process.
The Origins of Infant Mental Health
Lack of nourishment may retard fetal growth, it may also lead to an increase in the production of cortisol, a hormone produced in response to stress, which in prolonged concentrations may affect brain cell differentiation (3). Effects in the first three months of pregnancy may be harmful to the development of the brain, including memory centres and areas of emotional responsiveness, such as the hippocampus
Why Natural Birth?
I see clients, on a weekly basis, imploring me to help them have a natural birth after one, two and sometimes even three caesarian births. They speak about the nagging sense of loss, the feelings of failure, the terrible pain afterwards, the struggle to hold and feed their babies, the depression that lasts for months. I have women who come to me in Cape Town from as far afield as Limpopo and Namibia, because they have heard that there is a midwife and a doctor in Cape Town who will help them give natural birth. When I ask them why they want natural birth so badly, they tell me various themes.
Respectful Care at Birth
Dr Kathleen Hill and Diana Bowser have compiled an extensive report for USAID on evidence for disrespect and abuse of women in facility-based childbirth. How we begin our lives and make the transition from the womb to the world lays the neurobiological foundation for how we will feel about ourselves and ultimately how we will perceive our world.
Drugs and Food Quality
The quality of what we eat can affect our genes for up to two generations!!!! Not only is the food we eat filled with pesticide remnants and organophosphates, first world citizens are exposed to many additional teratogens in our homes, cleaning agents and paints, carpets, never mind the prescription drugs that are prescribed over the counter. Read the article for which I include links.
Spiritual Midwifery: Mother as First Guru
The notion of spiritual midwifery is clearly beginning to re-emerge in Western culture. As society has become more and more technologically based, many aspects of our lives have been reduced to purely physical functions. Childbirth especially has not escaped this rationalisation/de-mystification trend. In this process of focussing on what is happening to our bodies and the physical condition of the baby, many have lost the opportunity to experience the spiritual nature of childbirth.
