Giving birth is such an incredible thing. It is a gift that humanity has been given by our beloved Creator, as women to be the givers of life and as men to be to witnesses of life. This gift is one that opens us and sustains us. If you have ever participated in a birth either by giving birth or by witnessing birth, you know that you have thought of that moment many times, you have drawn on its gift of strength, and you remember the feeling of love that overtook you when you held the baby in your arms. There is no mistake about this. It is part of the Divine Plan, that we are filled with love at the birth of a baby and that we are put in touch with our inner resources of strength, perseverance, and surrender. This is what sustains humanity.
Remembering that natural birth is the trust in the natural order, trusting the inner wisdom of both the mom and the baby, puts us into relationship with nature. When we are in relationship with nature, the hierarchy is gone. Gone is the need for domination, gone is the need for control, and gone is the need to force nature to comply with our demands. When we are in relationship with birth, we trust it will begin at the right time, we trust that we have to strength to bear the strong forces moving within us, we trust that we will be able to release our own expectations and receive the birth we are given as part of the wisdom of the whole. The trust in this relationship with the natural order is what heals us individually, as a collective, and is what heals the planet.
Giving birth naturally inspires us to look within. This sets up a dynamic that sustains the earth by reinforcing in each individual person that all that we need to live is within ourselves. If we can give birth to our own children, we can certainly grow a garden to feed them, build a home to shelter them, create stories to entertain them, knit socks to clothe them and sing songs to soothe them. When we rely on our own inner resources, our need for external resources diminishes. As our need for external resources diminishes, our draw upon the earth begins to create a balance with what we have given back. From breastfeeding to compost to riding our bikes to growing love within our children and our selves, we actively participate in restoring the balance to the earth and to humanity.
The healing art of midwifery is mode of healthcare that focuses on the mother and the baby by looking at the heart, the mind, the body, the spirit and the planet. It is a health care that is loving, attentive, supportive, holistic and sustainable. The midwife relies upon her hands to assess the wellbeing of the baby instead of using expensive machines and tests. The midwife uses herbs that are often grown right in her back yard to support and sometimes fine tune the challenges, aches and pains that arise during the course of pregnancy. A midwife encourages women to eat healthy, organic meals and supports the woman in choosing forms of exercise or movement that work for her. Most importantly, the midwife creates relationship with the mom that serves as the model for the relationship that mother has with the natural order. The midwife is the direct connection to the trust in the natural order of birth, a beacon of light, which the mom relies upon when the challenges of birth become overwhelming.
Midwives know without question that the mom and the baby are inseparable before the birth, the dyad of the mother and baby is considered sacred and not to be divided. This dyad does not end when the baby is born. A midwife continues to guard the birth environment to allow the mom and baby to see, touch, taste, hear and most importantly smell each other. The sense of smell is the baby and the mom’s primary means of identifying each other and is deeply encoded in both the mom and the baby. Breastfeeding, the most sustainable form of food production and use, is encouraged and supported and again restores the balance of the natural order by using less resources and creating a loving connection that creates loving people.
Using a midwife and having a natural birth is simply another way of loving our planet, our mother earth, by loving the mothers who walk it. A Certified Professional Midwife will bring love to the mother’s of this planet. In creasing our capacity to love within the whole of humanity is the TRUE measure of progress and the only means of sustainability.