SUPPORT FOR PARENTS & BIRTH EDUCATORS
If you intended to participate in the Olympics, you would prepare psychologically and emotionally, as well as physically. I doubt that you would leave anything to chance. There are many resources and tools available for both inner and outer preparation. Choose carefully those that feel comfortable and right for you. The inner agreement to support yourself with intentional choice of all your activities, nutrition, environment, care and guidance is fundamental to your success. Opening to receive the support is of equal importance to choosing support. I have observed that this is the most difficult task for many women.
The most supportive "action" anyone can take is to accept the truth "I am connected, I matter!" Based in that affirmation of life, develop intimate relationship with those closest to you. You have the opportunity to transform all your relationships if you pay attention to the relationship you have with yourself. Open to a loving relationship with the baby. A relationship that includes listening to it, as well as speaking to him or her. Everyone at a birth causes an effect on the outcome. Be aware of creating relationship with all the people who will accompany you through labor and birth and after. Choose these people mindful that you can have what you want. Get to know them and allow them to know you.
For many years I have been referring to what I have prepared women to do, one on one and then for the last 12 years in large groups - more research, more experience more finding out what works and what doesn’t. I have called it Ecstatic Birth for a long time, because I got in touch with the fact that Ecstasy is not the absence of pain or feeling. Ecstasy is a transcendent experience. Ecstasy is reached not by trying to get away from something, but by accepting whatever is happening, whatever we are feeling in the moment, saying Yes! to it so that the energy can flow and shift and change. When we resist is when we cause pain.
Giving birth to my son 30 years ago I did not experience pain. Not only was there no pain, I was actually in charge … very much so, to the extent that I didn’t have the pleasurable experience of labor that many women I have worked with have had. I was very busy running everything at that birth and it was wonderful. I didn’t experience pain, and I had an extraordinary expansive experience as his head presented. I call it an orgasm, and I notice that orgasm is a transcendent, no time, no space experience . . . a cracking open of the wall of time and space. "One moment of ecstasy can transform your life."
Ecstasy is (according to E.J.Tinsley*) "an overwhelming experience wherein the sense of individual selfhood is transcended, the primary tense dimensions of time, past, present and future, are blended in an overwhelming sense of the eternal now, and there is an unforgettable experience of serenity, well-being and joy". Theoretical as that may sound, it nevertheless describes the experience of the saints and mystics, those who, as the spiritual writer Baron von Hugel testified, "are never so fully active, so truly and intensely themselves, as when they are most truly possessed by God".