Giving birth to a child - whether it's your first or your fifth - is certainly an awe inspiring and unforgettable experience. To give birth, naturally, at home, has been an experience incomparable to any other.
Why Home Birth?
In the age of modern technology and medical advancements, why would anyone want to have their baby at home?
Look, women have been giving birth to babies for TWO MILLION YEARS according to scientists estimation of human existence on this planet. Hospital births have only been a thing for less than the last 150 years. I think its safe to say that women's bodies are designed with an inherent ability and wisdom that will ensure the continuance of our species whether we have hospitals and doctors to oversee that process or not.
When I decided to "go natural", to me, that meant to make every aspect of my life as natural and in alignment with nature as possible from what I put on my hair and in my body to yes, even the way l choose to give birth to my children. I decided I wanted to find connection with the spirit of my foremothers through my birth experiences. I wanted to feel what they felt in times when there were no drugs to effectively paralyze you from the waist down temporarily to avoid the discomforts of childbirth while drugging the baby in the process. To me, pregnancy and childbirth is a rite of passage for a woman, and no, that's not to say that anyone is any less of a woman if they cannot or choose not to have children, that's just to acknowledge the fact that to give birth to a child is a defining moment in the life of a woman - for as the child is born, so is the mother born - the woman being ushered into a new role, a new stage in her life, full of a new set of challenges or "character builders" as I like to think of them. I wanted to walk through that ceremony of sorts fully conscious, fully aware, feeling every minute of the journey to completely appreciate it.
I wanted to experience the unlimited power of creation - the Goddess energy - unsupressed by drugs and uninhibited by medical practitioners trying to direct the birth of my child like a theater production. I wanted freedom and choice during my birth experiences. If I wanted to eat or drink, or walk and move or dance or offer ceremony and ritual to formally invite and invoke my ancestors into the experience, gotdammit I was going to do it without anyone telling me otherwise or attempting to take my power away under the guise of "medical authority".
We are also what some people refer to as an anti-vax family meaning that in keeping in line with our natural lifestyle, we have made the educated decision to not vaccinate, and delivering at home with a licensed nurse midwife is most accommodating to that lifestyle choice.
Of course, I am grateful for the security in knowing that if anything were to not go according to plan, and medical intervention was absolutely necessary, I have the option of going to the hospital to receive life saving care. Everything has its place and purpose.
However, birth is a natural event, not (typically) a medical emergency. I take very good care of myself physically and nutritionally and trust my body to do what it is designed to do and support it in its functionality. I trusted that it would facilitate the birth process perfectly and rejected any doubts that attempted to creep into my mind by continuing to support my body in ways to increase the likelihood of a safe and easy delivery such as eating a healthy, whole foods diet; keeping up regular, low impact exercise like walking and prenatal yoga; practicing meditation to establish and maintain connection with my unborn child and visualizing a safe and swift birth during meditation sessions, and breathwork practices to prepare for the vigor of the labor and birth process.
Giving birth completely consciously, has the capacity to be an [[intense]] meditative experience. The veil between the physical and spiritual aspects of our existence is at one of its thinnest, most loosely draped points during the birthing process. Natural birthing is an opportunity for you to realize your own personal power as Goddess embodied and your capacity to overcome life's difficulties and discomforts to bring new life into this world. That experience translates to many different themes during the course of a persons life and the beauty of it is that not only the new mother, but everyone involved in and present at the birth is gifted with the abundance of the truth of this lesson playing out before their eyes and in their own experience.
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