Peace, love, faith and healing

Hey lovely people,

Since I wrote my birth post I have been reading and re-reading it, trying to find the judgement in my tone that some of you may have taken the wrong way.

I need to make it absolutely clear that my stance is not to attack any mother's empowered choice. If a woman consents, with eyes wide open, and has not felt bullied in any way - that, to me, is empowerment. If a woman chooses to take drugs to see her through the pain, that is an empowered choice, which she has taken on board, which she takes responsibility for. That is empowerment, and that is a fabulous thing.

I celebrate the fact we can choose, that we have options available to us. I celebrate the fact that medical breakthroughs have saved many babies and mothers that may otherwise have died.

What I do not celebrate, is when a woman feels outnumbered and her wisdom is not given enough voice. When a well informed healthy woman is forced to have a birth she didn't want simply because she felt pressured or outright bullied at a time when she is most vulnerable.

The spirit in which I wrote my birth post was that it was meant to be an invitation to tap into ways to get past barriers, push past blockages, block out unhelpful stimuli, to have a safe, beautiful, transformative and deeply spiritual, connected way of meeting our babies. I wrote to give courage, to fortify and strengthen. I was trying to cut a lot of crap outta our way to bring it all back to us, that we can do it, we are not broken, we are whole. That pretty much mostly what you need is right inside you already and what you most need from those around you, really is love. Love, love, and more love. And faith. It is love that gets the baby in there, and the flow of oxytocin all around in the hearts of those attending to you is potentially more powerful and intoxicating than other medications designed to replicate that. When love energy is all around a mother as she births her baby, it heals everyone in its path, and touches everyone for lifetime. This is true of any type of birth model where the birth attendants are kind and good, and remain sensitive and personal in spite of the volume of mothers they deal with in a day.

Sometimes on top of love, babies need extra medical help to come out safely. I have never denied this. This does not negate or contradict the love aspect of birth. Even a caesarean birth scene has deeply loving humans at the heart of it - the bright lights, gowns and so on pale into insignificance once that beautiful baby is in your arms. However the baby is brought out into the world, it is still your bosom they end up at, your arms, your heart, ultimately. You are the heartbeat, the rhythm, and rock of safety that your baby clings to, remembers, loves.

If our own birth experience leaves us feeling sad or disempowered it is never too late to heal. We can feel disappointment whilst accepting and forgiving ourselves and others too if things didn't quite go as perfectly as we might have liked. There are lessons we can learn from, ways we can help others so they have a better time of it than we did. Love finds a way of soothing and healing us when we surrender to it. Many of us feel regrets about our births, and we live with the imperfections of how life sometimes flows. But peace,love, time and perspective can heal this.

I wish all my readers much peace, love, self-understanding, healing, and joy. I have fucked up many a time, made disempowered choices, and live with regrets and wishes that I had done things differently. I am scrambling around in the dark as much as the next person. But it's ok. I extend the same commitment to peace, love, self understanding, healing and joy to myself too.

I do not write to hurt or make others feel bad. I write to heal.

Xx MF xX