Labor Like A Goddess

Birth is a Transformative Journey Birth is a powerfully transformative experience. As a society, we honor the physical transition with baby showers and registries, birth classes, comfort measures, and push gifts. Birth is a time of pure bliss, but we sometimes neglect the emotional, psychological, and spiritual experiences of transformation that show up throughout pregnancy, labor, and birth, which can be really confusing to a new mom. No one talks about the level of sacrifice and surrender that can stretch the psychological parameters of a laboring mother, nor do we talk about the emotional waves of uncertainty or doubt that most of us experience or how to ride them. Birth is the most spiritual and paranormal experience we have as humans, aside from death. On the most obvious level, it is literally a spirit merging into the physical, heaven coming to earth. Without the language or understanding to recognize what is happening, this process can bring fear, shame, and resistance. When we are more conscious of what is happening, birth can offer the opportunity for deep personal, emotional, and spiritual healing for all those present. Shamans and ancient medicine healers understood that labor is one of the most powerful opportunities for a woman to heal and purify herself, her baby, and her lineage, should she choose to embrace it. Each Gate of Transformation that she willingly surrenders to before baby is born releases old patterns forever, so the next generation is free from the burden of battling unhealthy wounds, habits, addictions, or behaviors. A spiritual evolution of sorts is available in every pregnancy and at every labor. But if we don’t realize this opportunity, we may very well miss it or even become traumatized by it. When we approach birth holistically with preparation, education, support, and understanding, it can be one of the most fulfilling and empowering experiences of our lives. However, when we are unprepared for the transformation, we may fight the sacrifices or even get stuck in psychological trauma. The Maiden Goddess story teaches us that our willingness to surrender to each Gate of Transformation is the key to feeling empowered about our birth experiences and preventing trauma. When we choose to walk the path of Motherhood, we must be willing to let go of the old and allow things to die—even cherished parts of ourselves. Just like the Maiden Goddess, we have to choose to release old ideas, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and the dynamics of our current Maiden psyche and trust that in doing so, we will rise like the phoenix from the ashes as something better—the empowered Mother Goddess. Birth is the Ultimate Act of Feminism Birth used to be a female-only event where the women of the village would gather, dance, adorn, massage, entertain, support, and offer love to a laboring woman so facilitating a spirit’s entry into the physical world. As the tribal sisterhood supported the emotional needs of the laboring woman, encouraging her to bravely walk through her own Gates of Transformation, midwives would attend to the medical needs of the mother and baby. It was a collective female effort to birth the new baby AND a new mother into the village. As we moved away from tribal living and more into our modern-day individualized society, we started to lose the female support of this sisterhood. Midwives began to be replaced by male doctors in hospitals, and our birth culture shifted from matriarchal to patriarchal. Suddenly women were looking to men for answers on how to labor, and because these men did not have generations of wisdom, comfort measures, body positions, herbs, and tools, they applied what they did know—medicine. While birth became safer, it became less vibrant, less expressive, more controlled, less intuitive, and more procedural. Generation after generation bred the habit of babies being born this way, which started to chip away at our female sense of empowerment, pleasure, purpose, and spiritual journey that birth had always been. Birth suddenly became merely a medical procedure, a means to an end, that focused only on the baby without supporting the woman’s own emotional transformation. Recently there has been a resurgence in bringing back ancient female wisdom about birth with more and more moms advocating traditions like skin-to-skin, delayed cord clamping, home laboring, belly dancing, and doula care (hiring emotionally supportive birth attendants like us). Yet, we still have a long way to go in re-establishing birth as truly a sacred rite of passage, an act of transformation and a shift in emotional/spiritual consciousness. Returning to the essence of birth is a fierce act of feminism for mom, partner, baby, family, medical staff, and society as a whole. This is because, when a woman is supported and empowered in her birth experience it translates to all other areas of her life, amplifying her ability to consciously and compassionately guide and raise the next generation of humanity. When we align with our own body’s wisdom, trust the good intentions of our medical care providers, walk through each gate willingly and finally surrender to our own rebirth, we become goddesses in the flesh. And what greater act of feminism is there than that! When we start to see birth from this perspective, we can cultivate the feminine courage that lives within every mother who has ever been or ever will be. Birth becomes a collective female experience, and an energetic and spiritual initiation into the greatest act of sacrifice ever asked of humanity: Motherhood. Gates and Cycles Because labor and birth is a female journey, it is important to take into consideration the natural cyclical nature of the Divine Feminine. But first, let’s define the Divine Feminine: it is the archetypal side of God, Allah, Source, Creation, Divinity, Supreme Being, Higher Power or whatever your call ‘All That Is’ that is expressed through the feminine qualities of creation, destruction, intuition, connection, sensuality, beauty, nourishment, mothering, compassion, cycles, curves, spirals, and flow.