Carolyn Cowan is a Kundalini Yoga teacher, a teacher trainer and a psychosexual therapist specialising in addiction & trauma recovery. She runs the programme The Mother's Journey.
The birth path is one you offer and not one you choose…
1. Recognise that you had your birth experience, which is partly what would have formed you. Acknowledge that your child may need a different experience.
2. Be present when you have a cesarienne, make an empowered cesarienne
Accept that your child needed a different experience. Make a ritual, make a ceremony, and ask what you need so that as much as possible you are present to what is happening.
3. Sometimes your partner may not be the best person to have in the room. As a woman you may be a single parent, you may carrying a child for someone else, you may be in a lesbian couple. If the lover shouldn’t be under any pressure to see the actual birth, to go through the process of giving birth vaginaly.
4. It’s important to honour the participation, the patience, the love and the tolerance it has taken to get to the point where you are pregnant.
5. Recognise that you enter a portal, you are passing into a whole other sense of yourself, giving birth is an initiation in a whole new part of yourself. It’s important to recognise it and name it, it can be a real shock, it’s a phenomenal shift.
6. When the baby is inside you feel you have control, it’s your carrying the child around and when you give birth you don’t have the control anymore, he is not safe in your body anymore…. it’s a difficult thing to get to term with.
7. Miscarriages and giving birth is traumatic and difficult. It softness has time goes by…
8. The body is changing, each child you give a part of your body. The body is vastly changed and your mind is changed, your relationship is changed and you cannot prepare for it. You cannot know except that you are walking into this extraordinary doorway from one life to another. You discover a whole new part of yourself.
9. Maintaining a relationship after this shift is shockingly different and shockingly difficult. You need a legal partnership in place because you cannot know both partners will react.
9. If you can get your placenta (depending on the country you give birth) then organise with the midwives or the hospital so you can to do something with it! The placenta is magical: eat it, make a juice out of it or make homeopathy remedies, it’s has 200 times your bodies hormones at the point of birth, it’s very high in Iron, Zink and all the hormones your will pie out of your body right after birth. It will help you recover.
10. If you have a depressive tendency, it’s important to tell your health career about it, tell them that you may potentially needing help.
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