She's arrived earthside- Healing Your Birth: Returning to the Heart after Birth Trauma is now running as a pilot program, and I will soon be offering it to the wider community. It is a beautiful meeting of the Sacred Living Movement's Sacred Loss: Healing Birth Trauma course, written by Corrine Laan, and my own processes and work as a holistic doula and birth counsellor. I feel very inspired and humbled by this work moving through me. And I also see the vital importance of holding space for mamas who have experienced trauma in the birthing process- coming to wholeness as a mama creates healing and clear space for the next generation. What we need now are awakened, conscious humans. This work is a small but important part of that.
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| I am a certified Healing Birth Trauma Circle Leader |
The first week of this course is called Grounding into the Narrative of Birth: Embarkation. We explore mental health, create a container for clear expectations and communication and safe space, deepen our ability to listen in a truly wise and open way, and share our birth stories. We also chart the birth- the charge moments, the highs and lows, the peaks of the experience in a peak experience. We begin to tell our stories- to explore our narratives.
What is the narrative of birth?
On the most simple level, it is simply a conveyance of the chronology of the birth, the facts, perhaps the feelings. But any woman who has given birth, or approaches birth, knows that it goes much deeper than this.
Birth will awaken parts of us we didn't know were dormant inside us. It will agitate any part of us that is raw, and sometime soothe us in ways we didn't even know were possible. It will allow us to traverse strange and wonderful lands. It will take us to the edge, again and again, and reveal that beyond our edge there is both the void, and more space yet to travel. It can leave us more whole than we ever imagined, or leave us broken.
The narrative of birth is all of this: the deep sensuality of birth and how we met it; how we were held (or shamed, or unheard); the lessons, both new and deepened, that it teaches us (and again, both those lessons that served us and those warped lessons that don't); the way birth initiated us into motherhood- with energy or with grief, trauma or empowerment. It's a story but a story far too profound and complex for words alone. It can be told in words, but only partially. It can be danced, but only partially. It can be sung, or painted, screamed, torn, brought to a relational field-- but only partially. We will tell it forever, in many different ways.
We cannot control the trajectory or outcome of birth; we have a massive job in overcoming social conditioning around the shaming of women's bodies, the fear of birth and the medicalisation of our reproductive systems; and so we cannot ever prevent all birth trauma. But, given the healthy faciliation of a physiological birth process, with a woman clear in her intentions and supported by warm, knowledgable and skilled caregivers, giving birth can become a superbly empowering event. The narrative this woman would take into her motherhood and her wider life will serve her and all those around her in the most positive, nourishing way.
But what if the birth giving was horrible? Traumatic, haunting, isolating? What of that narrative?
Something I have seen in my work, is that there is a deep parallel between giving birth, and healing from birth. Both are a manifestation of women's power and strength and above all the feminine energy of giving love in the most amazing ways. Over and over, the women I see come out of birth feeling broken, traumatised and disconnected are the ones who discover a strong sense of wholeness, strength and connection during their healing journeys.
In healing we have to go to those raw places and confront them (much like the physical and emotional intensity of giving birth). In this we write a new story- instead of shutting down, the very act of striving to heal allows us to rebuild strength, trust, wisdom and self love. We can return to the heart, ever so gently.
Birth is never just a narrative of just a few hours, but a whole lifetime, and it's one of those rich and potent times that the narrative of our lives- the way we perceive our lives- can be rewritten. Whether that sacred rewriting happens during birth or during integrating a traumatic birth, the pathway to initiation is there regardless. In this I trust.
If you would like to know more about the six week (one morning a week) course, or be kept updated where I am with it's release, please email me at earthysammi@gmail.com, or call me on 0418950793
Copyright Sammi Cambray/Sacred Whisper Bellingen 2016
Sammi is a holistic doula and birth counsellor, and is the publisher of Sacred Whisper Bellingen
Ph: 0418 950 793
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