The Birth Expert
August 6, 2010
Several years ago I took an infant massage course. I was excited to go and learn about : How to massage babies. I was working in an Intensive Care Nursery as an R.N. and I thought, massage would be a good thing to add to the standard of care for the babies. The course was a 4 day, 8 hour a day class. Upon gathering, the instructor Kalena introduced herself, then shortly there after announced, “I’m not the expert here. you will learn that it is the mother (or primary care giver) of the child. At first, I thought to myself, “well what am I doing here to learn from her if she is not the expert?” Over the next 4 days the idea of “who is appointed expert” unraveled inside of me. The first day we practiced the strokes on our baby doll models that Kalena had taught us. On day 2 and 3 we gathered in a circle with mothers and babies. I learned to quietly observe how the mother interacted with her baby. The massage instruction was offered to the mother through modeling, I (and the other students) demonstrated the strokes on our baby model all the while encouraging the mother and supporting her in her desire to touch, nurture, comfort and bond with her child. We simply reflected to the mother that she already knew how to lovingly be with and touch her baby.
Recently another thought about “the expert” occurred to me. “What if the Birthing Woman is the Expert?” What happens when the mama to be knows and trusts her body to carry out the process of birthing her baby the same way she trust that her body will digest, assimilate and eliminate after a nourishing meal?
I’ve been teaching prenatal yoga for a decade and it has been my observation that women who enter the birth process with a complete sense of knowing and trust that what ever arises she is equiped to move through the experience and gain insight into her strength and power as a women.
There is a wonderful dvd : Birth As We Know It. It is filmed in Russia in the mid to late 80′s that show women birthing their babies in water. A portion of the dvd show a camp that was set up in the summer that documents the birth of several babies in the Black Sea. It shows toddler and pre-school age children swimming in the sea, free and content with the dolphins. I have watched this dvd many times and each time something deep inside my soul is stirred by the palpable beauty and love that surrounds the birth mama (hence the baby at birth).
What do the people in this dvd hold to be true that allows them to have these beautiful births? What must they know. Are these births a reflection of what they hold in the consciousness of their beings? Clearly the women in this dvd were held and supported as ‘the birth expert’ and the midwife attending each women reflected this back to the birth mama.
My hope is that those of us who attend to women during their pregnancy and beyond remember to honor and reflect back to the birth mama that her body knows how to birth her baby. We as mammals have been doing so for millenium.
