By Latham Thomas on June 16, 2010

Part 1: Honoring the Pregnant Goddess

Photo credit: Timothi Graham

The energy that infuses the web of life is vast and continuous. It is a dance of duality: between light and darkness, sun and moon, Shiva and Shakti. This ancient dance of opposites is what animates our living energetic universe. It’s responsible for all living things in our experiential reality. The conjoining of this male and female energy gives rise to a new generation, new possibility and continuum. “Sexual energy and birth energy are one in the same,” as my brilliant teacher Sheri Winston says, “hormonally, neurologically, and energetically.”

Birth is our rite of passage. We must reclaim it as the world of obstetrics is doing everything possible to take the power away from our most fundamental and sacred experience-birth. What an incredible phenomena. Every second of every day someone on the planet is giving birth. Bringing new life into the world is the most sacred experience. But more often than I’d like to imagine women are not experiencing the empowering and sacred birth experience, which is their rite of passage and their baby’s birth rite. Most people don’t even realize the depth of labor until they have experienced it and when you go to a deep place in your birth or support someone through their labor experience you gain something intangible but expansive that you didn’t have before. When you travel to what I like to call “the underbelly of the moon”, you are tuned into an experience that is ancestral and takes you along a journey that all of us took to get here. Down the sacred passageway of the divine and into the external world.

As a wellness maven in the arena of women’s health and in particular during the childbearing years I am fascinated by the magic of the female body and what it can do. In our monthly cycle attuned to rhythms governed by lunar energy, having the ability to conceive, birth, and nourish new life. It’s very empowering if we perceive our life cycles as vehicles for transformation. I’m alarmed by the growing number of unnecessary C-sections, low birth weight, and even the rise in infertility amongst otherwise seemingly healthy women. There is a disconnect with the divine energy- the Shakti (female)essence.

I have been holding space for women in nutrition, culinary, labor support, offering workshops in yoga techniques for labor, teaching prenatal yoga classes and have been invited to be present at some births which was an honor. Most recently I decided to take the journey as a Doula and was awarded HPC Community Doula Fellowship and look forward to offering educational support, advocacy, emotional support, and tools for women to get out of their heads and drop into their bodies in pregnancy. I want women to trust that their sacred anatomy was crafted perfectly for this experience of birth, bliss, and bonding.

I want to share some known observations from my personal experience and from other birth providers, and mothers that are helpful for women as they transition into motherhood. Remember not only are they giving birth to the baby but the baby is birthing the pregnant goddess into motherhood. Each is offering the other a divine experience that is designed to bond them for life.

Coming up tomorrow: Latham’s 7 Tips to a Blissful Birth

 

 

   
 

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