Birth Wild and Sacred

Cover Art Serafina by Laurie Billeter

Copyright pending Case # 1-7410130111, 2/19/19.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Print ISBN: 978-1-54398-941-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-54398-942-7

Table of Contents

Dedication

Prologue

Wild Birth

Chapter 1

They Won’t Let Me

Chapter 2

Giving Birth to My Sons

Chapter 3

Labor and Delivery Volunteer 1988

Cassandra

Back Labor – Ayudame!

Camila and Esteban – Against All Odds

Beached Whales

Birth in a Hospital Closet

Chapter 4

Midwife’s Apprentice – Finding the Path

Time of Birth; Bulb Syringe; Hypnotic Vortex

Preacher’s Wife

Birthing with Families

What Works and What Doesn’t: Strategies for Giving Birth

Chapter 5

Michele Odent and the Biochemistry of Natural Birth

Bright Lights

Speaking or Reading

Fear or Anxiety

Feeling Observed

The Safety Question

Chapter 6

Invitation to the Mystery

Recovering Instinct and Intuition – Becoming Wild

The Sacred

Feminine Power vs Feminism

Chapter 7

Slowing Things Down: Texas Hill Country Births

Maria

The Monroe Institute Hemi-Sync Experience

Speaking in Tongues – The Holy Spirit in Birth

The Deepening Mystery of Birth: Altered States of Consciousness

Chapter 8

Creating the Opening the Way Tape Series

Far-Out Job Interview

Scripting on Robert’s Mountain

Testing the Tapes with Birthing Mothers

Chapter 9

Riding the Wind and Other Wild Pleasures

Ina May Gaskin and Spiritual Midwifery

Dr. Odent’s Salle Savage

Felicitas Goodman and Ecstatic States

The Monroe Institute Gateway Experience

The Well Being Ranch and the Wild Elf

Chapter 10

Using the Hemi-Sync Opening the Way Series Back Home

Emmie Arrives: The First Opening the Way Baby

Chapter 11

The Sacred Feminine as Vessel

Feeling Rushes at a Birth

Amachi, the Hugging Saint

Sofia Diaz and the Daikinis: No Resistance to Sensation!

Kundalini Yoga and Yoga Nidra

Waking State (Jagrat)

Dreaming (Svapna)

Deep Sleep (Shushupti)

Turiya

How to Go to the Moon

Sacred Space

Sacred Intention

Make Yourself Comfortable

Relaxation Visualization, Breath and Toning

Gratitude and Release

Ecstatic Practice

Charismatic Christian Practices

Dancing, Singing and Drumming

Psychotropic Breathing Sessions/Rebirthing

Trance Dancing

Chi Kung/Embodied Yoga

Opening Your Microcosmic Orbit

Chapter 12

The Beauty and Wild Mystery of Natural Birth

Wild Wisdom

Birth is an Initiatory Rite of Passage

Interfering with the Natural Process of Birth Can

Cause Complications

Entering the Birth Zone is an Essential Part of Giving Birth

A Birthing Mother Needs to Go Into Her Cave

A Mother Can Prepare Herself for Birth

Common Sense Care Measures

The Sexuality of Birth

Always Listen to the Mother

Help Prepare the Father

Emotional Clearing

Pain Relief

Honor the Sanctity of Maternal-Infant Bonding After Birth

Healing Injured Instinct

Chapter 13

Returning the Sacred to Birth

The Changeling

Writer’s Block

Epilogue 191

Appendix A

Research of PhD Nurse, Regina Lederman

The Relationship of Maternal Anxiety, Plasma Catecholamines, and Plasma Cortisol to Progress in Labor (American Journal of Obstetrics

and Gynecology 132:495, 1978):

"Maternal Psychological and Physiologic Correlates of

Fetal-Newborn Health Status" – American Journal of

Obstetrics and Gynecology 139:956, 1981,"

Anxiety and Epinephrine in Multiparous Women in Labor: Relationship to Duration of Labor and Fetal Heart Rate Pattern – American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 1985:153:670-7."

Measurement of Maternal Anxiety and Stress During Childbirth – 8th International Congress of Psychosomatic, Obstetrics and Gynecology, March 10-14, 1986, Melbourne, Australia – Paper Presentation.

Appendix B

Testimonials for Hemi-Sync During Pregnancy and Childbirth

Appendix C

Opening the Way Manual

Appendix D

Janet Meek Resume

Appendix E

Further Reading

Dedication

To my own beloved Midwife and Teacher, Barbara Cook.

She welcomed two of my sons into this world and patiently taught me how to be a Midwife as her apprentice at Family Centered Maternity Care in Dallas, Texas in the 1990’s.

Barbara’s grounding hugs during labor made birthing moms feel so secure and supported that the labor just naturally advanced

Prologue

Wild Birth

I have a story to tell. It is a story of my own personal journey and that of my foremothers and many other women. It is a story about which I feel deep passion. It is a story about perhaps the most sacred rite of passage in the world – the birth of a child. But it is also about becoming a Woman and a Mother and, eventually, a Midwife.

It is a story about how I defied my own society to navigate the sacred rite of passage of birth for myself and my sons by having my second and third babies at home; and how I then, as a midwife, helped several hundred other women to do the same. It is the story of some of the things I learned by doing this.

Now I am a grandmother and the snow on top of my head has cooled me down a little about a subject for which I feel so much passion. I hope this cooling will help me tell truths that are powerful, but also gentle. It is my hope that the core knowledge that I gained in my own journey may be of some service to those who fear the natural process of giving birth and would like to enter into this, the most powerful Feminine Mystery and Sacred Epiphany, rather than miss this profound initiatory experience.

I am a Wild Midwife. That’s right – the word I have chosen to best describe myself and what I have learned is WILD. It even feels wrong to put quotation marks around that word. It feels like caging in the wild, which is what we do all the time in modern society. So just wild… as in what happens in the wild where man has not disturbed the natural order of things…

I was once in a little cottage in Pembrokeshire in England with a group of women. We were exploring the coast of southern Wales in the dead of winter. At the top of our staircase in our little dollhouse of a cottage there was a picture of a wolf and the caption at the bottom read:

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

I later found out that these words came from Henry David Thoreau, a voice that has always sounded the call for our return to our connection with Nature. At the time, the words caught me and whirled me, like the relentless cold waves crashing on the stony cliffs of Wales that we hiked by day.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Like booming waves breaking over me and reminding me; reminding me; reminding me…

For we live in a time and a place that denies the wisdom of the Ancients and fears the untamed power of the Wild. Nature has come to be viewed as something flawed; something that will go wrong at the least excuse and must be corrected and made safe by the interventions of mankind and especially by our application of the magical tools of our times: machines, drugs, technology and surgery.

I will share with you some secrets I have learned that may give insight about why this is so and what you can do to honor the natural process and get it working for you instead of inadvertently working against you and shutting down the intricate neuro-psychological-hormonal system that underlies healthy natural birth. Once you understand the natural birth process you will know what to do to recognize and heal your own injured instinct and become wild once more.

I will describe my own personal journey - from working mom giving birth at a hospital, to homebirth mom, to midwife’s apprentice, to independent midwife catching babies. I will share with you what I learned from observing all the magnificent expressions of natural and unnatural childbirth. I will share the secret I learned about how giving birth can be a truly initiatory, ecstatic experience to be embraced and welcomed rather than feared.

Beyond that, this book will follow the development of my own consciousness and reverence for the Sacred as I increasingly came to experience the profound epiphany of birth, both energetically and spiritually, and look even deeper into the mystery of birth. From that deeper understanding, I believe birth is the miracle of the embodiment of Soul into matter. One has only to look into the wise eyes of a newborn to realize the ancient origin of the incarnating Soul. In the modern world, where our focus has been on the material, we have treated birth as a physical event when it is an astoundingly sacred spiritual event. If we are aware of the deeper mystery, perhaps we can glimpse and maybe even touch eternity. Hopefully this awareness will return birth to the sacred event that it deserves to be.

I want to inspire you to fully investigate what it means to be a woman of power and grace in the world. For too long we have been molding ourselves to fit masculine archetypes of power: hierarchical structures; military might; competition and conquest; non-discriminate use of natural resources; controlling nature and the feminine. What does the feminine archetype of power look like?

Surely the archetype of birth is one of the most powerful feminine archetypes. I am not saying that a woman has to give birth in order to step into her full power as a woman. Trust your intuition. Learn how to access the wild and sacred. Learn how to go into non-ordinary states of consciousness. Do ecstatic practices. Become orgasmic. Open your microcosmic orbit. Dance with the moon and howl with the wolves and recover your injured instinct. Attune yourself to natural cycles. Overturn structures that harm women and children and the planet. Give birth to creative works. The world needs your wildness and your wisdom.

If you have had a traumatic birth experience or did not fully experience the births of your children due to medical intervention and drugs, start today to heal these traumas by doing some form of energetic and emotional clearing: psychotropic breathwork and rebirthing; the Presence Process (author Michael Brown); embodied yoga practice to clear blockages in your energy system; Charismatic Christian experience of the Holy Spirit! I believe that embodied practice combined with non-ordinary state of consciousness is the best combination for true emotional, physical and psychological healing – as opposed to talk therapy and traditional models of counselling and psychotherapy. Use your intuition as a woman to figure out what works for you.

What follows is a bit of my own story in order to take you deeper into one woman’s understanding of the feminine mystery – my personal understanding and path. However, there are many different feminine archetypes you can explore and by writing this book about birth and my experiences as mother and midwife, I do not mean to say that giving birth is the only feminine archetype you can follow for yourself. Maybe you are more of an Artemis than a Demeter. Or maybe you are post-menopausal and would benefit from studying the Crone archetype. You will also learn a little of my experience with one of the planet’s most amazing embodiments of the feminine archetype, the hugging saint, Amachi, and Amachi has never married or had a child. (She has, however, mastered the art of serving as a Vessel for the Divine…)

I invite you to explore the Mystery – in your own personal and unique way.

Chapter 1

They Won’t Let Me

It has been very difficult to sit before the page of this story. I thought it was that I didn’t know how to tell the story, but this is not the full truth.

My throat has been stopped. Those are the only words I can find to describe this stuckness that I have felt. Whenever I think of telling the story of what I have learned about birth, such strong emotion rises up in me and it is as if I am going to cry; and I must not cry; and my throat constricts and tears well up and my chest heaves in dry sobbing. It is as if the cry that would come out from me if I let it would be the cry of the women of all the modern generations of my family and maybe of the whole world – crying for the very great difference between how we know birth could be and the way it has been for us and our foremothers; crying for the way we fear that birth will happen for our daughters and our granddaughters. Crying for what this means for the way we relate to life and nature and love and the Divine.

But most of all crying from the terrible burden of having seen something that needs to be shared and understood by the many and not knowing how to write words that can adequately describe the indescribable mystery of it and fearing that I shall die with this story untold.

I must begin, but when I sit before the page, the immensity of it wells up in me and the tears and this great tearing and constriction at my throat…

And I realize that the very thing that stops me from writing is the thing that I must write about – how I fear to speak because they won’t let me.

And that brings me to the story of my own birth.

The waves of sensation were not that overwhelming to her when my mother began to give birth to me. They were strong – stronger than she expected – but more like a giant tightening followed by relatively long breaks that made the whole thing much more manageable than she had feared.

She really didn’t know what to expect. People just didn’t talk about those things back then. Thus, my mother had started her period at school one day and had gone home sick and panic-stricken thinking that she was bleeding to death. When she got home, my grandmother had handed her a pad of folded rags and sent her into the bathroom to clean herself up and said she should expect this to happen every month. And that was the extent of the conversation!

Then there was the popular notion that when labor started you would barely have time to grab your suitcase and make it to the hospital, so my mother decided not to delay going in. It was late evening when she and my father arrived at the hospital on October 28, 1949.

In 1949 the hospital was brand new – the pride of the small town in Central Texas where I was born. It had been built with a grant from a prominent local family that had started a major bus line. The family doctor had just returned from service in the Navy in World War II. This gave him a lot to talk about with my father, who had been a Navy pilot serving in the South Pacific. After the war the doctor had decided to settle in a small town and open a family practice. He was already becoming busy with births as people responded to peacetime directives to go home and have a family.

The doctor didn’t take my mother’s labor very seriously. He mostly chatted with my father. He told my mother it would probably be quite a while before the baby was born, since this was her first baby, and that he would check on her later. He left the hospital. He hadn’t been gone for long when my mother’s labor started getting much more intense. What she didn’t know and what no one in the hospital seemed to understand was that she was one of the lucky women who gives birth quickly and pretty close to the myth of grab your suitcase births in the public mind. She was in excellent physical condition from her own time in military service and she had developed an automatic response to extreme stress during the time she had been flying fighter planes as a WASP – an ability to let go and turn things over to a Higher Power in order to access a higher level of functioning!

She did not consciously realize what was happening, and she felt fearful. She began to thrash around in her bed and cry out with each contraction. OK, let me be honest. She began to insist on more attention and became demanding. The head nurse saw this as a very bad situation. The doctor had said that this woman would not deliver for hours and here she was already making a fuss in the middle of the night when other patients were trying to rest. She tried to calm her down with a stern lecture, but to no effect. She tried threats and said that if my mother could not control herself (control herself????) and be quiet, she would have to be put in isolation where she wouldn’t disturb the other patients. My mother couldn’t resist the urge to cry out with the contractions and felt irate at the conduct of the head nurse when she needed help! The nurse saw the rebellion in her patient’s eyes and the Big Nurse in her took charge. She brought in a gurney and had an orderly help her move my mother onto it. She tied her hands to