These sessions have grown through my 15 years in the clinic, my own experiences of birth, and through years of apprenticing in women’s work and rites of passage, and it has been shaped as much by sitting with women as it has by sitting with myself in through my own births and rites of passages. I’m not offering a way to do birth, I’m holding a space where you can meet yourself more fully, listen more deeply, and to trust your own knowing not only for birth, but for mothering and for all of life.
And perhaps preparing for birth doesn’t just ask us to focus on the physiological and a set of techniques but rather something that asks us to turn inward, to become more attuned to ourselves, to our bodies, and to the deeper patterns that shape how we meet this threshold. And as an opportunity and unraveling of some of the more deeply held beliefs that quietly shape how we meet life, how culture influences these beliefs and divides these profound experiences into either “right” or “wrong”.
And maybe life is more sacred and expansive than that.
In these sessions we begin with your story, not just the pregnancy you are in now, but your own birth, your menarche, any pregnancies, births, losses or terminations, and also the many other ways you have birthed in this life, including projects, careers, and versions of yourself that have emerged and been let go of over time, because all of these experiences leave an imprint and form part of how we arrive at birth. They also include acupuncture, as a way to support your body and the birth of your baby.
Together we begin to notice the threads that run through these experiences, the patterns that may exist within your family line, and the beliefs around birth that often sit quietly beneath the surface, sometimes so familiar that they are not immediately recognised as beliefs at all, but simply as the way things are.
Through my apprenticing with the Shamanic way, I came to understand rites of passage as a continuum, where the way we move through one threshold informs how we meet the next, and where birth is not separate from the rest of your life but is intimately connected to it, shaping not only the arrival of your baby but the mother you are becoming.
My understanding of this has also been shaped through my own three very different births, my first daughter Honey, who was born through the public system beginning as a planned homebirth and transferring into hospital where she was stillborn, my second daughter Mabel, who was a born through MGP care in hospital with the support of a private obstetrician, and my third, Lucky, where I had the support of a private midwife, where I chose to freebirth at home, and through each of these experiences I have come to see that there is no one way to birth, and that each birth and our babies asks something different of us.
There is a nuance in preparing in this way, where we can tend, learn, and become resourced while also remaining open to what unfolds, not holding tightly to a particular outcome, but cultivating the capacity to meet what is here in each moment with presence and responsiveness.
Responsibility sits within this, but not as pressure, blame, or the idea that you must do this alone, rather as the capacity to respond to what is needed, to remain in relationship with support without giving yourself away, and to allow support to be present without overriding your own knowing.
How we birth is deeply personal, and there is no single right way, only the way that is true for you, shaped by your history, your body, your baby, and the moment you are in.
These sessions are here to support you in coming into that relationship, to bring awareness to what has shaped you, to honour the patterns that have been carried, and to gently return you to a place where you can listen to yourself, your body, and your baby, and meet this threshold in your own way.