RG @adaughterdoula 🙏 .
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ON SURRENDER | By one of my favorite voices in birth, Dr. Sarah Buckley: "For modern women difficulty with surrender may reflect a lack of confidence in our bodies. This is not surprising when our society is distrustful of the natural order in general, and women’s bodies in particular. This view is further reinforced by the obstetric model, with its long lists of all that can possibly go wrong with our birthing bodies, and its myriad of technological fixes designed to rescue us from these dangers.
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We have also lost our birthing patrons: the goddesses and saints who have for millennia, guided women through this transition, where the veil between life and death is at its thinnest. Today this guidance is available to us in the living form of a midwife: a woman who has pledged to be with (mid) women (wyfe) in birth. A good midwife can remind us by her presence that we carry genetically the birthing successes of all our foremothers and that we know already how to give birth.
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Midwife and author Jeannine Parvati Baker reminds us giving birth is women’s spiritual practice, requiring “purity in strength, flexibility, health, concentration, surrender and faith.” It has also been said that to be consciously present at birth is equivalent to seven years of meditation. When we birth consciously, putting our great rational mind on hold, and allowing our instinctive nature to dominate, we can access the wisdom that all spiritual traditions teach: that the ego is our servant, not our mistress, and that our path to ecstasy and enlightenment involves surrendering our egoic notions of control. This level of surrender will also serve us well through our many years of motherhood.
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When we surrender conscious control we allow our deeper innate rhythms to surface. In allowing her labour to go at its own pace, without hurry or interference, a woman learns to trust her own, and her baby’s, natural rhythms. Such trust is another gift; another way that Mother Nature assists us to mother with ease and pleasure. In surrendering to birth, we learn to be truly present to what is, and we can discover more about our role on the Earth.
Obsessed with this. 🙏
PHOTO AND WORDS by @natalielennard .
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BABY ON BOARD 🚘⚠️"In the wild, when birth is very close, getting the baby out quickly allows the mother to move to safety" said Niles Newton. 'The wild' in our culture are car seats, lay-bys and corridors - or even, you could say hospitals themselves - and it is only through rare circumstance or by accident that we witness the curious yet normal and instinctive phenomenon of nature - the "fetal ejection reflex" where the baby emerges without pushing. Something that, in theory arguably most women experience if it were not for the normalised routine disturbance of childbirth.
This is a scene I shot in 2017 when testing for Birth Undisturbed. As this is not an official image of the series, there is no video. But it was a lot of a fun to make, and I remember being excited that my sister-in-law was so game for me. It opened the door to creating the bigger scenes.
This test led to developing the driveway birth scene in 'Ejection Reflex'. The man's face makes me laugh. Do you think he needs a new road map? His separation from the woman, outside of the window, is very much typical of the way I have portrayed men in the first half of my series (see all 6 official images at the web-link in my Bio). Looking back at this reminds of the trepid glee I felt embarking on the concept of portraying #birth in #stagedphotography, and makes me all the more anticipate continuing the series next year.
Model Kerry & Dan Lennard #PhaseOne #IQ3 #birthinacar #spontaneousbirth #naturalbirth #fetalejectionreflex #BirthUndisturbed ™@natalielennard
