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 As human beings we are part of the animal kingdom, a part of nature. As females we have been given the opportunity to live in a body that knows how to conceive, grow, birth and nourish a baby. Through this process of creating, giving, and nourishing life we can experience a raw con¬nected relationship to nature and know our primal feminine power. Birth is not an experience that happens outside of us or to us, rather it is a natural life process that we are a part of.
Birth, even though it is a natural life process, takes us into the unknown and thus, easily invokes our fear. As humans we want to possess knowledge and understanding. Modern medicine has played a significant role in women disconnecting from the natural process of birth and from the power of being connected to the process. We have handed our power over to science, put¬ting our complete trust in it. We count on ultrasound pictures to show us that our baby is grow¬ing inside of us. We want to know the gender of our baby so we can choose the right colours and gender specific items before they are born. Through books and the internet we have access to information about birth that we have never had before. Although science helps us to better un¬derstand the process of birth, we unfortunately have been socialized to put our complete trust in what we see, read and hear and we are not encouraged to be with the birth process, to neither trust our body nor trust birth. Instead, we are constantly bombarded with media messages that birth is painful and dangerous. Reality television such as, 'Baby Story' shows us how babies are born in our North American hospitals, and often concentrate on high intervention dramatic birth experiences which only serve to instill more fear. We entrust our body and baby to profession¬als, believing they know what is best. Professionals do have the knowledge and skills to guide us, but we are the experts about our bodies and our babies. We as women know how to give birth but we have become disconnected from being with birth and as a result have become disempowered (disconnected from our primal feminine power) in the process. Primal feminine power goes beyond the power of knowledge.
I frequently hear the saying that "knowledge is power." Knowledge allows us to understand what is happening around us. It aids us in being active participants and making informed choices; however, it is important to remember that information gathered outside of ourselves is merely someone else's perception, their beliefs, their truth. It may be that those beliefs are evidence based but that doesn't mean that it is best for each individual. We take that information in and decide for ourselves if it aligns with our beliefs, if it feels right for our body. It is about letting go of what society deems as "right" or "wrong" and going within to find to find our own personal truth. Learning to trust oneself and or body versus what we read or what we hear.
The power that comes from being in the process of birth goes beyond knowledge. It is pri¬mal. Our intuition tells us what we need to do and our instincts guide us in taking the needed ac¬tion. We need to believe in ourselves to trust our knowing and our bodies to guide us through the birth process. I recently had the pleasure of being at a birth where the baby was communicating that it needed to be born quickly. The room was filled with medical personal and the stress level was high. In the midst of it all, the woman was able to shut out the voices telling her what to do and to follow her knowing. Her belief in her body's ability to birth a baby allowed her to follow her instincts. Her body took over and she arched her back and her neck and in two pushes the baby was born. No one could have instructed her how to do that. Her body knew how to birth her baby.
As it is to be with any life process, it involves surrender. The word "surrender" in our soci¬ety seems to have taken on the meaning of losing control. We reach a place where the fear takes over, where we cannot find another solution and we wave the "white flag". There is an illusion of safety created when we take control of everything in our lives. We feel in charge of the situation if we have plan A and then plan B and C as backups. But if, by some chance, each of our carefully thoughtout plans fails, fear takes over and we feel we have lost our control. At this point we hand over our power to the situation. However, by choosing to enter a state of surrender, it is not about handing over our power. Rather, it is about being empowered. By choosing to let go of control, to let go of having to know and to just simply be, we are surrendering to what is in the present moment. In the present moment there is no fear. If we don't feel that we have to have control, we can accept what is happening in the present moment and in that, there is a sense of being in control. We trust ourselves, our body and the process. The irony is that we have more of a sense of con¬trol in a state of surrender than in trying to control everything around us.
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