13Jul/11Off
Excerpt from Leigh Anne DuChene’s article ‘Birth as a Transpersonal Experience’
Below is an excerpt from a very interesting article by Leigh Anne DuChene: Birth as a Transpersonal Experience: Healing, Empowerment, Self-Knowing, and Transformation.
Birth as a Transpersonal Experience: Healing, Empowerment, Self-Knowing, and Transformation by Leigh Anne DuChene, April 2011
“Childbirth is a life changing event that many women experience at least once in their lifetime. Some women experience birth as a very sacred, spiritual, deeply healing, and transforming experience in their life; while some women experience birth as traumatic. Still, other women do not experience birth with any spiritual or emotional significance. There are many reasons for these various experiences, which have been covered extensively in other studies and articles. Some of those reasons are personal beliefs about birth held by the woman due to religious and cultural influences, and any personal experiences surrounding birth; the woman’s support system during birth, and the trust that the birthing woman and that of her birth team have in a woman’s body to birth, baby to know how to be born, and the birth process itself. This paper is focused on how birth can be a transpersonal experience. How some women experience birth as a spiritual, sacred, deeply healing, and transforming process and experience in their lives.”
“Susan Starr Sered (1991) shares with us that “premodern societies have shown childbirth to be a socio-spiritual phenomenon, a women’s rite of passage, and a potentially fulfilling and self-enriching life experience.” (p. 8 ) Sered quotes a woman from an Israeli hospital as saying, “Birth is a spiritual experience, a feeling of creation, that I am a creative part of the universe. You get a gift, like something coming out of nothing. It is a bit like the creation of the first man.” (p. 17)”
“Birth can be a transpersonal experience; and birth was intended to be a woman’s rite of passage into motherhood by preparing her heart, mind, body, and soul for the new challenges in her new role as mother. By cultivating a new culture of trust and personal surrender around birth experiencing birth as a transpersonal experience becomes a possibility to more woman as their perceptions on birth and their ability to birth change to one of trust and empowerment.”
“Every mother is different and each birth experience is different and brings with it new challenges and opportunities to know oneself deeper. Whether it is a woman’s first child or fifth child she will still face new challenges and come to know herself in ways she has never known herself before. Birth as a spiritual experience allows women to be fully human, and fully alive in the process of giving life, as God intended.”
