This is it! This is the time to be alive. To REALLY be alive. We are potentials of unlimited powers, capacities to love, serve and support ourselves and each other during this new and revolutionary time in our history.
As the world becomes Awakened, a new paradigms in childbirth are emerging: Awakened Birth, Dreambirth Imagery, Calm Birth, Birthing From Within, Birth As We Know It, all reflect these new body/mind paradigms. New words such as, sustained energy, green, recycle have become common phrases in our every day lives and media. There are breakthroughs in science, ecology and technology. What we think, feel and consume affects the whole, individually and globally. (www.bethelightbetheone.com)
People ARE becoming more awake and aware. In the past three years, the films; “Orgasmic Birth”, “The Business of Being Born,” or “Pregnant In America” have flooded the market, waking people up to choice and knowledge. And for our sheer enjoyment, “BABIES” is about to come out in the movie theatre’s in May 2010.
“The Secret-Law of Attraction,” or “What the Bleep,” have opened the doors encouraging awareness as to how we live our lives today. Dr. Oz, Oprah’s physician to Oprah, is broadcasting a daily show on health and medicine. Oz educates and inspires people to become more aware of their bodies as their own best healers. Preventative medicine is the ticket to a healthier you.
In 2008, Echart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey shared the largest internet class to date, covering 10 chapters in Tolle’s book: “A New Earth-Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose.” The enrollment for the first week was so large, the systems crashed. By the end of the 10th week numbers reached as high as 8 million people!
Futurist and evolutionary Mother of the planet, Barbara Marx Hubbard, develops tools for visions of a Universal Humanity. She is a leader on the growing edge of the women’s movement, supporting the emergence of the Evolutionary Woman the Feminine Co-creator who is calling for the next level of creativity and partnership between women and men to guide our world through our current challenges and opportunities.
“Consciousness” raising websites, inspirational films and you tube presentations are popping up all over. Even reality shows are presenting people processing their lives right in front of millions. It’s not going to stop. It’s just going to become more.
To become a 21st century teacher to yourself, your baby, in and out of your womb, and to those around you, Awakened Birth, guides you how to be an inspirational role model, by living a life of purpose, clarity, joy, integrity, trust, fulfillment, aliveness and connection.
What got me started on my ‘awakened’ path was an editorial a few years ago in Mothering Magazine, by Peggy O’Mara. The words at the top of the page screamed out, “WAKE UP! Women in birth WAKE UP!!! I didn’t initially understand what she meant by the words but my body felt a sense of urgency and truth with them.
The synchronicity of the editorial and my life took on a new meaning. I noticed the women I was working with at the time seemed to have ‘fallen asleep.’ The emails on my yahoo groups commented about the same observations I was having. Women were giving their power over to medical caregivers, birth caregivers, machines and drugs. I wondered where their sense of connection and communication with their bodies and babies went? When I would talk about the ‘biology of birth,’ eyes would glass over in classes. Women WANTED to drop down into biology and attempt a natural childbirth and/or breastfeed, but when push came to shove, literally, something happened. They went ‘asleep’. They shut down. Exhaustion and fear became the dominant emotions, mindset and body breakdown. I realize we are in the middle of a tipping point in childbirth.
When I first started in 1987, vaginal breech births were being done routinely in hospitals. Labor doulas were not a common addition in the room, yet there was an interest and welcome by the medical staff for the ‘extra help’ for the mother and her partner. A woman was given an IV only if she medically needed one. Women were allowed to walk around much more during labor. Group b strep tests and early admissions were not routinely administered. Cesareans and episiotomies were used only when medically necessary. Women were not induced regularly for low amniotic fluids and or big babies. I attended the first ‘walking epidural’ at Roosevelt Hospital. The Doctor who invented the procedure administered it and the woman actually walked through most of her laborIt was amazing. Yet, times have changed.
It’s 2010, the scales have tipped and we are in a state of critical mass. Generations are being drugged, cut, strapped to machines and gurneys and losing all sense and connection with their hormonal potentials, their babies and bodies. Fear has become the dominant driving force in childbirth. I am not only experiencing this in hospital births but also in birth center births and home births. While I advocate a woman to choose the place she feels safe and supported, it is important whatever the choice, ask questions up front, make sure your needs are being met and nothing is done to you without your knowledge and or permission.
So why ‘Awakened’? Why not Awake, or Awaken or Awakening Birth? The choice of ‘awake’ is a state of doing on the physical plane. ‘Awaken’ is a state of unfolding to a potential. ‘Awakening’ is a process of trying and trying to get there and not necessarily succeeding.
AWAKENED is state of already ‘being there.’ Awakened Birth is remembering what we have forgotten; our bodies know how, our babies know how, without even thinking about it. All the necessary tools, insights, possibilities, potentials and hormonal pharmaceuticals are inside each woman, man, child, waiting patiently to be accessed, remembered and given permission to be released.
What happens when you’re ‘awake’ in life? Actions, words, thoughts, feelings, colors, sounds, smells and experiences are brighter, stronger, clearer and flow more readily. There is no ego involved. There is a sense of connection with Source, guiding, assisting and participating in the miracles of life. ‘Awake’ can happen when you are awake during your day and also when you are sleeping at night. Remember the last time you awoke from a dream with a desire, passion or message to do something, call someone or create something? When you are sleeping, your dreams can potentially become ‘lucid’; you are aware of what you are dreaming and able to SHIFT the actions in your sleep state or receive important information.This is also an example of being awake.
When you’re ‘asleep’ in your day and night time, you may be restless, confused, hyper, worried, doubtful and fearful. You are disconnected with Source and your ego is the driving force behind all your words, thoughts, feelings and actions. The intention behind your action could be judgement, criticizism, to defend, which is really attacking self, or having an attachment to a person, idea or thing. Eckhart Tolle, author of, “The Power of Now,” calls this behavior our “pain body.” Debbie Ford, author and seminar leader, calls this “The Shadow Process.” Nightmares keep one stuck in this experience of resistance. Carolyn Myss, medical intuitive, calls it the ‘wounded soul.’
When women ovulate or are pregnant, their senses become more acute. Everything is exaggerated. (Sometimes pleasantly and some times not so pleasantly.) The intuitive senses are triggered like a fine tuned antennae waiting to receive, and transmit information. Day dreams, intuitive sensations, night dreams are vital. They are pathways of reception and avenues of clarity. Abraham Hicks says everything is vibrational energy and all we need to do is, “tune in, tap in and turn on.”
How do you know if you are ‘awake’ or ‘asleep’? Most people are not able to access what they are feeling. Many are more in touch with their thoughts and your body never lies. Your physical body will let you know. It is the grossest, densest of the bodies and the last to receive information.
The first step is to breathe out. What are you feeling emotionally? Good or bad? Check what you body feels like: comfortable, light, easy flowing or painful, uncomfortable, heavy and blocked. Check your mind. What are you thinking? Are you judging or surrendering? Feelings are indicators and thoughts are the power behind those feelings. Thoughts are triggered by heart felt feelings and emotions. Are you angry or trusting? Moment to moment, staying present and aware of what is happening in your emotions, physical body and mind is the FIRST step toward being Awakened. Small baby steps will bring rise to giant, consistent reminders of your Awakenedness.
“it’s not rocket science” 
Larry is a full time corporate attorney and he starts his day at 3 am. Not only would nine children be a challenge, but the household could not have been complete without their token dog, Betty the Bulldog.
Pelvises I Have Known and Loved
June 13th, 2009(© 2003 Midwifery Today, Inc. All rights reserved.If you enjoyed this article, you’ll enjoy Midwifery Today magazine! Subscribe now! [Editor's note: This article first appeared in Midwifery Today Issue 50, Summer 1999 and is also available online in Spanish.])
What if there were no pelvis? What if it were as insignificant to how a child is born as how big the nose is on the mother’s face? After twenty years of watching birth, this is what I have come to. Pelvises open at three stretch points—the symphisis pubis and the two sacroiliac joints. These points are full of relaxin hormones—the pelvis literally begins falling apart at about thirty-four weeks of pregnancy. In addition to this mobile, loose, stretchy pelvis, nature has given human beings the added bonus of having a moldable, pliable, shrinkable baby head. Like a steamer tray for a cooking pot has folding plates that adjust it to any size pot, so do these four overlapping plates that form the infant’s skull adjust to fit the mother’s body.
Every woman who is alive today is the result of millions of years of natural selection. Today’s women are the end result of evolution. We are the ones with the bones that made it all the way here. With the exception of those born in the last thirty years, we almost all go back through our maternal lineage generation after generation having smooth, normal vaginal births. Prior to thirty years ago, major problems in large groups were always attributable to maternal malnutrition (starvation) or sepsis in hospitals.
Twenty years ago, physicians were known to tell women that the reason they had a cesarean was that the child’s head was just too big for the size of the pelvis. The trouble began when these same women would stay at home for their next child’s birth and give birth to a bigger baby through that same pelvis. This became very embarrassing, and it curtailed this reason being put forward for doing cesareans. What replaced this reason was the post-cesarean statement: “Well, it’s a good thing we did the cesarean because the cord was twice around the baby’s neck.” This is what I’ve heard a lot of in the past ten years. Doctors must come up with a very good reason for every operation because the family will have such a dreadful time with the new baby and mother when they get home that, without a convincing reason, the fathers would be on the warpath. Just imagine if the doctor said honestly, “Well, Joe, this was one of those times when we jumped the gun—there was actually not a thing wrong with either your baby or your wife. I’m sorry she’ll have a six week recovery to go through for nothing.” We do know that at least 15 percent of cesareans are unnecessary but the parents are never told. There is a conspiracy among hospital staff to keep this information from families for obvious reasons.
In a similar vein, I find it interesting that in 1999, doctors now advocate discontinuing the use of the electronic fetal monitor. This is something natural birth advocates have campaigned hard for and have not been able to accomplish in the past twenty years. The natural-types were concerned about possible harm to the baby from the Doppler ultrasound radiation as well as discomfort for the mother from the two tight belts around her belly. Now in l999, the doctors have joined the campaign to rid maternity wards of these expensive pieces of technology. Why, you ask. Because it has just dawned on the doctors that the very strip of paper recording fetal heart tones that they thought proved how careful and conscientious they were, and which they thought was their protection, has actually been their worst enemy in a court of law. A good lawyer can take any piece of “evidence” and find an expert to interpret it to his own ends. After a baby dies or is damaged, the hindsight people come in and go over these strips, and the doctors are left with huge legal settlements to make. What the literature indicates now is that when a nurse with a stethoscope listens to the “real” heartbeat through a fetoscope (not the bounced back and recorded beat shown on a monitor read-out) the cesarean rate goes down by 50 percent with no adverse effects on fetal mortality rates.
Of course, I am in favour of the abolition of electronic fetal monitoring but it would be far more uplifting if this was being done for some sort of health improvement and not just more ways to cover butt in court.
Now let’s get back to pelvises I have known and loved. When I was a keen beginner midwife, I took many workshops in which I measured pelvises of my classmates. Bi-spinous diameters, sacral promontories, narrow arches—all very important and serious. Gynecoid, android, anthropoid and the dreaded platypelloid all had to be measured, assessed and agonized over. I worried that babies would get “hung up” on spikes and bone spurs that could, according to the folklore, appear out of nowhere. Then one day I heard the head of obstetrics at our local hospital say, “The best pelvimeter is the baby’s head.” In other words, a head passing through the pelvis would tell you more about the size of it than all the calipers and X-rays in the world. He did not advocate taking pelvic measurements at all. Of course, doing pelvimetry in early pregnancy before the hormones have started relaxing the pelvis is ridiculous.
Another pelvis that came my way a few years ago stands out in my mind. This young woman had had a cesarean for her first childbirth experience. She had been induced, and it sounded like the usual cascade of interventions. When she was being stitched up after the surgery her husband said to her, “Never mind, Carol, next baby you can have vaginally.” The surgeon made the comment back to him, “Not unless she has a two pound baby.” When I met her she was having mild, early birth sensations. Her doula had called me to consult on her birth. She really had a strangely shaped body. She was only about five feet, one inch tall, and most of that was legs. Her pregnant belly looked huge because it just went forward—she had very little space between the crest of her hip and her rib cage. Luckily her own mother was present in the house when I first arrived there. I took her into the kitchen and asked her about her own birth experiences. She had had her first baby vaginally. With her second, there had been a malpresentation and she had undergone a cesarean. Since the grandmother had the same body-type as her daughter, I was heartened by the fact that at least she had had one baby vaginally. Again, this woman dilated in the water tub. It was a planned hospital birth, so at advanced dilation they moved to the hospital. She was pushing when she got there and proceeded to birth a seven-pound girl. She used a squatting bar and was thrilled with her completely spontaneous birth experience. I asked her to write to the surgeon who had made the remark that she couldn’t birth a baby over two pounds and let him know that this unscientific, unkind remark had caused her much unneeded worry.
Another group of pelvises that inspire me are those of the pygmy women of Africa. I have an article in my files by an anthropologist who reports that these women have a height of four feet, on average. The average weight of their infants is eight pounds! In relative terms, this is like a woman five feet six giving birth to a fourteen-pound baby. The custom in their villages is that the woman stays alone in her hut for birth until her membranes rupture. At that time, she strolls through the village and finds her midwives. The midwives and the woman hold hands and sing as they walk down to the river. At the edge of the river is a flat, well-worn rock on which all the babies are born. The two midwives squat at the mother’s side while she pushes her baby out. One midwife scoops up river water to splash on the newborn to stimulate the first breath. After the placenta is birthed the other midwife finds a narrow place in the cord and chews it to separate the infant. Then, the three walk back to join the people. This article has been a teaching and inspiration for me.
Gloria Lemay is a private birth attendant in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
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