Walking Alone - Birth as a Solitary Path

Let's face it: One of the most troubling facts about labor is that you have to go through it yourself. No books, stories or videos about birth and no birth plan will change that. Don't fool yourself into believing that the more you read and know about birth the better you'll be equipped to make it through. No one will take your place when the first contractions start. No one is going to walk you through labor - you have to do it yourself.

Blindfolded, barehanded, and with a timing that is not of your choosing, you have to cross a stormy ocean. You have to move in ways you haven't moved before, and step into depths you haven't reached. Yes, your partner and friends can call out to you and keep in touch from the lighthouse of their love, but where you are going no one can follow. It is your solitary path to walk. There are no roadmaps, cancellations or second chances, and there is nothing you can bring along - except what you know about your self.
How you let go.
How you hold on.
How you face fear.
How you forgive.
How you love.

When you are in the middle of this ocean, you will meet yourself. It will be an incorruptible and guileless encounter, and you will see yourself in your nakedness, with no place to hide or mask yourself. You will see with piercing clarity who you thought you were. You will be shown what pleases you and what makes you uneasy, what gives you comfort and what you like to ignore, what lets you down and what builds you up.
You will start to break under the weight of your fabrications.

With each contraction you will be squeezed and stripped down to your most vulnerable self, and this is where you are given a chance. Emptied of all fashioned ideas about yourself, you are ready to give yourself to the ocean. With nothing left to let go off, you are able to give all of who you are, and become the ocean. You are the ocean, and there is nothing left to cross.

July 2008

Birth Bliss

One of my students recently had her third baby (at home), and - recalling her birth experience - remarked how surprised she was that she needed so little help during her labor. How she felt that she was birthing her baby by herself, and how powerful this experience was for her. A good friend of mine who is soon due with her first baby asked me how such an experience is possible.

Labor and birth, like any other major life events, are in their very nature raw, existential, transcendental, absolute, and intimately personal. They are opportunities to get close to the mystery of life, to affirm our cardinal connection to what we call Truth, Spirit or God through an experience of pure being.

A woman who is able to let the experience of pure being guide her in labor is an empowered woman. She intuitively knows how to move and how to breathe with her contractions. She enters a realm that is free from desire, attachments, projections and affliction, a space of deep meditation that is self-less, and as such pain-less, beginning-less, and end-less. Mothers who went through labor often mention that their sense of time was suspended, that they didn't know what time of day it was, or how long they've been laboring.

Our sense of time is closely connected to our self-consciousness - when our attention is engaged time seems to "fly"; we are un-conscious of our self, but merge with a greater consciousness that is infinite and endless. The Upanishads, one of India's oldest philosophical-religious texts describe this state as follows: "As a lump of salt thrown into water would dissolve in the water itself, and there would be nothing of it to be picked up, but wherever one may take it, it tastes salt alone, so indeed is this Great Being, Infinite, Endless, only a mass of Consciousness".

Most women who go through labor in our culture struggle to attain this level of experience. Labor is a modality that is infused with different degrees of internal and external interventions.

External interventions range from inducing, monitoring and structuring labor to the subtle interference of proposing labor augmentations or excessively interacting with the birth mother. They all affect the birth mother's intuitive ability to labor, and can disrupt her inner dialogue, her labor rhythm and focus. Most midwives, after they arrive at the birth place, take a seat in the background to bear witness and observe with their ears, eyes and heart. Only if the laboring mother indicates, consciously or not, that she needs help, will those wise women take action.

Internal interventions are a result of the laboring mother's beliefs and disbeliefs regarding her ability to birth, her assumptions and expectations, the extent of her relationship with herself and her birth partners, and the degree of her self-consciousness. Those internal barriers are often pivotal to the way a women labors, and can make the difference between a satisfying or disappointing birth experience.

When I was in labor with my third baby I reached full dilation in 6 hours - laboring on my own without needing anyone of my dear friend's or family's help. I remember noticing friends arrive in the middle of the night, taking a seat at the edge of my bed where I was resting and breathing through contractions, simply beholding a woman having her baby. I know I appreciated their presence, them being there, but I didn't need their assistance, encouragement or comfort. With the very first contractions I had felt that night I had led myself to a place of complete surrender. I gave up my identity and self-consciousness, and dissolved like the lump of salt into the ocean of birth energy.

How did I give up my identity? I acknowledged that I was going into labor, that it would be intense and painful, and decided, almost matter-of-factly, that I had to get to work. Though I knew that this work was most important, I didn't think of myself as the important player, but focused on the work itself - the work of breathing, letting go, accepting and simply being with each contraction. Soon I wasn't even aware of me being part of this labor anymore, and the concept of labor itself, or of pain, dilation or breathing vanished. There was no "me", and therefore no referred, contextual experience. I didn't "feel" pain - though it hurt; and didn't "labor" - though I was having a baby. "I" was pure awareness, realizing samadhi - the unconscious-conscious state of bliss or Absolute Consciousness, where there is no activity of the mind and no knower, no knowledge, and nothing to be known.

At some point in my labor I got out of bed and went into the living room. I knelt next to the bed we had set up there, and with one mighty contraction my bag of waters broke. The sensations of my body changed rapidly, and my awareness switched into action mode. I got into the birthing tub, and felt I had to push.

My midwives hadn't arrived yet, and in an instant I became self-conscious, helpless, anxious and fearful. I felt the pain of my contractions. It hurt, and I cried out. Then my midwives arrived, within minutes after I got into the water. I was able to ease back into my labor, but not for long. After about 30 minutes of pushing I started to wonder why my baby hadn't arrived yet. It had taken me only five minutes to push my second baby out - so why did it take so long for this baby to come? With each push and each contraction I got more and more discouraged, exhausted and lost. The contractions hurt like hell, and I was acutely aware of my surroundings, my body, my screams, and my frustration. Labor was agonizing, and I felt it and knew it. I was conscious of my relations and interactions, conscious of time and space, touch, no touch, pain, words of encouragement from my friends and midwives, light reflections on the water, the hoarseness of my voice after a long hour of screaming.

My baby was born after an hour and a half of pushing, which is not that long after all, but seemed like an eternity after encountering my expectation of having her arrive quickly and effortlessly like her older sister.

Expectations, like any other engagements, beliefs, presumptions, plans and projections lock us into the duality of subject-object relationship. This relationship relies on empirical cognition, and all the feelings that are known to human language are ours to experience: We are agitated or relaxed, anxious or assured, in pain or pain free. That is what we know. We are tumbling between comfort and discomfort, bobbing from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Labor can be like that, a self- or semiconscious exertion with periods of excitement, surprise, disappointment, apathy, despair, confusion and passion. But it can also be ananda, or birth bliss, where we connect with the Absolute, with the Essence of Existence, where there is a different kind of knowledge, a knowledge that has "no perception or cognition, for that knowledge is indestructible..." (Upanishads). We breathe, and we listen, and we let go, until the layers of subject and object, knower and knowledge fade and vanish, revealing our pure self guiding us with divine intelligence through a labor of Love.

July 2006

Book Review: "Yogini - The Power of Women in Yoga", by Janice Gates

Ever since I started teaching yoga, my work has been almost exclusively with pregnant women, so Janice Gates' book "Yogini" was a must-read for me. It profiles and collects stories from 17 contemporary women who have given the ancient practice of yoga a new voice. They are stories from women who "have all come down from the mountain and integrated yoga into their daily lives".

Two messages stand for me out from this book: Yoga is decoding the body, and every woman must decode her body herself.

This is often a painstakingly difficult and slow process. "The intellect is very fast", says Angela Farmer, "it judges very quickly and tries to fix it. But the body is slower, it has a totally different intelligence, which comes about through instinct and feeling and old, old understandings."

Emphasizing the importance of our body's intelligence and our patience with deciphering it is the key to helping pregnant yoga students get ready for labor and birth. Many women come to my prenatal class because they want to learn how to have an easier labor. They want to know which positions to do at different parts of labor, what to do if the baby is posterior, how to remedy achy hips, and how to breathe with contractions. Looking for help from the outside and lack of confidence is very typical for women in our culture, especially if they are pregnant for the first time. Nischala Devi feels that all women have a natural intuition and understanding what's right for them, but they tend to rely on outside forces for information and don't develop this intuition.

As a teacher, I feel a responsibility to share the knowledge and insights I gained through study, trial and error, as well as encourage my students to listen to their own bodies for answers. Though it is helpful for a pregnant woman to know how women in labor tend to position themselves or breathe, each woman entering labor needs to figure out all over again how to move with her body and how to give birth. So, the more she listens to her body beforehand, and the more she reads and follows her body's clues, the more skillful she'll be when she is birthing her baby. "The Buddha is famous for suggesting we not believe something just because we like the person saying it, or because it sounds true", says Sarah Powers. "Although we need ample exposure to wise guides, we each must take up the burden and the privilege of self-inquiry to discover true freedom."

I give the women in my class often a choice to either hold a yoga pose, or to move out of it. At the same time, I ask them, what makes them choose one or the other? Why do they opt to stay in the pose, or why not? Where is their decision coming from? From a voice in their body, or from a voice in their mind? The practice of yoga is about having an ongoing dialogue, "is all about being curious....Practicing thus becomes more about questioning than performing or having answers; it's about being a little unsure." (Judith Lasater)

Being unsure teaches as much as knowing (if not more...?), if we, as yoginis, can let ourselves only be comfortable with it. Yoga is not about "pushing the river", but about "trusting in the undercurrent and...waiting for things to unfold on their own rather than impatiently forcing them" (Janice Gates).

That is also true for the process of birth. How do I teach "trusting the undercurrent" and patience in my classes? I instruct my students to move slowly and deliberately. I remind them to listen to their breath. I ask them for feedback about a physically challenging pose, and help them recognize the absence of patience when they find themselves restless, frustrated, weak, heavy, achy and bored.

The practice of not "pushing the river" has been helpful in my own yoga as well. When I took up yoga years ago I often felt frustration when I didn't make it to class or when the class wasn't long enough... I wanted to see results for all the hours that I had spend on my yoga mat, but didn't see them quick enough. Over the months and years I have seen "results" indeed, but have also realized that progress and change unfolds in a spiraling pattern. There are good weeks, and "bad" weeks. And then there are good weeks again. I have learned that I can trust the "undercurrent" -- as long as I keep my practice in focus, i.e. as long as I keep coming back to it and showing up to listen.

One of my pregnant students recently noted after class that "being ready for birth is not holding a position for 3 minutes but honoring what your body can do in the moment". She found for herself a powerful truth and accessed the very wisdom that's needed for birthing, creating and living life joyfully.

May 2007