Parenting Excerpts

Reprinted with permission from Freestone Publishing.

Birth, being life’s central metaphor, like yoga, provides an opportunity for higher consciousness, for enlightenment. The more we focus on the details, the clearer the big picture becomes. Birth is a hologram. A “holoerotic” experience which magnifies our essence, literally showing us the stuff we’re made of. It’s in the details that we find God. Looking closely at birth, we see all.

…Perhaps it is due to the nature of sexuality itself that most “spiritual paths” get tricky when integrating fertility. It seems especially so in yoga practices.…But separating spirituality, sex and fertility is a false division to begin with. Add the higher value placed on celibacy by many spiritual paths and we have, rather than liberation, another even more confused situation complete with all the symptoms found in our larger culture of imbalance and irreverence for life.

Practicing yoga during pregnancy is one way to heal this split between soul and spirit. Prenatal yoga sexualizes spirituality and spiritualizes fertility. It is the tantric practice of mothers. Once the babies come planetside, our yoga practice shifts into karma yoga beyond belief. We become servants to our babies and our path is bhakti yoga, the practice of devotion.

The wound reveals the cure, so says Hygieia, goddess of health. Combining yoga with natural birth as a sexual and spiritual expression invites parents into an experience of co-creation. Healing one mother is healing our Earth. It allows us the possibility of realizing ‘the Garden’ is here again – and by naturally, ecstatically birthing babies, we are indeed bringing Heaven to Earth….

Giving birth is initiation into women’s mysteries. Like all good shamanic (spiritual) paths, it prepares us for other altered states and dying to the self. Giving conscious birth is woman’s vision quest, par excellence. It is ultimate sadhana – spiritual practice – which requires purity in strength, flexibility, health, concentration, surrender and faith. Opening for conscious birth helps all power centers to open, especially the healing power of sexuality. Along with delivering babies, we open our hearts….

Meeting what comes fully is one of the goals of yoga (santosha – contentment) – and it is the best advice in childbirth as well. With breath as ally we can receive a vision that will spiritually feed us our entire lives, right at the moment of birth (and conception). Go into the intensity, up to the very edge of eternity. Open to the stretch of body/mind, knowing each moment for what it is. Be thankful for life however it presents itself. Receive the blessings of birth gently and in love.

Prenatal Yoga & Natural Childbirth is on sale on Babynut.
View it here.

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