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“One of the primary jobs of being a mother is to encourage our children to achieve happiness and fulfillment by reading and acting on their own innate instructions- a job that is much easier if we ourselves had done such work, and been honest with ourselves about the extent to which we have followed our hearts and lived up to our potential.”    -Dr. Northrup, “Mother-Daughter Wisdom”

SINGING to the COLLECTIVE MOTHERS  One of my earliest memories celebrating Mother’s Day is that of being a young girl and my older teenage cousin, Mary Anne, gathered all the cousins and taught us the M-O-T-H-E-R SONG so we could sing it to all our Mothers. Mary Anne lined us all up on the stairs with the littlest one on the bottom leading to the older cousins higher up and orchestrated our singing:

“M” is for the million things she gave me, “O” means only that she’s growing old, “T” is for the tears she shed to save me, “H” is for her heart of purest gold; “E” is for her eyes, with love-light shining, “R” means right, and right she’ll always be, Put them all together, they spell “MOTHER” A word that means the world to me. – Howard Johnson

We sang that song to my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother as well as many aunts.  I hold all their memories of mothering me and treasure these many special moments.  This was such a special moment to me as little girl because we were singing to collective mothers who were all there.  Life changes, I am now a mother and grandmother and I see my mothers and the World of Mothers from another vantage point….

FOLLOWING our HEARTS  Professionally I share a passion with you to protect every mother’s right to give birth safely with respect, dignity and informed decision making.  Both personally and professionally the lives of mothers matter! I am committed to sharing the ten-steps to creating Optimal MotherBaby Care, with the International MotherBaby Childbirth Initiative www.imbci.org working to ensure every woman’s right to give birth with quality, respectful care. Together we can, and are, improving the lives of mother’s around the world.  And it is with both sadness and hope that I share with you and ask you to read The State of the Worlds Mother’s 2013 from Save the Children. We each make a difference in the lives of mothers.

So this Mother’s Day, as I celebrate you and all the mothers of the world, I ask you are you following your heart? Join me in giving yourself these three gifts:

• Honor all the mothers who have gone before you.

• Acknowledge the greatest gift you give as a mother is to nurture yourself and to live your life to its fullest potential, being an example for your children and others.

• Honor yourself as a woman/mother– whether you have given birth or not, you mother many ways by sharing your creative, nurturing energy with the world.

 

To register for Dr. Northrup’s online course Lightening the Mother Load, please visit Hayhouse Radio- Early-bird deadline until May 9th!

Women gathered to support women and in doing so handed down essential knowledge and wisdom that today we have replaced with fear.

As a doula and childbirth educator for almost 30 years, I’ve had the pleasure of being with many children who are attending and supporting women/their mother’s in labor and childbirth- natural childbirth, homebirth, hospital. Some of whom I met years later and could hear their perspectives on birth that were formed from those first experiences. I also had many women attend my doula workshops that have been at births of their siblings. In all cases, attending birth as a child has given them a greater appreciation for women’s bodies, women’s power and a trust in our ability to give birth.

I often discuss at my doula workshops that when we took birth from the social model to a medical model, moving from women’s homes to hospitals, we broke an important cycle of learning and understanding that has led to increasing fear of our bodies and birth. I ask women to raise their hands if they have younger siblings and imagine that 100 years ago they would have been around their mother’s laboring and possibly in the room for these births. Add to this, younger cousins, younger children of friends of your mother’s, and other younger family members, as young girls we would have had an opportunity to learn nurturing and comfort skills passed down woman to woman and to see birth firsthand, which I believe builds confidence.

Knowledge is power! Understanding the process of labor and birth along with tools that help provide comfort is what were all striving to learn today as we approach our births, often the first time we experience birth now, but not what it was historically. Women gathered to support women and in doing so handed down essential knowledge and wisdom that today we have replaced with fear. I applaud a woman’s wisdom who prepares her daughter and listens to what she is ready to learn and see, and meet her there. As we see, birth can be powerful, pleasurable, and gentle. Wishing you a Pleasurable Birth.

Join the discussion taking place on the oBirth facebook page. Did your children attend the birth of their younger siblings? Do you hope to include siblings in an upcoming birth?

Sign up for Debra’s Weekly Pleasurable Birth e-news.

As spring continues to open and unfold in northern NJ, I love walking and seeing all the flowering bushes and trees. Soon, the warm weather will be upon us. As I listen to the birds each morning and see more and more creatures and animals in my yard and garden, I am looking for the caterpillars that will soon appear. While I love caterpillars especially the fluffy ones, I love even more their journey of transformation.

In time, they will spin transform into a chrysalis and settle in for a short sleep. It is amazing that their body will transform from one that remains on the ground to being free to fly well above the bushes and trees that have been home to them till now. When you see a chrysalis it might be tempting to help the butterfly to emerge. If you come upon it as it begins to open you can witness its struggle to be set free. Yet, if you help it open and don’t allow this essential struggle for life, you will stop it from reaching its beautiful potential to fly- as its wings need this time and this effort to fully mature.

Teri Shilling, a great Lamaze educator with a Passion for Birth, was the first person who helped me understand how inducing a baby to arrive before it is fully ready may also take away some of the MotherBaby potential to have a safe, fulfilling birth.  The journey of natural childbirth is needed for a safe, satisfying passage into motherhood and breast-feeding.  We are starting to learn amazing things on how essential the babies hormonal opening is in childbirth, as well as the development of cells on the baby’s cheeks that happen only in the 24 hours before birth that are needed for the baby to find the breast and begin to feed easily.  Mother Nature does not do well when disturbed!  We are learning there are important reasons to allow our babies to arrive when it is their time and not before.

Lamaze Safe and Healthy Birth Practices- give us some of the science and information that will guide you to make an informed decision on when labor should begin. http://www.lamaze.org/HealthyBirthPractices.  Healthy Birth Practice 1: Let Labor Begin on Its Own http://www.lamaze.org/HBP1

This weekend I will be speaking in Montclair NJ about Healthy Birth Practices- if you are nearby please join me and if you afar please stay in touch via my weekly Pleasurable Birth e-news.

HAPPY HEALTHY CHILD

Premiere Screening

plus Q&A with Debra

FREE Event

Saturday April 27th

at 6:00 pm

at Golden Bridge Yoga in NYC

 

 

 

 

HEALTHY BIRTH YOUR WAY

Free Event

at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, NJ

Sunday April 28th at 2:00 pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ORGANIC BIRTH SCREENING

plus Q&A with Debra

at BirthNet Ridgwood, NJ Location

Sunday May 5th at 2:00 pm

 

Submitted by: Debra

I ask you to consider, what happens when we bypass the body’s natural ability to begin labor with love, and its ability to secrete peak levels of the hormone of love, oxytocin? Studies have shown oxytocin’s role in reducing pain. In my own state of NJ, Beverly Whipple, professor emeritus at Rutgers University, a famed author/sexologist found that when women masturbate to orgasm, “the pain tolerance threshold and pain detection threshold increased significantly by 74.6 percent and 106.7 percent respectively.”

In an interview in Wired magazine another colleague, Rutgers psychology professor Barry Komisaruk, said, “We’ve seen that there is a strong inhibition of the response to pain during orgasm. What that leads us to think is there is some kind of very important interaction between the orgasmic experience and the pain experience.”

We know that when women are induced with synthetic oxytocin they and their baby feel more pain. Labor contractions are much harder to manage and often require an epidural to manage pain. But what about other short and long term effects of not allowing our bodies to produce this essential hormone at peak levels? Synthetic oxytocin cannot cross the blood brain barrier. We not only loose its pain relieving effects, we miss the ecstatic, nurturing, bonding effects it offers to MotherBaby too.

These relatively new studies are key to our discussion in our documentary Orgasmic Birth and in my many talks and workshops about finding pleasure in birth and life. Sarah Buckley so exquisitely writes in her book, Gentle Birth Gentle Mothering “Passion and love are as powerful a combination at birth as they are in sexual activity. And in birth, as in sex, we release oxytocin, the hormone of love, in huge quantities from deep inside our brain. Here again, our hormones are directing us toward optimal and ecstatic experiences, yet this system is also extremely vulnerable to interference.”

What happens when we replace our natural hormones with synthetic hormones to begin or augment labor? We don’t know all the answers in either the short of long term for our babies and society but the question must be asked.

Dr. Buckley is the author or new Physiology Report due out next month that will provide more data and insights on how valuable our natural hormones our to keep childbirth safe, healthy and, I add… pleasurable!

Lamaze Healthy Birth Practices gives us great information and research on why allowing labor to begin on its own is so important! Lamaze International recommends that you neither choose induction nor agree to be induced unless there is a true medical reason. A “large” or even “very large” baby is not a medical reason for induction. Letting your body go into labor on its own almost always is the best way for you to know that your baby is healthy enough to be born. Spontaneous labor also increases the likelihood that you can experience the other healthy birth practices identified by Lamaze International that lead to a safe and healthy birth— especially freedom of movement and no routine interventions.

Amy Hannaford of Bellies & Birth comments: “Always, ask “why” when your care provider is recommending something or especially if you are being told you “have” to have an intervention, such as an induction. We normally would never let anyone do something to our bodies without our consent, so pregnancy and birth should be no different.”

Experiencing natural contractions, produced by your own body’s oxytocin, increases your freedom to respond to your contractions by moving around, changing positions, and trying the tub or shower. Interfering with or replacing the natural hormones that orchestrate labor, birth, breastfeeding, and maternal attachment may have consequences that we do not yet understand. So take the time to ask questions- its your right! Wishing you lots of love and oxytocin!

Please sign up for Debra’s enews to learn more about these studies as well as discuss many of the ways you can enhance the release of oxytocin in your labor and birth- finding more pleasure, reducing pain, and enhancing safety for you and your baby.