People's pregnant bodies and parenting journeys have given rise to a flourishing strata of birth and parenting support professionals in recent years. Our growing collective awareness around the sensitivity and importance of the early formative period has spurred an exciting time of new research and best-practice development aimed at improving the way in which we carry, birth, and parent our babies.
In the last 20 years, perinatal research and therapy work has intersected with psychology, neurobiology, and epigenetics to produce some poignant findings. This fertile collaboration of disciplines has been able to establish unprecedented correlations between the quality of our time spent in the womb and the first few years of life, and our life outcomes across a broad spectrum of variables. From physical health, to education level, to financial success, to mental stability, to relationship health, to over-all life quality - everything we do and become as adults seems to point back to this initial period of gestation through early childhood as one of the greatest contributing factors.
From the documentary film “Birth As We Know It” (2006), to the ACE's TED talk by Nadine Burke Harris, to the recent research on the way society is being reshaped through birth practices (Hannah Grace Dahlen, et al., 2014), to the new documentary film MicroBirth, so much exciting information is available to us regarding this time period that many of us may be asking ourselves, "What do I do with all this information?”
One exciting discovery that I made for myself was the work of the Birth Into Being Method.
This exciting healing modality utilizes the information we have regarding the importance of the formative period and allows individuals, couples and groups to recreate a space in which it becomes possible for each individual to move through their earliest traumas in a safe and loving space of conscious group support as adults. Through a series of somatic, breath, movement, visualization, writing and role-play exercises we can re-live our earliest pain, fear and frustration while receiving the absolute unconditional love and support which we all so yearn for. This work literally creates new reference points in our nervous system, allowing us to move past old ingrained patterns of negative coping mechanisms and into being our fullest and truest selves.
The Birth Into Being Method moves through 4 different levels of healing, beginning with Level 1 which addresses the most critical formative period of pre-conception through postpartum. Level 2-4 focuses on healing and re-setting our emotional patterns from infancy through adulthood, each workshop moving to a later stage in life. We know that the way we enter the world is of critical importance for future well-being and success, yet the habit of entering the world in pain and fear has proven a hard one to break. This method has created a means to break the cycle. If we can heal our own birth and childhood trauma as adults, in so doing we can be liberated from perpetuating this trauma in our life and in our parenting journeys.
This method offers something for everyone.
If you are a person simply seeking to improve your quality of personal and professional life, Birth Into Being allows you to shift the basic patterns that hold you back from achieving your fullest potential. If you are a parent or parent-to-be, Birth Into Being allows you to heal your own wounded child so you don't have to compete with your children to get your needs met. If you are a pregnant person or couple, Birth Into Being will help you give birth fearlessly and with confidence. If you are part of a Birth Support team, Birth Into Being will help you resolve the fears you carry which can negatively impact the births you attend. If you are a Birth Professional, Birth into Being will increase the tools in your toolbox to be able to offer effective psycho-emotional support and healing through birth (as well as helping you heal your own unresolved issues, making you more effective in the work that you do).
If you haven't heard of this work, I highly recommend checking out their site (http:// www.birthintobeing.com/) and reading more about it there! Attending the Level 1 workshop alone changed my life and the life of my family infinitely for the better. I'm honored and grateful for the opportunity to write about it and inform others of this phenomenal opportunity for healing.