When a baby is born at home, the spirits of the land rejoice

I believe that whenever a baby is born at home, the spirits of the land rejoice.

I often talk about mothering being supported by invisible helpers from the spirit world, but what about pregnancy and birth itself?

When a soul chooses to incarnate in a certain location and the pregnancy is nurtured and witnessed by the spirits of the land, the ancestors, the plant allies and the water spirits.

How would it feel to know that all these well-wishers are conspiring to support you and your baby to have the birth that you desire?

Ask the mountain what it means to stand proud and tall in your birth choices. Ask the river what it means to remain fluid and course correct when necessary. Ask the sea to be with you as the waves of your surges rise and crash and fall only to rise again. Ask the oak tree for wisdom on how long things take to grow. The herbs in the garden have wisdom to know where they thrive best, and so do you.

When we bring ceremony and ritual back to the land, we bless the mother, weave our red threads and close bones upon the bones of all who lived on and loved this land beneath us. As we empty birthing pools onto the soil to nourish and grow other lives.

I believe that whenever a baby is born at home, the spirits of the land rejoice. These last two weeks I've had the pleasure of three closing ceremonies for babies in the spaces they were born. We are bringing birth back to the land.

The secret of the embodied mother

One of the most common questions I get asked is how do you continue a spiritual practice after the birth of a child? What changes? Where previously there may have been time for meditation, retreats, solo adventures, now the woman shifts into the deeper devotional spiritual practice of the mother.

The very act of tethering brings you closer to god. When you serve at the altar of the child, everything is simplified. I often say, you can scrub floors in a monastery or you can stay home and become a mother. Both powerfully increase your capacity for love through service. 

When you become a mother you learn the true meaning of prayer. The physical limitations of caring for a child increases the limitless capacity of the soul and the reliance on invisible helpers. The perception of the numinous expands with motherhood as you feel a profound connection to all those who have birthed, and the cosmic womb that births all our souls.

Motherhood is devotion to life itself. The belief that life is good, that life should continue, that the adventure of the soul in a human experience is worth undertaking and can be of good to the world.

Many women find after ecstatic birth experiences that their capacity for pleasure increases tenfold, and the opening of the womb and yoni through birth means their creative power flows stronger than it ever has before. 

The opening of the heart through devotional mothering and breastfeeding means that the woman has become a powerful creatrix, as her ability to desire, conceive and birth becomes effortless. Manifestations come through quicker, and her desires unfold before her eyes.

The design of birth

Birth is designed to dissolve and reassemble a woman into a mother. It's one of the biggest initiations into power we will ever experience. When this unfolds as designed, the woman meets her inner shadow, her perceived limitations of body and soul, and blasts through them as she brings life into the world.

When a mother and child experience an ecstatic and powerful birth experience, their brains become wired to expect pleasure, freedom, success and so much more. When we see the level of coercion in maternity services it is clear to me that this design for birth does not suit those higher up.

Women on a birth high can move mountains for their children, will stand up to injustice, will have a sense of personal power that cannot be bullied out of them. They will raise their children to think for themselves.

Children who are not born afraid will not submit to anything that does not respect their humanity and innate sense of goodness and deservingness to exist.

What would it serve any of the patriarchal institutions to allow this to happen?

This is why you will only see lip service paid to the rate of interventions and birth trauma. It serves a purpose. That purpose is to weaken women and mothers and thus children, making a population that is compliant and subservient. It's a colonisation tactic older than we can imagine.

There was a time when this rite of passage commanded the highest respect for it's ability to transform a woman into a mother.

We remember.