Manifesting Your Dream Birth

How to use a more feminine flow to achieve the birth you want

1. What is your ideal birth? How does that feel? Remember all the senses, sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing

2. Are the choices you are making going to give you the best chance to achieve that? Are you in alignment? Be honest with yourself.

3. How would you feel if it already happened? Imagine telling the story.

5. Surrender to the journey.

Your birthing day is not just the sum total of your antenatal preparation, your birth team and your unique medical circumstances...

It's an expression of ALL your rites of passage.

How you came into the world, how you acknowledged your first bleed, the first time you had sex, all your womb creations, your art, your poetry, your work...

That's why the journal prompts and discussion questions are so important, they take you to the heart of YOU, and what you need to resolve before you embark on this transformative new journey.

You are a whole woman, not a wishlist.

That is why my tracks speak to your soul and deep knowing.

Birth is a bead on the thread of a much older story.

What does your story have to teach you?

“Activity: Think about and write down your ideal environment for birthing. Think about all the senses – sight, smell, sound, taste, touch. It may be similar to the environment you need for making love. Every sense can be engaged in order to facilitate maximum oxytocin release.”

Discussion questions/journal prompts for women and couples:

- What do you think about the sex education you had growing up?
- How did you first find out about sex?
- What was your first period like?
- How do you think these things impacted you, in a positive or negative way?

Healing The Maiden Meditation Journey

Reclaiming Your Menarche…

Menarche is the time when a young woman menstruates for the first time. For a lot of women it was not acknowledged, or was a negative experience. If we do not have this rite of passage honoured then we experience a partial soul loss. It can also lead to negative birth and new motherhood experiences.

We are designed to expect to be welcomed into a sisterhood of women and told about the wonderful blood mysteries of our bodies. That little girl is still inside you waiting to feel that warm acceptance. The way a woman experiences any transition affects all the other transitions in her life, and your first menstruation can affect your enjoyment of your birth experience. Pregnancy is the perfect time for changing the story of what you experienced in the past to find joy and hope.

This meditation from my “Awaken Your Wild Feminine” course will help you integrate your experience of your first menstruation for soul healing, to become a fuller version of yourself and support you as you move forward in your transition into a mother.

“Activity: Find a quiet place to sit where you will not be disturbed. Lay one hand on your womb and connect with your baby there, one hand on your heart. Close your eyes and take a few slow, deep breaths. Feel the energy flowing between your womb and your heart. Do this whenever you feel anxiety rising in the body.”

Discussion questions/journal prompts for women and couples:

- Have you asked your mother what your birth was like?
- Was birth ever talked about growing up?
- What kinds of birth have you seen on the television or in real life?
- Would you like your birth to be the same/different? Why?

Reclaim Your Placenta Meditation Journey

In Australian Aboriginal culture, so the story goes, the burial of the placenta is the first feminine initiation. When the placenta is buried mother-side down in the earth, then the Earth Mother feels when the young girl is approaching her first period and can begin to spiritually guide her into womanhood.

Our placenta is our first friend, our closest womb companion, and reclaiming your placenta and this rite of passage that so many of us miss out on can bring great healing and awareness on your motherhood journey.

Nourishing The Wild Feminine

For women living in these times it is common to dislike and distrust their body. From unwanted attention, to physically being made to feel weak and incapacitated, to not measuring up to unrealistic beauty expectations. Or to cutting off undesirable female attributes in their personality to succeed in a man's world.

Then we have the industrial birth structure which is all about testing and probing and measuring a woman's body as if anticipating and expecting failure. Examination gloves, marks on a chart, machinery.

So many women are disconnected from their sensual nature. Pregnancy can be shocking in all its uncontrollable, animalistic beauty. Yet it is this animal side that is needed to give birth. If we are used to depriving our bodies and forcing them into compliance, if we are used to eradicating or suppressing the natural physical aspects of ourselves, how can we fully relax and release enough to give birth?

Many women may not resonate at all with the hypnobirthing concept of trusting their bodies to give birth as they have always eyed their bodies with suspicion and mistrust.

Giving birth is a sensual, sexual, ecstatic and natural release. It involves the woman journeying to the innermost depths of her subconscious to find the strength to bring her baby into the world.

It means she must see her body as safe, as her creative home, as her source of magic and vibrancy. It means that bodies and touch and skin to skin contact must feel safe.

I have been known to call birth surges "the shadow side of the orgasm" in how they rise and peak in the body and the physiological effect they produce in a woman.

Women often need to feel safe in their bodies to orgasm, thus they need to feel safe INSIDE as well as outside to have effective surges.

Pregnancy is a time for really delving deep into your sensual nature and reclaiming your wild feminine. You were really made to do this. It's time to claim back what you have always had within you. Savour your food, massage your body lovingly, spend time with your feet in the grass, take long baths, make love alone or with a partner, wear comfortable clothes, rest, dream, alchemise.

How would you behave if you accepted you were perfect just as you are? What choices would you make? What would you do?

“Activity: Write a love letter to your womb and/or body thanking it for all the things it has done for you.”

Birth As A Spiritual Experience

A lot of childbirth preparation talks about the mechanics of childbirth and fails to touch on the hugely transformative effect birth has on women. You don't have to be religious to have a spiritual experience - it is one that touches us emotionally and psychologically and stays with us for our lives.

We are moving from the daughter figure to the mother figure and this is bound to bring up some intense feelings, from our own perception of what a mother should be to how we were mothered ourselves. If we have had no good experience of being mothered we may be anxious and if may affect our feelings about being pregnant and giving birth. Added to how mothers are treated in society, especially by the medical model, who make it all about the baby's health and survival and tell the woman she should be grateful for whatever happens to get that baby out.

Many women feel a strong desire for a sacred and healing experience when giving birth whether they are aware of it or not. If they have no mother or a mother who cant meet their needs they may be looking for that "wise woman" figure to make them feel safe and support them through this enormous transition. The sacredness of birth is something that is rarely acknowledged by the medical profession and this need in women goes unmet, causing emotional wounds, women who feel a lack of something without even knowing what it is they have missed. This is because western medicine focuses on the body, not the mind and soul. In the medical model there is often no room for gentleness, awareness, ceremony, profundity. It is treating the physical body for a perceived illness. I remember being told by a midwife to "Not worry because they would give me a designer vagina" while suturing and feeling like it was incredible crude and jarring.

“To be initiated into a mystery psychologically is to have a mystical experience that changes you. You no longer are what you were before. You have undergone something that sets you apart from those who have not had the experience. Often an initiation involves an element of isolation, of facing fear or undergoing an ordeal. But perhaps just as often, the initiatory experience comes as a gift of grace, where mystery and profound beauty come together in a numinous moment of which we are a part….

…For me, pregnancy was an iniatory experience that changed my body, shifted my consciousness, taught me surrender, and was the beginning of the dawning awareness of the physical, psychological, and spiritual demands and gifts that would come through being a mother."

- Jean Shinoda Bolen

If you are able to do the journal and discussion prompts I would really encourage it as a way to connect to feelings you may be holding in your body around your experiences and whether they are useful or not useful, are they something you want to take with you into your new phase of life?

In birth you face the physical limits of your body and challenge and push yourself to limits you never dreamed of. You hold within you the ancient knowledge to be able to this from all the women who have gone before you. Mentally you are challenged to face your deepest insecurities and repressed feelings and overcome all this to bring your baby into the world. Birth is like wildfire rushing through your life and making it new. Birth is a great healer. As your baby is born you are reborn. Again and again.

When I say birth is an initiation I mean...

The woman must let her old self die in order to bring forth the new version of herself in the form of Mother. Even if she has done it before.

So much pain and trauma around childbirth comes from these initiations that were never properly supported, and I believe that in these cases some part of the self is still stuck in the "Death" part of Life/Death/Life, where nobody was there to hold sacred space. This is why subsequent births can be so healing, as we complete the cycle as it was intended.

Part of this surrender of birth means realising that she is at once in the body and yet not of the body, she is part of the universal life force, she is at once herself and every mother there ever was, she faces her own mortality, she lets go of any preconceived ideas about who or what she is and becomes simply her true essence.

In any spiritual experience you would be supported by a guide, somebody who had walked this path before you, and this is what my work is about.

Surround yourself with loving and experienced support. Plan for this initiation gently and with love. Take time to dream, to breathe and be, take time to be in nature, seek pleasure. Find the balance of preparation and surrender. And find your guide

"The physical phenomenon of pregnancy is almost miraculous in its essence, for woman multiplies herself into another being and becomes the channel for bringing another soul to life. For nine months she creates matter, shapes a body and brings substance within herself like an alchemist transforming essence into living matter." - Manuela Dunn Mascetti

“Activity: Discussion questions/journal prompts for women and couples:

- what was your relationship with other girls like growing up?
- did you feel connected to your mother? Were you able to talk to her about important things?
- what worries you about becoming a mother?
- what do you think are your strengths that will help you to be a mother?”
— Quote Source

Branding and graphics lovingly created by Hermione Wild