 The birth of my son opened up a whole new dimension of my understanding of myself, of my purpose, and of Life itself. I have never before experienced such amazing strength, such power and focus – the strength of giving life. I realized I am that strength, I am Life! I am Life recreating itself one more time into the infinity.
It was mindblowing - I was so energized and HAPPY! I have never felt more present and more rooted in my own body before. A huge wave of gratitude and joy covered me forever - I feel so grateful, thank you Mother, thank you Father, thank you Creation! Thank you for this amazing experience to be HERE, TO EXIST, to be ALIVE! And thank you SO MUCH for the ability to birth my son and share all the gratefulness, joy, amazement, and love I am feeling of living this gorgeous lif. Thank you that I am able to pass on to him that precious experience, this amazing LIFE!!!
I felt the deep bond we all have as women, passing on this amazing gift of life from one placenta to the other, from one woman to another, throughout the years, throughout the centuries, throughout timeless and spaceless eternity. In the security of the warmth and darkness of our wombs, life is creating itself, and a new, perfect and unique human being is able to grow with such will and wisdom.
In the soft candle light of my birthing room, my husband and I were intertwined and melted with each other sharing the powerful beauty of the sacred moment. In my own journey, far away in a trance-like state, I was also completely feeling my baby and communicating with him, dancing with each contraction and channeling the urge to push into deep earthly sounds. I was emerged into a timeless space, only aware of what was going on deep within our souls.
I was working together with my baby in a birthing pool in my room, surrounded by the unconditional love and support from my husband, my sister-in-law, mother-in-law, my wonderful friend, and doctor. Suddenly, my sister-in-law tells me – do you want to touch the head?
WHAT?
WOW! YES! His HEAD! I love you! I love you little one, I love you so much, thanks for being here! Thank you for choosing me as your mom! HIS HEAD!
Incredible – I am touching his head! It is coming out of my beautiful vagina, out of my own body! Wow! His head, so small, so real, so beautiful! My baby is getting born! I am caressing his beautiful head for the first time! I can feel his little hairs in the warm water, so amazingly wonderful and blessed and divine! My baby is being born and the entire Universe is here right now giving birth with us!
The strongest wave so far came, and I knew that he could be born if I just push enough. I felt in an instant that I have a choice – to push and ride the wave all the way, or to wait for the next one and take it really easy and gently. Eager to meet that amazing little person who shared the same body and soul with me so intimately for 9 months, I decided to push, and collecting all the energy from each cell of my body and soul I focused that immense power opening myself as a channel for new Life to pass through. He bravely seized the opportunity and came through on a wave of pure energy, coming out into a new world like a little fish in the water.
In the moment of giving birth, I felt connected to everything, to every little cell, to each and every plant and being, to all the planets and stars, to all the Universe which was both inside and outside of me. I felt WE ARE ALL TRULY ONE.
That feeling was overwhelming, so releasing, LOVING, JOYFUL and so STRONG! I was looking at MY SON, holding him in my arms and falling in love with the brand new face and body I was seeing. He seemed so peaceful and content, so glad he was here! Hugged and loved by his mother, father, grandma, and aunt, we all started singing his song to him giving him our happy welcome.
The experience of birthing was an initiation that transformed me. With a new baby, a new mother was born too. Besides being a mother, I became aware of the amazing strength I have as a woman and the full power of life I am so privileged to be a channel of.
The magical realization that changed my birthing experience was that birth doesn’t need to be a struggle to overcome pain or achieve anything, if I don’t want it to be. All I needed to do was to stop thinking or doing anything and instead enter the temple of LOVE each of us has inside, at our very center and the source of our being. This quality of love meant total acceptance, trust, freedom, flowing, and joyful playfulness. The strength needed to birth a new life was actually pure energy and power in the form of LOVE and LIGHT. I felt as a root of Mother Earth stretching out and spreading life, so happy to share, so abundant and giving.
During the time since the birth of my son until now, I have been loving, caring for, nurturing and getting to know my growing baby, as well as myself. Honoring this sacred miracle, I am receiving the amazing gift life gave me, and discovering the true meaning of being a woman and a mother. I listen to my soul telling me things, while I am discovering and forming my visions and purpose. I listen to the beautiful and soothing song of Love and Gratitude, letting it overflow me, guide me and teach me how to love, live, inspire and share. I can hear my own inner calling stronger than ever, together with a calling of Mother Earth, to fully realize and create myself into a person who I am and who I want to be.
 Sanda Baretic is a Conscious Birth Emissary, Mother, and Textile Artist from Croatia, currently living in Mexico. You can contact her online here: Sanda
The baby's experience of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum creates the foundation of the child's health and consciousness. A healthy pregnancy and a gentle birth creates the most pleasurable, intimate, and loving experience of childbirth for both the mother and baby. It is essential for parents today to become conscious consumers, to do their research, know their options, and make wise choices. It is also vital for the mother's support team in pregnancy and birth to be gentle, loving, nurturing, and to prevent unnecessary intervention. Violence is the perpetuation of trauma and healing birth is at the root of healing violence in our world for the generations to come. We can heal humanity through birthing and raising babies peacefully and teaching them the way to be kind. Many blessings, Kara Maria Ananda www.birthemissary.comwww.karamariaananda.com
The Healing Arts of Birth have been practiced by wise women, midwives, traditional healers, and shamans for thousands of years. Healers around the world have integrated bodywork, energy techniques, healing food and herbs, and natural therapies to support women in the childbearing year to have healthy pregnancies and births. Natural healing arts can offer effective pain relief and support for labor and birth without any of the negative side effects that narcotic and pharmaceutical pain relief can cause. Birthworkers, birth partners, and pregnant women can all benefit from learning techniques and practices from energy healing, massage, craniosacral therapy, rebozo, dance, yoga, sound healing, and holistic nutrition for improving labor experience and outcomes. There are skills from the healing arts that can provide prevention of common pregnancy and birth discomforts, as well as improve labor experiences, and reduce pain in the birth experience. Energy healing and rebozo are two areas of natural healing arts that offer simple and powerful techniques that anyone supporting a birth can learn quickly and effectively. Energy Healing can relax a woman in labor, ease pain, and provide comfort. Vibrational medicine can be used for a woman experiencing a natural birth or with an epidural or during surgery. It is applicable to all labor and birth situations to improve and ease the experience. One birth that I attended, a mother had an epidural and was experiencing great anxiety and nervousness, and her baby was needing to rotate more in her pelvis to be born. I simply put my hands on her hips and sent the baby and her pelvis loving energy. Within a couple minutes the mother turned to me and said with a calm voice how amazed she was that she could feel that energy and warmth and how calming it was, even though she was numb to a pin poke in that area due to the anesthesia. The energy was greatly beneficial and she went on to have a healthy birth. Rebozo massage is a comforting and diverse skill from the art of Traditional Mexican midwifery using a long woven shawl to sift or rock the mother and baby for comfort, relaxation, and to improve the position of the baby. When I teach workshops the rebozo part is often a favorite of everyone attending. It's incredible what a versatile tool the shawl is for bodywork and positioning for pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and beyond! The rebozo can be used to relax the mother, align the uterine ligaments, calm the nervous system, encourage baby to move into an optimal birth position, alleviate hip pain, support the belly, balance the musculoskeletal system, carry a newborn baby, and so much more! There are basic techniques that can be used with a rebozo or any shawl that are simple and effective for anyone to learn. Learn techniques from Energy Healing, Rebozo Bodywork, and much more at the: Healing Arts of Birth Workshop with Kara Maria Ananda September 22 & 23 in Mount Shasta, CANovember 10 & 11 in Cypress, CA. ---> Find out more about the workshops and how to register by clicking here. <---
Are you an advocate for conscious birth and parenting? Are you passionate about empowering mothers, fathers, babies, and families today? Learn how you can be a Conscious Birth Emissary and join a growing global community creating a leading-edge birthing movement! The Conscious Birth Emissary Training is a global, self-paced, comprehensive and holistic course with printed workbooks, online video and audio classroom, online private support group, and personalized email and phone consultation support. You can birth the change the world desires for conscious birth of a global humanity! Join the Conscious Birth Emissary Training today!
 "Like many of us, I have been praying with my ears,listening to midwives all around the world. How can we (wo)manifest the vision of unity that would serve families? Meditating upon the divisions between birth attendants, a vision came to me. I saw a circle wherein the tribes called to heal the Earth by healing birth sat together. It was a medicine wheel, with all styles of midwifery and obstetrics represented."
- Jeannine Parvati Baker, "Vision of Unity" (1949-2005)
How do homebirthing, birth centers, hospital birth, and unassisted birthing all fit together? Is there a place for each of these options in the spectrum of maternity care for modern mothers? How does one decide what choices are best for you and your birth? Is the medicalization of birthing helping some mothers and harming others? Can many women birth wonderfully while unattended while a few need skilled care providers? What can we do to create the best birth possible for babies today?
When it comes to Conscious Birth, I believe it is ideally best honored, protected, and respected - with independent midwives available in all communities to all mothers for homebirth and birth center care. Women who choose to birth unassisted, should do so only because they are prepared, confident, and healthy, not because of a lack of access to better options or trusting care. There should be excellent and respectful care given at mother and baby-friendly hospitals for high-risk pregnancies and births, without unecessary intervention, and utmost honoring of the mother-baby synergy. I envision a world in which all communities have safe hospitals with low-c-section rates, doulas, waterbirth facilities, and lactation consultants, as well as community-based birthing centers with midwives, gardens, and waterbirthing facilities, plus skilled homebirth midwives and postpartum support for homebirthing families.
I am so grateful for both the medical and midwifery knowledge that is available today for mothers and babies. One thing Western medicine is really good at is surgery - when performed with discernment for appropriate reasons and in the circumstances that other options are not viable. If a person needs surgery today the results are better than any other time in recorded history. Yet surgery and pharmaceuticals both have major impacts and consequences upon the body and are drasticly overutilized and abused in Western medicine today - particulary in birth. For a natural process like birth, unnecessary intervention will lead to complications and interfere with the biological cascade of hormones inherent in facilitating bonding, breastfeeding, and attachment. While surgery has improved the outcomes of lives in fields including emergency medicine, in birth the overuse of surgical delivery has in fact caused a rise in maternal deaths. It is a fallacy to think that more lives of mothers and babies are saved today in the Western world because of interventions in childbirth. In the last decade in California, the c-section rate has doubled and at the same time the maternal mortality rate has tripled in conjunction.
The World Health Organization has recommended for decades that the C-section rate should be no higher that 15%. However in the US we are double that, in some hospitals it is over 50, 75, or even 90%! In countries such as Brazil the c-section rate is close to 95% of women in urban areas. Some women need surgery but not nearly as many as are receiving them now.
In the US, at the Farm Midwifery Center in Tennessee, run by Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives, they have a less than 2% c-section rate from over 30 years of practice, including opening their doors for decades to any women who wanted a natural birth. Women frequently used to show up at their door in late pregnancy or labor, without ever having seen them before, and even with this diverse population they still have an incredibly low c-section rate. Ina May also writes in her latest book "Birth Matters" that a woman today has more than double a chance of dying in birth than her mother did. Clearly, the increase in high-tech birth is not improving upon Mother Nature.
In the past, before the industrialization of childbirth, women sometimes died in childbirth because of lack of access to medical care. Improvements in nutrition and public sanitation both create huge improvements in maternal health and outcomes. Good nutrition for all ages of life and clean water, air, and public sanitation are on the top of the list of necessary things for good health and healthy mamas and babies everywhere. Surgery and pharmaceuticals do not improve childbirth outcomes as much as access to healthy foods and preventing toxicity from the environment, pollution, or lifestyle.
In countries where midwifery is the primary source of care for birthing women, the maternal and infant mortality rates are lowest. In the US, the reporting of statistics for maternal mortality is skewed and the actual numbers are much higher than what is known. Ina May Gaskin has a project called the Safe Motherhood Quilt Project in which she is raising awareness about the huge number of deaths in the US related to complications from birth that are unacknowledged. Such as a women recieves a c-section, goes home, has an infection, dies, and it is not reported as related to the surgical birth, because she has already left the hospital.
The reality is that women have very little influence on the choices available to them in birth in the US and in countries around the world, leading to their choices and needs being controlled by the pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, hospital administrations and corporations, and governmental agencies with big money interests in mind and pocket.
I am inspired by Dutch model of maternity care in which midwives and doctors work together, healthy women automatically get a midwife, unless you risk out and then get a doctor, and all mamas have a home nurse visit postpartum for over a week to help out. I think that undisturbed birth is an ideal, and that the modern midwife should be very hands-off. I am not a fan of unnecessary cervical and vaginal exams, forced pushing, manually dilating the cervix, breaking the bag of waters, and other interventions that doctors and midwives do regularly that can cause complications.
The experience of pregnancy, giving birth, and becoming a mother has huge impact upon the women's life resulting in physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and social changes. Birth is a life-changing experience and it can be empowering or traumatic, depending upon the care, support, and environment that women and babies are surrounded with. There are resources today for mothers healing from birth trauma, as well as for babies and bonding. I recommend exploring the information from the pre- and perinatal psychology field at www.birthpsychology.com as well as body-mind-spirit integrated bodywork practices including craniosacral therapy, aquatic bodywork modalities, massage, and mother-baby support groups.
What is really best for mamas and babies? To be truly deeply supported - from preconception through postpartum, to have access to gentle knowledgable midwives, waterbirth centers, compassionate mama and baby friendly hospitals, and healthy nutrition from the beginning. There is no right or wrong way to birth - each mama must decide what it best for her and her baby in the moment - that is a conscious birth. I believe on a soul level that our babies choose the experiences that are right for them, we grow and they grow from what experiences are given in life.
Birth is phenomenal. Birth is sacred. Birth is the gateway of life. We are the guardians, and it is time to protect our birth rights!
By Kara Maria Ananda
Conscious Birth Ambassador
The Wisdom Of Mothers and Babies (WOMB) Online Conference is creating change for generations to come through sharing the voices of leading visionaries in Conscious Birth and Parenting today. With speakers in the fields of midwifery, pre- and perinatal psychology, the healing arts, conscious parenting, and more, this is a inspiring convergence of knowledge and vision for global change, health, and peace. This conference is a series of 33 weekly interviews over 7 months - each Friday from Mother's Day Weekend (US) to the December Solstice of 2012. Participants receive in an email each Friday from May 11th to December 21st sharing an informative, intelligent, and inspiring talk for the WOMB Conference. Each talk will be available for free online for one week to listen to. The WOMB World Web is a growing online community of birthworkers, parents, advocates, students, educators, and health professionals from all over the world tuning into the the epic online WOMB Conference! Join participants from the US, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Ireland, Egypt, Serbia, South Africa, Brazil, Ecuador, UK, Spain, Italy, Bali, New Zealand, and many more countries tuning in to the WOMB Conference. Listen in for FREE at www.wombconference.com and experience the WOMB wisdom! In Gratitude, Kara Maria
Being an advocate for conscious birthing practices today means protecting the rights of pregnant women, babies, and families to have the information and access to the best childbearing care and practices possible. The most powerful advocates for improving maternity and infant care today are parents. Mothers and fathers have a powerful responsibility and opportunity to utilize the force of conscious consumerism and informed choice to push for their rights to birth and parent their babies in the way best for them. Birth advocates and professionals can work together to inspire, organize and support parents in local communities and around the planet to work together to improve maternal and infant health and happiness. In the process of creating a harmonious world and humanity, there is nothing more important than protecting the vitality, health, and spirit of babies, parents, and families today. Conscious birth and parenting is the key to creating a peaceful future, through honoring the importance of the primal period from the womb to age 3 in the formation of the psychological and physical blueprint of a human being throughout their lifetime. 1- Know the Facts: There is a vast field of knowledge, science, and wisdom to conscious birth and parenting. Learning about birth is a life-long journey. Consistently read books, journals, and websites and explore educational opportunities. Study, witness, and keep an open mind. Listen and talk to mothers, fathers, and birth professionals. Gather reputable resources, know your sources, and share information with integrity. 2 - Be a Conscious Consumer: Parents today have the right to choose their primary care practitioner, place of birth, maternity services, and infant care products independently, supporting conscious birth through conscious consumerism. The birth of a child impacts the long-term health and vitality of the mother and baby, as well as the wellbeing of the whole family. Choose carefully the best childbirth services to invest in for your new baby through research, informed choice, and conscious consumerism. Conscious birth advocates can also choose to support organizations supporting access and education for conscious birth today. 3 - Conscious Social Networking: Social networks have changed how we share information by providing instant access to receiving and publishing information globally. Consciously utilize social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube to share conscious birthing information, support, and news. Create your own website with a blog and write, share videos, links, create a resource guide, and connect with parents and birth advocates worldwide. 4 - Create a Resource Library: Collect books, magazines, birth DVD's, and informational brochures to share with parents in your community. Donate positive birth books and DVD's to the public and school libraries in your community. Improve access to conscious birthing information so parents can make informed choices about their birth and parenting practices. 5 - Create Community Events: Bring expecting and new parents together in your community to create support networks, information sharing sessions, and resource guidance. Connect with local support groups for pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and parenting and see how you can support them. If you see a need in your community for a birth or parenting circle, birth awareness event, or community support group - then create it. 6 - Share Birth Videos: Video is the most effective way to share information online today. Create your own videos, upload them online, and post them on your social networks. I put the first video I ever made up on Youtube in 2007 called Conscious Birth Affirmations - and this video now has over 111,000 views. Online video sharing through Youtube, Facebook, and other networking websites is a powerful way to share conscious birth inspiration globally and quickly. Hosting film screenings in your local communities is also a powerful way to bring people together and share information through showing birth documentaries. 7 - Be Positive: Sharing positive birth stories and inspiration is the most powerful way to support an expecting mother and father's trust and confidence in birth. Scary birth stories perpetuate the epidemic of fear around birth. Be real and share the truth from the heart while focusing on empowerment, informed choice, and positive solutions. Inspiring people to choose conscious birth practices can create sustainable change in the culture of birth globally. 
Do you know what's going on with birth in the US and the world today? We need to co-create change in the world of birth on both local, national, and global levels. Let's work together to become educated, aware, and conscious of maternity care choices and how we can improve the health of mothers, babies, and families around the world.
To learn more about birth in the US, the C-Section epidemic, and the future of Conscious Birth watch this short video and please share... Join the Conscious Birth Emissary Newsletter and get the Co-Creative Birthing e-book FREE!Become a Conscious Birth Emissary Today! Join the Community Birth Leader Training!Get KaRa'a Book: The Sacred Nature of Birth Book: Natural Wisdom for Conscious Birthing
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