Sharing concepts and story

This is a space to store concepts that I think are important enough to store away. Concepts like feeling afraid or vulnerable, moving through hard spaces through love and grace, and building a community who will hold your hand while muddling through all the beautiful messy stuff.

One major theme with the parent-infant dyad, or pair, after birth is that the postpartum person and newborn are on a similar learning curve for a while. Like a year or two, kind of while. The nervous system is learning how to regulate, the lungs learning how to expand and hold air, how to breath, the body slowly builds strength and learns to move, eat, and excrete, and the heart learns to love and be cared for. So we see the postpartum state has this undeniable likeness to the infantile state - which, as the neonatal period turns into infancy as months go by, also includes learning to self soothe. This is relevant when asked about the role of suffering and pain in childbirth. I think learning to move through suffering into a state of supported fearless pain a beautiful goal to achieve during labor and childbirth, and comes in handy as preparation and practice for the unpredictable messiness and pain of parenting. So again, in parenting, we find ourselves on another learning curve with our dyad team member - learning to self soothe and readjust our perception of suffering into one of pain without fear. How about that?  

One chapter is meant to prepare you for the next, so without learning to move through suffering to pain then you don’t have the empowerment and self knowledge to carry you enlightened into your next chapter.  Does this mean one must achieve a natural un-medicated vaginal birth as practice to good parenting. Nope. There are plenty of practice opportunities in a medical induction, in a disease process like diabetes or hypertension, in a cesarean birth, and so on and so forth. My own mother’s labor helped prepare her for breast cancer, so she told me in reflection in the days after her double mastectomy decades later as we tended to the wound drains. My labor helped prepare me to survive and live again after I had my world flipped upside down with tragic news. Specifically the things I learned in labor that come in handy as I find myself parenting: feeling loved, mindfulness & self-compassion techniques, breath awareness, embracing the muddy process of surrendering to the process, calling for support people to witness and share the journey, and acknowledging the common humanity of suffering, loss and grief.