This is it! This is the time to be alive. To REALLY be alive. We are potentials of unlimited powers, capacities to love, serve and support ourselves and each other during this new and revolutionary time in our history.
As the world becomes awakened, a new paradigms in childbirth are emerging: Awakened Birth, Dreambirth Imagery, Calm Birth, Birthing From Within, Birth As We Know It, all reflect these new body/mind paradigms. New words such as, sustained energy, green, recycle have become common phrases in our every day lives and media. There are breakthroughs in science, ecology, and technology. What we think, feel, and consume affects the whole, individually and globally. (www.bethelightbetheone.com)
People ARE becoming more awake and aware. In the past two years, the films; “Orgasmic Birth,” “The Business of Being Born,” or “Pregnant In America” have flooded the market, waking people up to choice and knowledge.
“The Secret-Law of Attraction,” or “What the Bleep,” have opened the doors encouraging awareness as to how we live our lives today. Dr. Oz, Oprah’s physician to Oprah, is broadcasting a daily show on health and medicine. Oz educates and inspires people to become more aware of their bodies as their own best healers. (Preventative medicine is the ticket to a healthier you.)
In 2008, Eckhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey shared the largest internet class to date, covering 10 chapters in Tolle’s book: “A New Earth-Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose.” The enrollment for the first week was so large, the systems crashed. By the end of the 10th week numbers reached as high as 8 million people!
“Consciousness” raising websites, inspirational films, and YouTube presentations are popping up all over. Even reality shows are presenting people processing their lives right in front of millions. It’s not going to stop. It’s just going to become more.
To become a twenty-first century teacher to yourself, your baby, in and out of your womb, and to those around you, Awakened Birth, guides you how to be an inspirational role model, by living a life of purpose, clarity, joy, integrity, trust, fulfillment, aliveness and connection.
What got me started on my ‘awakened’ path was an editorial, by Peggy O’Mara, in Mothering Magazine. The words at the top of the page screamed out, “WAKE UP! Women in birth WAKE UP! I didn’t initially understand what she meant by the words but my body felt a sense of urgency and truth with them.
The synchronicity of the editorial and my life took on a new meaning. I noticed the women I was working with at the time seemed to have ‘fallen asleep.’ The emails on my yahoo groups commented about the same observations I was having. Women were giving their power over to medical caregivers, birth caregivers, machines, and drugs. I wondered where their sense of connection and communication with their bodies and babies went? When I would talk about the ‘biology of birth,’ eyes would glass over in classes. Women WANTED to drop down into biology and attempt a natural childbirth and/or breastfeed, but when push came to shove, literally, something happened. They went ‘asleep’. They shut down. Exhaustion and fear became the dominant emotions and mindset. I began to realize we were in the middle of a tipping point in childbirth.
When I first started in 1987, vaginal breech births were being done routinely in hospitals. Labor doulas were not a common addition in the room, yet there was an interest and welcome by the medical staff for the ‘extra help’ for the mother and her partner. A woman was only given an IV if she medically needed one. Women were allowed to walk around much more during labor. Group b strep testing and early admissions were not routinely administered. Caesareans and episiotomies were used only when medically necessary. Women were not induced regularly for low amniotic fluids and or big babies. I attended the first ‘walking epidural’ at Roosevelt Hospital. The Doctor who invented the procedure administered it and the woman actually walked through most of her labor, with the epidural in place. It was amazing. Times have changed.
Yet in 2010 the scales have tipped and we are in a state of critical mass. Generations are being drugged, cut, strapped to machines and gurneys and losing all sense and connection with their hormonal potentials. Fear has become the dominant driving force in childbirth. I am not only experiencing this in hospital births but also in birth center births and home births. While I advocate a woman to choose the place she feels safe and supported, it is important whatever the choice, ask questions up front, make sure your needs are being met and nothing is done to you without your knowledge and or permission.
So why ‘Awakened’? Why not Awake, or Awaken or Awakening Birth? The choice of ‘awake’ is a state of doing on the physical plane. ‘Awaken’ is a state of unfolding to a potential. ‘Awakening’ is a process of trying and trying to get there and not necessarily succeeding.
AWAKENED is state of already ‘being there.’ Awakened Birth is remembering what we have forgotten; our bodies know how, our babies know how, without even thinking about it. All the necessary tools, insights, possibilities, potentials and hormonal pharmaceuticals are inside each woman, man, child, waiting patiently to be accessed, remembered and given permission to be released.
What does it mean to be ‘awake?’ What does it mean to be ‘asleep?’ When are you ‘asleep’ in your life? When are you ‘awake?’ Some of you may think these phrases have to do with waking up in the morning to begin your day and going to sleep at night to recharge the battery. I am talking about something beyond these definitions of our biological existence.
What happens when you’re ‘awake’ in life? Actions, words, thoughts, feelings, colors, sounds, smells and experiences are brighter, stronger, clearer and flow more readily. There is no ego involved. There is a sense of connection with Source, guiding, assisting and participating in the miracles of life. ‘Awake’ can happen when you are awake during your day and also when you are sleeping at night. Remember the last time you awoke from a dream with a desire, passion or message to do something, call someone or create something? When you are sleeping, your dreams can potentially become ‘lucid’; you are aware of what you are dreaming and able to SHIFT the actions in your sleep state or receive important information.
When you’re ‘asleep’ in your day and night time, you may be restless, confused, hyper, worried, doubtful and fearful. You are disconnected with Source and your ego is the driving force behind all your words, thoughts, feelings and actions. The intention behind your action could be judgement, criticizism, to defend, which is really attacking self, or having an attachment to a person, idea or thing. Eckhart Tolle, author of, “The Power of Now,” calls this behavior our “pain body.” Debbie Ford, author and seminar leader, calls this “The Shadow Process.” Nightmares keep one stuck in this experience of resistance.
When women ovulate or are pregnant, the senses become more acute. Everything is exaggerated. (Sometimes pleasantly and some times not so pleasantly.) The intuitive senses are triggered like a fine tuned antennae waiting to receive, and transmit information. Day dreams, intuitive sensations, night dreams are vital. They are pathways of reception and avenues of clarity. Abraham Hicks says everything is vibrational energy and all we need to do is, “tune in, tap in and turn on.” Short and sweet yet brilliantly profound.
So how do you know if you are ‘awake’ or ‘asleep’ in life? Your body. Your physical body will let you know. It is the grossest, densest of the bodies and the last to receive information either pleasure or pain.
The first step is to take a breath out. Check in and feel if there are comfortable, light, easy flowing feelings in your body or painful, uncomfortable, heavy, blocked areas. Then check in with your mind. What are you thinking? Are you judging or are you surrendering? Thoughts are triggered by heart felt feelings and emotions. Are you angry or trusting? Moment to moment, staying present and tuning in is the FIRST step toward being Awakened. Small baby steps will bring rise to giant, consistent unfoldment of being Awake.
