Not pregnant yet? You bet!. Rimma Efimkina

body is wise in its own way and it acts in spite of any beliefs or conscious control. Its wisdom consists in listening to its nature and do as it says. Here are the views of midwifery and gynecology professionals who adopted holistic approach to childbirth.

      Harry van der Zee cites Chamberlain and draws a conclusion that pregnancy and birth are controlled by the unborn child. It is he who produces hormones that change mother’s body. He takes care of keeping the pregnancy, defines how long it will be, decides on the time to start labor and signals to start it with the help of hormones3.

      Robert Mendelsohn, US health professional, the author of the controversial Confessions of a Medical Heretic points out that when many a woman come to hospital their otherwise active contractions become weak and cease altogether. According to him, even if they had to break the speed limit to reach the hospital, because contractions were strong and frequent, the contractions slow down and even cease as soon as the woman steps into the hospital. This reaction is so common they have a name for it – powerless labor. Those who studied the question think its main reason is fear4.

      I’m not surprised, because i also gave birth in this medical system and I felt like a victim of this heartless and callous medical machine. I guess it is not by chance that I chose psychology, because for me it was a painless, human, and, mainly, effective way of helping myself and others. Instead of invasive surgical procedures, non-medical psychotherapy encourages us to study nature’s ways, understand it, see what this or that symptom is to say to us. Infertility does not happen for no reason – it is always a state of mind. And the problem with medical interventions is that this is the way to devalue the discrepancy between a symptom and a person’s inner state.

      Medical professionals refer to 17—20% of women who do have babies as a result of medical interventions. I agree that we can force a woman to give birth as a result of hormonal therapy, then what? We are not able tell what would be psychological consequences of such birth yet. However, we can guess that these women will still have to match their external and external state. The success of each intervention depends on how it is taken from the point of view of the soul.

      Milton Erikson tells a story of his sister who desperately tried to get pregnant for thirteen years. She nursed newborns who lost their parents until someone adopted them. At last, she asked her brother whom she did not take seriously as a professional for advice. And his advice was: “You have been to get pregnant for a long time. It doesn’t work for you. Once you adopt a child and feel that he/she is all yours, belongs to you in some special way, I mean physically, spiritually – I don’t know how to express it – you will get pregnant in three months”. She followed her brother’s advice and adopted a child in March and got pregnant in June. She gave birth to several children after that. This story is a perfect example of what was said above. Psychotherapists understand the symbolic meaning of these actions.

      Something from the outside should be literary taken in by the body. Childbirth is a lifelong act of taking in and letting go. I call these kind of act transitions or initiations.

      Childbirth as initiation

      If you don’t go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

      Initiations (lat. initiato – sacrament) are rituals that come along and consolidate changes in status as well as the transitions from one state to another. Psychologically speaking, initiation happens when a person lets go of his habit of living unconsciously and finds a way of living consciously.

      Initiation is not about knowledge, it’s about mystery. Initiation ritual is always a “mysteria”, a “sacrament”. By the end of its rituals neophyte’s existence changes drastically, he becomes a part of both human society and the world of spiritual, sacred.

      There are many initiations-transitions during people’s lives, both small and big – from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to youth, from youth to maturity, from maturity to senility.

      As for female initiations, the first one comes when a girl has her first period and, thus, enters childbearing age, which creates many problems for her parents. What is the problem? The problem is that she has a mature body and a childish mind, that’s why the girl becomes prey to adult morally bankrupt men.

      Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the author of women’s “Bible” Women Who Run With The Wolves says that when she works with older teenage girls who are convinced that the world is good if they only work it right, compares herself with an old gray-haired dog: “I want to put my paws over my eyes and groan, for I see what they do not see, and I know, especially if they’re willful and feisty, that they’re going to insist on becoming involved with the predator at least once before they are shocked awake. At the beginning of our lives our feminine viewpoint is very naive, meaning that emotional understanding of the covert is very faint. But this is where we all begin as females. We are naive and we talk ourselves into some very confusing situations. To be uninitiated in the ways of these matters means that we are in a time of our life when we are vulnerable to seeing only the overt”5.

      However, there is no way one could become conscious and grown-up except to have one’s own experience and make mistakes. The ability to use one’s woman power and chose suitable partners will reward all the hardships of the way.

      Another important female initiation is making a union with a man, which opens up new horizons for her. At first this relationship is immature, and the woman is forced to live as if two lives – inner hidden life and outer apparent life. This is very similar to the life of Tsarevna The Frog from Russian fairy-tale who is forced to appear in the form of a frog by day, and shed her frog skin by night to become Vasilisa the Beautiful who could do magic: bake bread, weave carpets and mesmerize by her perfection. It takes power and courage to be true to oneself whenever and wherever possible. To make this happen your male partner should not be ashamed to reveal you to others and go to get you on a magic steed far-far away to defeat Koschei The Deathless himself. In the fairy tale this man is Ivan Tsarevich, but psychologically speaking, it is not about a man, it is about animus archetype. To put it simply, from the very beginning of her life a woman should accept her masculine side – bravery, courage, vigor, strength, self-sufficiency and independence of authorities to become whole.

      Childbirth is the third big initiation for a woman. It means discovering her creative power to make, produce, and I don’t mean just literally, but also figuratively. Everything we make: things, ideas, projects, books, children, even ourselves, our life-story are products of our creativity. If we can’t find our purpose in life at this point, we risk becoming infertile, because for our body this means betraying oneself. Infertility is a message that a woman lost her way in life, lost her purpose, cannot hear the voice of her soul.

      Finally, the third big initiation is going from childbearing age to late maturity. Milton Erickson said that with the first period a girl becomes a mother – it’s joy; with the last period she becomes a grandmother – it’s happiness. Now the goal is to cultivate powerful qualities valued by people in the young generation. Now she is the person who initiates others, she has the power to punish and pardon depending on whether they succeed or not. In fairy-tales such a person is the one who gives the gifts – Old Mother Frost, Baba Yaga – they reward the hero and punish the anti-hero. In real life this is a wise mentor who feels “like an old grey dog” when looking at cocky young people. The main challenge of this stage for a woman is to leave the territory where she felt valued, respected and in demand by our unconscious society when she was young.

      Unfortunately, we as a culture are not any more mature and conscious than teenages. Carl Young noted in despair that for the most part our old people try to compete with the

3

Harry van der Zee, Homeopathy For Birth Trauma.

4

Robert Mendelsohn, Confessions Of A Medical Heretic.

5

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.