| Dear Kaitlin,
The weeks leading up to the beginning of another round of The Radical Birth Keeper School are always filled with opportunity and creative energy. Not only are my team and I focused on getting the word about enrollment out to as many women as possible, but Yolande and I also love to offer free learning opportunities to those who are just now finding us and familiarizing themselves with the work we do.
We are currently in the middle of presenting three free classes to the public. The first took place this past Sunday and was dedicated to the topic of authentic midwifery, because there is SO much confusion regarding what exactly an authentic midwife is. Luckily this is one of our favorite things to talk about, both on our platforms and in our school.
You can catch the replay and register for our next two classes HERE.
First things first.
Is an authentic midwife a licensed midwife? By our opinion — No. Absolutely not. An authentic midwife does not find her loyalties divided, and thus she answers to no one aside from the birthing mother who requested her presence.
In fact, Yo and I believe that licensure is a major hindrance to a midwife’s ability to practice motherbaby care authentically and with absolute integrity. Our collective experience working in the birth world that lies outside of the system has shown us that authenticity in midwifery has absolutely nothing to do with licensure or certifications - other than the fact that it is marred by them. It does, however, have everything to do with being clear, congruent, honest, and devoted to birth,and mothersbabies.
This understanding led us to develop a framework within which we can thoroughly and openly discuss what we have determined to be the most important facets of an authentic midwife. We call this framework The Eight Pillars of Authentic Midwifery, and they are the most critical components of radical birth keeping and serving women. Many who have learned these pillars go so far as to say that they are critical components of living an authentic life whether or not midwifery is your calling! We agree - these are foundational.
Sunday’s class provided us with a container within which to discuss the Eight Pillars outside of the school, and I couldn’t pass up the chance to share them with my email subscribers, too. Your continued support of me, Free Birth Society, The Radical Birth Keeper School and my many other varied endeavors is what fuels me to keep visioning a better world for motherbabies; a world that they can thrive in; a world that sees their sanctity and does everything it can to preserve and protect it.
These Eight Pillars are foundational to answering a call as holy as birth-work, and they are as follows:
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SELF-AWARENESS
This pillar weaves wonderfully into all of the pillars, and that’s why it’s first. Do you know who you are? Are you aware of your philosophical orientation to birth, life, and spirit? Have you explored exactly where your boundaries lie? Having self-awareness as an authentic midwife means that you understand what motivates you and what your hidden and unconscious agendas are. A woman who has fine-tuned her self-awareness has the skills to bring what lies in the unconscious out into the conscious. She has investigated her own inner workings to learn just how clear she is on who she is, and exactly how high caliber she can be when it comes to truly serving women with integrity.
Part of developing one’s self-awareness is understanding exactly where you are, when you are suffering and in drama. For this, we’ll use the Drama Triangle. The Drama Triangle (which is made up of the Victim, Villain and Hero) is a way to place ourselves honestly when we are co-creating drama in our lives. Accurately and honestly placing where we are in the drama triangle helps us to stop lying, first to ourselves, and then to others. When our blind spots become visible, life becomes smoother, and there is increased flow. In a state of flow, all other pillars unlock, and we have a greater skillset, and therefore confidence, in our ability to stay aligned in our own self-awareness and act from a place of awake consciousness.
HONESTY AND TRANSPARENCY
In regard to midwifery, honesty and transparency specifically refer to the ways we represent ourselves to the mothers and families who seek our service. An authentic midwife is very clear about her background, education, and firsthand experience attending births - even if she has fear of being rejected for her lack of experience in birthing spaces, or, on the other hand, for her abundance of experience attending births in the system. An authentic midwife speaks and presents who she is from her lived and embodied experience. She knows that she will be hired for who she is, and the more in alignment she is with herself and with truth, the more likely it is that she will be hired. Further, the more likely it is that she will be hired by the correct families who are perfect for her - the real her.
Honesty and transparency also mean being impeccable with your word, knowing how to identify full-bodied yeses and nos, and knowing how to renegotiate agreements that are out of alignment. When honesty is avoided, it is often because we are manipulating others to gain their approval. This is pretty common, but it does not align with truth, and therefore prevents authenticity. An authentic midwife seeks truth, and aligns with it always.
INTEGRITY
To have integrity means to be in wholeness. It means both having awareness of your energy management and taking responsibility for that. It also means congruency, your insides match your outsides. It requires that we know which of our activities vitalize us and which drain us. When living from a place of integrity, you choose to do less of what drains you because you know that the unconscious uses these drains to avoid living the life we say we want.
A woman who lives in integrity owns her mistakes and chooses differently next time. Doing so is choosing to live in a state of integrity, and it allows her to stay in her own business as opposed to meddling in the business of others or trying to control that which belongs to God. An authentic midwife doesn’t meddle; rather, she concerns herself with her own energy management because she knows the best way to affect change in her circumstances and environment is to embody the energy she wishes to surround herself with.
REVERENCE
To revere birth is to exercise and embody a profound respect for birth. An authentic midwife speaks her reverence into action and reveals her faith in birth through both her words and behavior. She respects birth as a spiritual experience, and unwaveringly trusts the birthing women.
When you effectively express your reverence for your work, birth, and mothersbabies, you awaken something that lies dormant in the general population. Your reverence is contagious. Pairing this passionate energy of exaltation alongside integrity is incredibly potent. Fear is no player in the game of reverent birth-work. Only devotion and love take part in the leadership of an authentic midwife.
DEVOTION
Devotion, when it comes to authentic midwifery, is essentially synonymous with loyalty. When we are truly devoted to birth and motherbabies, we are unwilling to be governed by any institutional body whatsoever. Attempting to express devotion to the mothers we are in service to while also answering to a governing authority means that our devotion gets diluted, or simply dissolves altogether. Answering to an authority figure outside of ourselves and outside of the mother invites the energy of dishonesty, manipulation, and fear into the birthing space.
AUTONOMY
Intimately intertwined with the practice of devotion, autonomy is an essential pillar of authentic midwifery. Functioning independently as a midwife is required because it preserves every other pillar and maintains authenticity in your practice. There is no devotion without autonomy, nor is there full integrity, transparency, or self-awareness. Autonomy inherently makes way for alignment because our strings are not able to be pulled by outside “authority” figures.
The only authority in birth is the woman herself, and the only one authorized to speak to its needs in the birthing space is the mother allowing it to unfold within her very own body, in accompaniment with her baby who has their own energetics to bring to the experience. An authentic midwife knows this, and her autonomy serves to protect motherbaby from unnecessary and often detrimental outside interference.
SELF-RESPONSIBILITY
We live in a culture where self-responsibility is discouraged, and dependence on outside authorities and the inverted validation they give is valorized. Because of this, it can feel dangerous to step into self-responsibility. Women then find themselves enmeshed in a culture of victimhood, which places them ever further away from their own self-awareness. Being self-responsible makes you an outsider in today’s society, and this can be confronting.
An authentic midwife who has explored the Drama Triangle within herself does not fear confrontation. She knows the role of victim is available to her but does not choose to partake in games of hero-ed belonging. Her embracement of self-responsibility shifts her relationships in an uncomfortable way at first; this is a necessary part of aligning to truth. But she does not fear the shifts. She knows that she is responsible to and for herself, and no one else. Serving a mother does not mean taking responsibility for her, but it does require knowing how to take responsibility for oneself. She understands she is responsible TO the mother, in the agreements she has made to her, but never FOR the mother, because the mother is, of course, a full grown adult.
KNOWING BIRTH
What does it mean to know birth in a culture that pathologizes it? It means to be able to differentiate between the truth of birth and the many lies that are told to hide its power from us all. An authentic midwife has a fundamentally different way of seeing birth and knowing how it works. She understands the landscape of birth and can hold a shamanic field of guardianship for motherbaby as they do their work.
To know birth is to honor and respect birth, as well as to recognize how the term “physiologic birth” has become distorted in the overculture. While an authentic midwife certainly informs herself as to the ways in which the body manifests the birth process, she does not pride herself on this knowledge alone. Rather, she uses her contagious words of reverence to speak to its power and inform her community of the many treasures that lie within its unhindered unfolding.
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As the Eight Pillars show us, an authentic midwife is deeply familiar with herself and her inner workings - and she loves and serves herself and her community all the more for it. This depth of knowing oneself allows a woman to be truly unafraid of birth (and all of life!) and the many unknowns it presents, primarily because she is unafraid of herself and is able to trust the cyclical processes of birth, death, and rebirth as they have occurred within her own body and personal evolution.
An authentic midwife is present and resourced.
A woman in a loving state of trust and servitude truly does serve women, not the system, and she knows exactly why. The system has no reverence for life, nor is it devoted to joy or true love-based pleasure. The system is based on an outdated and violently methodical medical paradigm that does nothing more than diminish the power of life.
The Eight Pillars of Authentic Midwifery help women in this role to continually hold themselves accountable while maintaining autonomy from that which serves no one. This is a required part of society’s collective rebirth.
To create freedom, we must become free, live free, birth free, and die free.
We’re here for it.
Using the Eight Pillars as guideposts to refine one’s energetic presence in their wise-woman role will help those of us birthing the new earth to do so with grace and humility. An authentic midwife knows that humbling ourselves at the altar of birth is a necessary part of the journey, and she is always ready to do the work. (Or, when she quits, she gets back on the horse a thousand times over, if you catch my drift.)
Enroll with The Radical Birth Keeper School this fall to go even deeper into all eight pillars while also learning about the business of birth-work and birth itself. In the meantime, sign up for the next two free online classes with Yo and me; the next one is scheduled for August 24th and is all about self-sabotage, jealousy, and professional dynamics in birth-work. Hope to see you there!
In Authenticity,
Emilee and the FBS Team |
