
06/09/2025
Ocean within, ocean without.
Here i am in my second (first picture), third (second picture) trimester, and just as birth is beginning to surge through me (third picture).
It was amazing to go through pregnancy and birth after first being a doula for 13 years. My friend put it beautifully, that I was "apprentice to birth" for many years. Being at births has shaped my life profoundly. Birth is an incredible teacher, initiator, for all present. Every birth is different, but the portal energy is there each time, and it is a wild mystic.
As a birther, you won't come out the same person as who you went in. Birth will change you, re shape you. And that's how it's meant to be! To birth you have to go deeeep. That depth changes things. It will also show you your patterns, show you what's healed and unhealed, holding up a powerful mirror, bringing treasures up from the underworld in a myriad of ways.
In late pregnancy, on the edge of this wild mystical depth, I felt like I was approaching the crest of the most intense roller coaster in existence. True preparation was never from the books I read or what I "knew." It was the extent to which I was able to inhabit my body. To feel uninhibited, to move as the primal demanding, to sound as the primal demanded. It was how much I could empty myself of myself, to enter trance, and to trust the safety of my environment. A safety that enabled me to go into the underworld.