03/07/2024
What an incredible article (shortened) worth the read written by Debra Pascali-Bonaro!
Exactly how I feel when I help you mothers! 🤗🤰💁♀️
"When I was a new doula, I spent a lot of time thinking of all the things I needed to put into my doula bag-of-tricks.
I began gathering comfort tools: massage lotions and oils, a birth ball, a rebozo, a hot sock, essential oils, music, an electric candle and even a strand of holiday sparkling lights so I could help create sacred birth ambiance.
With everything gathered, I picked up my bulging carpetbag and realized this was a lot to carry. I felt so prepared, trusting the tools I had packed.
Birth after birth I held a hand and spoke calmly and quietly with words of reassurance: You are doing so well! You are strong. Trust your body and your baby! Ride the waves; release. I gently touched wherever she needed the extra pressure—shoulders, lower back and hands and smiled as my bag often sat in the corner. I began to see how it was my continuous reassuring presence, love and care that was my greatest gift. Just being there! Of course, in time all the tools in my kit were gently used, but I realized they had been as much for me to believe I had something to offer than they were for the women and men I served.
Today my doula bag is much smaller. It contains all my personal items. I have learned that to educate and encourage women to pack their own comfort kit helps them to prepare for birth, postpartum, parenting and stress reduction in life.
In my prenatal visits, I help women visualize a sensual, sacred, private event.
This is your opportunity to plan for your birth ambience. Creating the same setting—a romantic, sacred birth environment—will help a woman’s hormones flow and keep birth as safe and healthy as possible. A quote I love by Ina May Gaskin says, “The energy that gets the baby in, gets the baby out!”
In this environment, my role as a doula is to not disturb. I am the keeper of the ambiance: honoring and respecting the woman, her partner, the birth team and keeping the rhythm of labor flowing by running the energy of love and tapping into my own flow of love hormones—keeping myself calm, connecting heart to heart, hand to hand and eye to eye and staying in my intuition and helping the laboring woman stay connected to hers. Just being in my own sacred space encourages her to stay in hers.
Over the years my carpetbag has become lighter and so has my invisible bag. What is my invisible bag? I learned this expression from my dear friend and colleague, Elizabeth Davis. I love how she frames our two bags. The first bag is the one that all birth companions or providers carry, with supplies and comfort measures. The other is our personal baggage of life experiences: times of happiness, joy, sadness, loss and, for many of us, experiences of trauma, neglect or abuse. We may have worked to heal, to find a place for that baggage, yet we always carry all our experiences with us in some form. As I looked at how my life’s baggage interfaced with my work as a doula, I found Amy Gilliland’s work helped me understand how being a doula was also a way to lighten my personal baggage.
I learned how each birth, especially in the first 25 births we attend, is a mirror into our souls—a way to view the birth through our own unique lens. We see what buttons are pushed that are about us, what joys are our joys and, in time, begin to separate ourselves and our baggage until we are totally present for someone else. When else do we so profoundly see the range of one’s emotions and allow ourselves to also be so totally open and vulnerable—to see into someone else’s deepest, most intimate being and accept them and love them with all our heart? Being with women, their partners, fathers, grandparents and friends at this powerful sacred gateway has taught me so much about the baggage we carry through life. I have lightened my load in so many ways. I have learned to love unconditionally, to accept, to trust, to believe and to follow my intuition. The tools I once thought I needed, I found were actually within me all the time. It is the same with you—I hope that your toolkit becomes lighter as you look deeper inside to see your authentic self and learn that being is doing!"
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