The worth of having someone to hold a clean container with you as you dive into the depths of the unseen, in life or birth, is unparalleled.
In birth, and also in my own trauma work, I have experienced practitioners who did this well with incredible power + clarity, and I have seen people who hold a container rife with holes. The difference in what this feels like and the results they produce are night and day.
I honestly struggle to put it into words, because this very particular set of emotional skills is not something that is highly valued in our culture, especially not in birth.
We are taught that people are weak and must be saved, especially femmes. We are conditioned out of having the self-awareness + skills necessary to manage our own energy as to not leak into another, or collapse in on ourselves.
My teacher Whapio speaks profoundly about the importance as an attendant of being “emotionally sensitive and unemotionally clear.”
This looks like being emotionally engaged, but also detached. Knowing where you end and the other begins. Without this we risk spilling out into another’s experience, which in trauma and birth work, destroys any sense of safety or anchoring, and leaves folks out to sea with our personal energy like an oil spill around them. Something to field, to clean up, to deal with. Obviously, this is the last thing we want.
We want the people we walk with to feel held, but not coddled. Supported, but not saved. Powerful, but not empowered by us.
Anything else subtracts and traumatizes. Our standards around our own emotional/spiritual work as attendants must be impeccable, for when some pain of our own is activated, our presence threatens to endanger others.
We must do our work to hold a container as clear as glass and strong as steel. Because the people who choose to birth autonomously deserve nothing less.
The mama in these photos needed nothing more than to be loved on and held in a solid, sacred container of trust and reflection to birth her 10lb4oz sunny side up baby boy. There is no bigger joy as an attendant to witness someone embody fully their power, with no one taking one single bit of it from them by word or action. This mama shared with the both of us present the greatest gift.
