My 'wild pregnancy' - a practice of patience, love and joy, the question of deservingness and finding nourishing support.

themes: making space, slowing, patience, internal knowing. choosing love over fear, and opening to joy and pleasure.

For me, the sweetest gift of pregnancy is leaning deeply into faith, developing intuition and to be with the mystery of life. The first weeks were a mix of deep internal knowing that I was pregnant interspersed with flecks of doubt. It was a precious invitation to live day by day - ."Today, my bleed hasn't come - Let's see what tomorrow brings". in the Vippasana tradition this is also known as 'Equanimity' which was a skill I learnt in my first pregnancy and used to my benefit in my first birth, which was a freebirth.

The more time that passed the more evident it became that my suspicions were correct. Inklings murmer until they swell and grow into objective truth and with the unfolding of time circumstances reveal themselves. This was my initiation into wild pregnancy; into practicing patience, choosing love over fear, and opening to joy and peace. Those first few months I felt like I was climbing into the womb of life. A quiet, burrow-like darkness surrounding me as I greeted this sparkling little life inside mine. It felt as if our souls were dancing in the unseen breath of the universe, witnessing a tiny, ginormous big bang. In not 'doing' anything to confirm my feelings of being pregnant,  I made space for tenderly greeting this extraordinarily sacred moment of creation. Suspended in time and space, together, for a moment...an experience so intimate and immaculate it pierces the heart.

Throughout pregnancy, I was working the farm, solo parenting most days and feeling extremely low on energy. My dear friend and circle co-facilitator was also pregnant and parenting an energetic 3 year old, which meant that both of us were out of our usual rhythm of holding pregnancy circles. We managed a couple of gatherings but I felt the absence of our usual monthly meet up - sitting in a circle of women and babies sharing stories and drinking tea together. This missing of community support further reinforced the need for these circles for all pregnant women but particularly those walking outside of standard maternity care. To bear new life is an essential act of being human, as is being together with others, celebrating and grieving, singing and dancing and eating. A few times throughout pregnancy I would notice a feeling of lack of support and loneliness. It always came back to wanting a consistent, loving sister or mother figure who could hold me and witness me in my experience. I knew that this wasn't what the available NHS support provided, actually the complete opposite. I processed more grief about not having this provision in our society and then set out to gather the women around me who I did feel held by - friends and sisters who could hold and nurture me with bodywork and a listening heart.

I had a fair bit of what I see as pretty standard discomfort in pregnancy - nausea for about 4 months and with it a desire for the blandest of foods, back spasms which crippled me into all fours, pelvic pain, headaches for weeks on end and thrush. My energy levels were very low. The reason I include this here is to highlight that pregnancy can definitely be uncomfortable, exhausting, and at times - crippling. It doesn't necessarily mean that anything is wrong. Building our ability to be with discomfort is a practice of strength building, and to exercise discernment about what is a problem that can, or should be fixed - based on our own values. This is a process which led me into more awareness and intention about what I was inviting into the new phase of life and strengthening my self knowing. I was walking my rite of passage without bypassing fear, discomfort and unceratinty - which hurt. It also grew and healed me in ways that will continue to become evident many years from now. I have learned that humans will try to avoid a sense of uncertainty at almost any cost sometimes, because it is very uncomfortable. But the essence of practicing to expand ones abillity to be with discomfort is to sit with it, and then to witness it passing. All things pass - this is a universal law. This was a skill that I had been developing for many years before I got pregnant and it is not a case of being uncomfortable for discomforts sake, but rather that sometimes when you want something doing a certain way it takes a level of discomfort to get there. I knew that I wanted a pregnancy in my own body, rather than living from a heady space or in someone else's fear. The body reveals what it needs to heal, and it reveals this through feelings and sensations. This pregnancy revealed a lot of intense sensations and a lot of fearful thoughts.

These days people don't expect you to refuse scans, and would look perplexed and terrified at me when I told them I'm not sure 'what' I'm having (a little baby human, probably). It is somewhat bamboozling to me that in only a matter of decades we have normalised the use of a submarine technology that hasn't propery been tested on humans to blast at our tiny ones in utero...how quickly a technology becomes enculturated. If a result concluded that I had a baby with malformations or abnormalities I would not terminate, so to me there was no point in getting a scan that wouldn't change the outcome and cause us both stress, and indeed could potentially be wrong. My baby's physical form would become evident upon giving birth and in the days, weeks, months and years following. Not knowing the physical form of the baby growing inside my womb, or indeed how many babies were in there provided a continuous practice of curiosity and patience, submitting me into the void of unknown, which could be fun at times too as well as scary.

Once I felt mentally and practically prepared for birthing whoever and however many babies, it was a case of getting relaxed, exploring my internal world, communing with nature, elements, ancestors and God and allowing the great mystery to unfold. As the pregnancy progressed beyond 24 weeks I didn't think I was carrying twins as much, although the thought never completely subsided until many hours after I gave birth and I could safely say there were no more babies coming!

At around 38 weeks pregnant I finally stopped working on the farm, and started to slow down and turn inward. It was then that I realised fear really was dominating my pregnancy. I had been focusing on all the things that I didn't want to happen, and it was time now to swiftly shift my focus on the way that I did want to birth. There was a block in my psyche though that was keeping me stuck in fear and not allowing me to dream. I had felt so grateful for carrying this baby after a previous loss, that I felt I did not somehow deserve to ask for more. It would be too jammy to have a baby and a beautiful birth, right? And if that wasn't enough I also felt that having had a wonderful freebirth with my first child meant that I couldn't get to have another equally wonderful experience. Once I identified this block it was a simple matter of choosing to shift - consciously deciding that I could indeed dream into a birth experience of joy and pleasure. Deservingness simply wasn't a relevant part of the equation. At this point I knew I wanted simplicity, joy and pleasure to be central to this birth, and meditated on this dream with the starry night sky and my ancestors holding and guiding me from above.

To find out how the birth and postpartum went, stay connected for my next blog post...