Three Pillars of Meaningful Postpartum Rituals
By the BfW Team
Postpartum preparation is often full of logistics, gear, and to-do lists. Parents worry about getting the right car seat or stroller, setting up the nursery, finding doctors and childcare providers, and so on – all in time for the baby to be born.
These tasks are important… – but they often overshadow the also-important need for ritual and celebration to mark this time.
Offering ways to incorporate ritual and celebration into postpartum can help parents connect to each other, themselves, their baby, and the bigger transformational experience of birth.
Many cultures have rituals that honor the soul journey of pregnancy and birth, recognize the thresholds at which parents are standing in the early days of parenthood, and celebrate the integration of new self-knowing. We might consider how we might bring such traditional rituals into our own experiences, perhaps particularly those that speak to us from our own cultures.
We can also find meaningful rituals in the smaller actions of everyday life! Breath, tea, mindfulness, walking in nature, lighting a candle, singing a song, artmaking and journaling, having a special bath…the opportunities are plentiful.
Meaningful postpartum rituals will usually…
Acknowledge the crossing of a threshold, the movement into new ways of being.
Focus on the parent(s), not just the baby, taking into consideration the transformational experience that new parents have just been through and the tender state they may be in.
Awaken the inner parent, the parts of us that foster self compassion, do what needs to be done, and mindfully let go of attachments or aversions that may not be serving us in the moment. This is in contrast with activities that might focus on “redoing” a birth experience, making things outwardly pretty without attention to inner needs, or upholding the idea that things should be as they were before birth.
Creating space for ceremony in the postpartum period, even in small ways, allows us to acknowledge and honor the changes that we have been through, as well as the as-yet unknown changes that are to come in our journeys as parents – and as human beings.
