Mindful Postpartum Planning
Awakening Your Client’s Inner Parent
Session One Resources
Archetypes of Birth: Overview
We can think about archetypes as innate, universal prototypes, each with its own group of associated memories, ideas, and interpretations. They can be thought of as built-in parts of our psyches, just like a liver or a heart are built-in parts of our bodies. It can be helpful to remember that a person is not a single archetype. Many different archetypes are alive in all of us, but often a person will move from within just one or two archetypes at a given moment or in a given context.
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The Heroic Journey of Birth
The heroic journey is a story of personal transformation that has been used for thousands of years. Birth is also a heroic journey!
Ceremony and Celebration: Rituals of the Return
“In the West, other than the six-week postpartum exam,
few rituals mark the postpartum Return.”
- Ancient Maps for Modern Birth
Research rituals of the return from around the world. (Pay specific attention to seeing what you can find within your own cultural lineage.)
These are rituals that honor the soul journey that parents have been on and recognize the thresholds at which they are standing NOW -- rituals that celebrate the integration of new self-knowing. Some examples include Closing the Bones (Mexico and Morocco), Groaning Table (Great Britain and U.S.), and postpartum lying-in periods.
What else?
What makes a good ritual of the Return?
Acknowledges the threshold being crossed.
Focuses on the parent(s), not the baby.
Awakens adult archetypes (self compassion, doing what needs to be done, or mindfully letting go of something) instead of reinforcing child archetypes (redoing a birth experience, trying to make things pretty, upholding the idea that things should be as they were before birth).
What ritual(s) could you bring to the parents you work with? Be mindful, here, of cultural competency, cultural appropriation, and crediting of sources