YXE Doula - Saskatoon Birth Services
Birth Art
What does art-making have to do with childbirth?
How can it prepare us for the unknown?
How can it help us process our experiences?
Most of a parent's childbirth preparation involves "getting informed" and learning lots of information about pregnancy and labour. Which is a good thing but often parents become distracted about looking forward to how the birth will end up. Even if we have watched videos, read birth stories or birthed a baby previously, each birthing experience is different and we can forget that an essential part of labour involves descending into the unknown.
Birthing From Within's Birth Art Process steps away from intellectual, cognitive or verbal information of what we know and dives into what has informed our ways of knowing and what's already in our hearts and minds. Creating art allows us to go deeper, go underneath our everyday conscious thoughts, and get curious about different symbols and images in life and birth.
Art-making in prenatal preparation or birth debriefing gives each person the experience of moving out of their neocortex and into their creative, intuitive mind, where they can begin to access deeper beliefs, insights, imagery, and solutions than they could in the ordinary beta-brainwave state of alert consciousness. In prenatal childbirth preparation, parents get a taste of the “Labor Land” mindset, as well as the unconscious mind’s ability to generate unlimited possibilities and solutions for any issues that might arise.
In the birth processing aspect Art-making is a profound way to move into and through difficult childbirth experiences.
Art during the childbearing year can do so many things for both parents and birth professionals — things that “traditional” childbirth education classes, birth work training, and so on, often miss.
Facing a blank page can be a bit uncomfortable, maybe to some hopeful-like being in a place of not knowing and noticing what's arising from within. Perhaps observing what happens when we let go of an attachment. An internal, lived process of discovery, creating art can be a way of navigating, digesting information from the outside world and connecting thoughts about what's evolving and integrating on the inside.
This is true preparation for facing the unknown transformations of birth.
Parents experience so many benefits from having Birth Art processes be part of their childbirth preparation – and healing – experiences. Birth Art is an amazing tool that touches each blossoming parent in a unique way.
Birth Processing
Already experienced a birth? Process it through art! So many benefits from having a Birth Art processes be part of childbirth debriefing and healing experiences. For both parents and working professionals. Birth Art is an amazing tool that touches each birthworker or parent who attends.
YXE Doula - Saskatoon Birth Services
Birth Art
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Bring internal stories, judgements, and expectations into the light, where they can be examined and integrated.
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Help us access our subconscious minds, where we may find instincts and coping skills that we had not known that we possessed.
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Give us practice in interacting with perinatal topics without using our intellectual, “book-learning” brains — which will probably not be accessible in labour.
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Give us practise feeling uncomfortable, out of our element, unsure what to do next, out of control, and (literally) messy – and then allow us to watch ourselves make it through anyway.
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Open us to the possibilities that the answers to our birth-related questions may exist within ourselves.
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