Change #14 We Must See the Training of the Birth Peep
as a profound Initiation and the Hero’s Journey
Dear Birth Peeps,
If you were fortunate enough to be trained by kind mentors in a safe and supportive environment that nurtured you through every phase and fumble of your training, consider yourself extremely blessed—your experience is rare—but it has given you an insight and gift that you can share with us as we tackle another change our birth culture is in dire need of.
If you are one of the many who felt broken by your training and perhaps, you feel a part of you is still in that underworld, it is my hope that this week’s letters will be a sliver of light to help you find your way “home.” As we join together, and complete our Return from the underworld of our training-initiation, then, and only then, can we truly be the Ones Who Know, and who can guide other initiates into, through, and all the way “home” from a training process that is in fact a hero’s journey.
There is so much to say about this subject, it may take me several posts to convey it. Rather than attempt to condense it, and trivialize this, I will take my time. I look forward to your responses as we move through Change #14.
First a brief review of the hero’s journey so we can share language and ideas. In general the hero’s journey has three phases, (1) The Call and Preparation, (2) the Ordeal, and (3) the Return. It could be said that your whole life is this journey, and that within our lives we may be blessed to undertake several hero’s journeys through education, relationship, career, and illness.
When someone is drawn to birth work we could say, and often do say, they were “called.” It is not a “job” that kind of “falls in your lap,” you are called to it, you are compelled to choose, and re-choose, it. Don’t think of this Call in a romantic sense, but rather as a soul-calling—it is “soul work.”
What calls the initiate to birth work? Usually it is a tangible event in our life that awakens an interest in birth work, or in a particular aspect of birth work. Some philosophers say it is work we “agreed to do before we were born.” So, at some point we say “yes” to this Call, and off we go!
In Love,
Pam
(copyright(C)2010 Pam England)
Thank you, Pam, for sharing this pair of posts. So timely for me, as I am in the midst of bringing your vision to a group of 29 Birth Peeps in San Diego. Women have come from all over North America to be initiated into birth work as a Hero's Journey, during this 3-day BFW training. They think they came here to help others, to change birth--only to discover that it is themselves they are here to help, to change, from within.
ReplyDeleteToday, as I shared the Hero's Journey Mandala with them, there were wide-open eyes, furious scribblings in notebooks, a few tears, nodding heads, and looks of disbelief, relief, and more.
Such powerful teaching.
All Birth People need this. It is my honor and privilege to be able a part of spreading these seeds far and wide!
~Virginia