Embracing The Sanctity of Birth Through a Spiritual Lens
Since 1997, Maha Al Musa, birth educator and birth activist has been teaching her unique brand of childbirth education, EmbodyBirth to mothers and birth professionals.
Maha’s offerings have stemmed from two streams of understanding.
Firstly her Middle Eastern cultural roots. A connection to her ancient feminine lineage for birth and mothering and her integration of this into her Western upbringing. The best of both worlds.
Secondly her three as nature intended birth experiences which have further informed her birth work. The last birth in 2008 was a home water lotus birth bringing her beautiful daughter Aminah Earthside. Maha then took her breastfeeding advocacy into the worldwide media breastfed her daughter till she was 7.5 and Maha 53.5. She wanted to show the world not only the beauty of breastfeeding but also the need for society to accept and understand all mothers choices.
Maha has walked the road of mothering with an empathetic heart for all women’s experiences. Her offerings are rooted in her appreciation that birth is mother / baby centred and that they are the experts of the experience. The foundational roots of her work is to bring women home to their own heart, hands wombs and babies through the pregnancy, birth and mothering journey. It is here that she believes humanitarian changes towards a more peaceful and compassionate world has the opportunity to manifest. Humanising birth starts with respecting mothers, babies and families choice and consent without coercion and power over tactics.
Maha has always said that if we trust in birth birth will trust in us. She sees the journey of a thousand steps as a place where the river of many mysterious and unseen energies meet. Birth is a physical, emotional, energetic and spiritual experience that dances within life force, birth and sexual energy, with mother and her baby. These configurations cannot be compartmentalised nor fragmented, interfered in or manipulated. She shares that in childbirth that which is hidden can have deep resonance if we can understand birth as a somatic practise. We also cannot profess to know it all nor are we supposed to. Maha says in her trainings and classes “know all then let it all go – allow the mystery (my story) to unfold”.
Much global childbirth preparation and education omits this potency especially if only reliant on a medical appraisal – a view stuck in absolutes. A birthing woman and her baby are togetherness personified. They are a living breathing dyad perfumed by many different fragrances unfolding in every moment of birth. We need to be mindful in our need to control and ask ourselves why the desire to box a mystical experience? Mystery cannot be assembled into logic and reason for the comfort of society. The harder we try to manufacture and mould the less successful. Birth is like a bird it needs wings to fly free without the fear of being captured.
When we can begin to understand the true nature of birth from this unlimited perspective it will naturally ask of us to respectfully stand back and allow the unique song and dance of every mother and child’s rhythmic flow to unfold in its own pace and timing. Then and only then will childbirth be looked upon through the window of dignity. Being in this infinite allowance where the spaciousness of birth can show her colours we will find the diamond. It’s light will shine upon all of humanity to reveal to us that this is where Love lives.
