I started this a while ago and so far have a whole stack of drafts that I haven’t posted yet, because I wanted them to be ‘good’ (perfect 🥴). I wasn’t done with them and I essentially created my own friction point because I was trying to be an editor, a curator and a marketer all as I was writing… and generally, that doesn’t work for me.
There’s a small part of me that’s mad about it, friend. I know better. And yet, I still fall for my own conditioning. Sigh. It’s a practice. I’m learning. So… I’ve resolved to write first. I’ve scheduled some regular writing time. Next, I’ll come back and edit etc. I don’t know if it makes sense to share this, honestly… except that I do see something similar happen with new birthworkers all the time.
It’s a practice. I’m learning.
They’ve signed up to become birthworkers because they’re excited about birth or concerned about perinatal outcomes and want to help mitigate that. They take a training that, let’s be honest, tends to be focused on how to be a doula and less on the practice of being a doula. Folks leave those trainings expecting to be ready for a full time birth practice without much entrepreneurial guidance. Then to top it all off, they learn that birthwork is spiritwork, birthwork is lifework… and it isn’t about ‘saving’ birthing people or ‘fighting’ for them after all.
It’s about witnessing folks as they move through their experience. It’s about offering the information that’s asked for or helping folks find it. It’s about honouring their wisdom, their knowing, and their choices. It’s about dealing with your own stuff so it doesn’t enmesh and entangle with theirs. It’s about creating an enterprise or practice that allows you to take care of yourself so you can show up how you want to, for as long as you choose to.
One of the recommendations I make the most is to make space for the inevitable overwhelm. Give yourself the grace to fuck it up AND take some time to hold space for yourself, offering yourself the same grace and care you offer others so that you can integrate and release. Some practices I’ve found helpful in coping with overwhelm include breathwork, braindumps and finding focus by getting clear and choosing how I want to move forward. Like many things in life, it takes practice and a willingness to get it wrong and try again (and again and again and again).
Give yourself the grace to fuck it up.
Once you’re past the overwhelm, it can be helpful to consider what rhythms you naturally move in and think about how to create a practice that honors that. When are you in a season of rest or a season of activity? What activities can you group together, for the most ease? Figuring out your systems, both as an entrepreneur and as a space holder, may not seem like a way to directly help mitigate perinatal outcomes, but anything that allows you to show up how you want to is worth investing time and effort in.
I know folks like to talk routines and schedules but the demands inherently attached to them are rooted in the CCWSD (Colonial Capitalist White Supremacist Delusion) and I am no longer willing to tolerate that. Routines and schedules, in my experience, expect folks to always be the same - to have the same amount of time, energy, willingness and resources, to behave and respond the same way, every time. Life doesn’t work like that. Least of all in birthwork and entrepreneurial work. There are seasons of busyness and seasons of rest, seasons of courting work and seasons of recovery. The rest of the planet and the life on it seems to have accepted that, why can’t we?
What rituals are you currently practicing? I don’t mean anything religious or ceremonial, necessarily, although they can certainly be a part of this. But what practices do you notice support you in your rhythms? What markers do you have to conclude or begin certain activities or periods? A ritual is essentially a practice that may involve certain words, objects, actions, gestures, movements etc that are performed in a particular sequence. Perhaps they’re connected to traditions in your family, culture or heritage or maybe they are ones that you’ve created yourself. All of these are valid. They can also exist outside of anyone else’s experience but your own.
Bringing ceremony into our daily lives can be so helpful in giving us a place or moment to center, to ground, to land back into this body, in this moment. Even as we’re navigating making sense of the past or planning for the future, it is vital that we continually come back to this present moment to choose how we want to move forward now. Perhaps it’s that herbal bath you take as you prepare to meet a client, that pause at your ancestral altar when you get home or maybe that hike you take the day after a birth, knowing you need to be outside, with the Earth, to integrate what you’ve witnessed and held. All of it is ritual.
I invite you to consider how rhythms and rituals could support you in your practice and life. If you are inspired to share what comes up for you, I’d be delighted to hear it.
This was beautiful. I have been wanting to create more ritual and rhythms in our lives but have felt lost as to where to begin.