Elizabeth Feldman and Amy Schuman share how they use ritual to help ease the fears that are a normal part of childbirth.
Throughout history, women tended to the important transits in human life: birth, illness, and death. The unseen acts of women wove communities together by providing care and support at the bedside. Women neighbors assisted in childbirth and washed the newborn child, swabbed the body of the feverish elder, and cleansed the newly dead in preparation for burial.
In Chicago, a group of women has found its own way to reconnect with these ancient female rites, in an energetic creative spirit that is thoroughly modern. Elizabeth Feldman is a physician teaching in a family practice residency program at Ravenswood Hospital, Chicago. Amy Schuman is an organizational development consultant with special expertise in issues relating to families. Both are members of a small, alternative Jewish community, founded almost 15 years ago, which meets for prayer services, holidays, study sessions, and explorations of spirituality. "We started doing rituals around pregnancy and birth simply as a response to our own need for them," admits Feldman. The rituals they create recall the traditional role of women in the birthing process and celebrate the ways that women help each other to confront the fear and threat of loss that even today's relatively safe childbirth cannot fully eliminate. Though the women were familiar with Native American "blessingways" or birth rituals, they relied on no formal structure or tradition in creating their rituals, other than what Feldman calls their "shared experiences of singing, chanting, and praying together."
Reflecting on the process of making these rituals, Feldman says, "We feel deep gratitude. We feel filled up just remembering them!"
The group's first ritual experience together was for their friend Sarah, to help her safely sustain her third pregnancy after two miscarriages. "We always try to gear rituals to specific concerns or blocks a person is experiencing," says Feldman. "One of Sarah's issues was how becoming a mother would radically change her life as an artist. Sarah was very into the color red, perhaps related to the blood of her previous pregnancy losses. So everyone brought some red item — a scarf, candle, flower." Fresh flowers, herbs, and greens symbolized the new life that was developing.
With Sarah in the middle, the women sat in a circle and chanted melodies and songs. They washed Sarah's hands and feet with warm water scented with flower petals and lit candles and set them in nutshells floating in a large bowl of water. "At one point we formed a human passageway and massaged Sarah as she crawled through this loving 'birth canal' and reemerged," says Schuman. "Then we gathered around as she lay on a padded table and stroked and massaged her. We tried to send energy to her gently rounded belly, to her chest and neck, to her lungs to open up her breathing, and to her head, firmly holding both temples and gently pressing on her closed eyes."
The ritual was relatively unstructured, with participants acting as the spirit moved them while a tape played meditative music. But like the best rituals, it created a deep connection to the psyche of the woman being honored: Sarah's pregnancy went full term, and she gave birth to her first daughter eleven years ago.
When the group plans rituals, a few women step forward to be responsible, often those with a special connection to the person being honored. They meet with the honoree to talk about what she wants from the ritual. She shares the issues, challenges, opportunities, associations, fears, and hopes linked to the coming birth. The outline of the ritual begins to take shape as the women identify a color, a feeling, a theme, or an image around which to organize. They try to address all the senses: sight (flowers, scarves, pictures, objects from nature, candlelight, dry ice to create the effect of a mystical fog), smell (flowers, incense), sound (music chosen for the particular feel or theme of the ritual: for a "blue" ritual someone made a tape of water songs and wave sounds), touch (for the blue ritual, blue fabric draped on the floor and chairs), and of course, taste. The rituals almost always end with food, the kind and quantity to be specified by the honore, e.g., desserts that are gooey, white food, hearty food, or natural, uncooked food. For one woman, who had on occasion pampered herself with Belgian chocolates, the food included chocolate fondue, brownies, chocolate cookies, and Belgian chocolate candies.
The ceremonies almost always include the giving of gifts — not store-bought presents but gifts of the heart, they say — stories, poems, loans of treasured objects for the duration of the ritual, pieces from nature or their own lives. On one occasion, a participant brought a bag-amulet necklace containing special objects and a chart for the mother-to-be to perform a "counting ritual" for the ninth month.
Says Feldman, "The entire process is one of pondering the possibilities and letting our spirits find new, fun, meaningful, sensuous ways of expression. Everyone leaves the ritual feeling renewed, not just the person being honored. The energy generated at these ceremonies is inspiring! We feel as though the Divine Presence has dwelt among us."
