Having never had children the process of a nine month gestation and physical birthing is not something I have personal knowledge of. Yet I have always used the broad stroke of analogy that when in the throes of creation, whether it is a story, a novel, a business or a romance you are in essence giving birth. So I shouldn’t be as struck by the parity as I am each time my client Sheila Kamara Hay, founder of Ecstatic-Birth, shares a snippet of information about the physical birthing process.
The other day as she was describing the course content of her newest telesummit, The Body, she explained that one of the hardest things to adjust to in pregnancy was the flood of new life energy circulating within you.
Made sense to me. Whenever I have embarked on something new I am engulfed with the energy of possibility. An energy that can propel me forward as easily as it can make me stop to take a break and catch my breath.
Sheila explained that for a pregnant women the key to a pleasurable birth process is by learning how to work with that energy, to breathe with it and through it. Now I am sure there are many of you reading this who think the idea of giving birth pleasurably impossible if not ridiculous. That’s what happens with anything that is contrary to conventional thought like Ecstatic-Birth. It’s controversial.
But I’m also sure that you are the same folks who might prescribe to the no gain without pain philosophy no matter what it applied to. That group that believes that if we want to change something or create something new it must include nothing but hard work, long hours and a lot of sacrifice. The idea of fun, much less pleasure is impossible to imagine inserting into the equation.
I can’t tell you from first hand experience that giving physical birth can be pleasurable, but as a student of Regena Thomashauer who happens to be on Sheila’s roster of teachers, I believe that pleasure is an approach that can be applied to any aspect of your life. And birthing, whether actual childbirth or writing a novel is not exempt.
If you think about it when in the midst of building a business something new is bubbling inside of you. While not a physical being, it is percolating nonetheless. It needs nourishment, it needs special care, not just to the project, but to you as the one with the vision. And it gets damn uncomfortable at times. Sometimes it is so exhausting that like a pregnant mom you have to go lay on the couch in the middle of the day and take a nap.
Yet we resist self care when it is a thing we are creating and not a human. We get very serious and forget to laugh. We say we need to write one more page first. We deny ourselves food until we make three more phone calls to the vendor. We over think instead of breathing and feeling. We perform our own triage as to what is most important and needs to be accomplished first and what can wait. We forget what makes us smile.
That’s what I’ve been doing of late. My triage has been in putting this blog at the bottom of my list. With several projects I am juggling simultaneously (details to follow soon) in addition to my coaching clients I have experienced this overwhelming flood of energy within me that some days makes it’s hard to breathe, hard to believe that these things, these ideas I have stored up in my brain are going to be something real. The irony is that in my attempt at triage I forgot how much I like writing my blog. How much I miss it when I don’t. How it fuels me for my other projects, helping to ease everything else through the birth canal. That it is a source of pleasure in my process.
Do you believe in the no pain, no gain philosophy or do you believe pleasure and fun can be part of any creation, including actual childbirth?
Sheila has just opened registrations for her new Tele-Summit entitled The Body. If you are a woman pregnant, thinking about being pregnant or merely fascinated with the birth process, you might want to reserve yourself a seat.
This blog is so HOT!