The power to give birth originates in the creative life spirit birthing all, the seen and the unseen.

but I really missed going to church. I longed for a viable means of marking significant milestones in life. I missed having a way to honor the rites of passage and rituals of life: weddings, funerals, births, and deaths. I yearned for a spiritually conscious community that welcomed my intellectual curiosity, honored the wisdom found in all world re

Rhythm, ritual, and rest not only aid birthing women, but they also support all of us to move skillfully through our life’s labors.

My college professors served as wise academic mentors, but I needed spiritual support.

Over the first year of his life, I deeply reflected upon the connections between birth, breath, and death. After breathing my way through fear, I found myself in a place of profound and visceral love, the most precious of life’s gifts. Motherhood is its own threshold.

skilled comfort

Let us draw strength from birthing women who embody the goddess in her glory. Let us engage with our passions and birth our dreams. Let us meditate on the miracle of our own births. Let us honor the women who, through their very bodies, bestowed on us the gifts of life and life’s companion gift, the mystery of death.

Through the bodies of women, we are all born into time and space. Each one of us must also walk through that great, uncharted door of death.

In particular, I loved introducing my students to the scholarship of Joseph Campbell. Together we applied his three-tiered description of the classic hero’s journey to the process of birth. In Campbell’s description, a hero departs from the known world; experiences various trials, revelations, and fulfillment; and finally returns to the community b