A woman who fills rooms and hearts with
so much love and energy can never really die. Jeannine Parvati
Baker won't be there to answer emails or phone calls but
don't ever doubt that she gets all messages from our dreams
and our ecstacies. Our friend, our sister, and our champion
Jeannine is now in HER lap. ~ Susun Weed, 11th of Dec,
'05
Remember Me:
Sacred Ground The Deep Ecology of the Family
Copyright © Jeannine Parvati Baker
Author of Conscious
Conception http://www.wisewomanbookshop.com/
"The primitive experience of the Goddess
is not one of fear and torment, it is one of perfect familiarity
and respect. When the Nez Perce Indians of North America
were presented with the prospect of agriculture as a means
of survival, their spokesman, Smohalla, very rightly replied:
‘My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot
dream and wisdom comes in dreams. You ask me to plough the
ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's breast?
Then when I die I cannot enter her body and be born again.
You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be
rich like the white man. But how can I cut off my mother's
hair? It is bad law and my people cannot obey it. I want
my people to stay with me here. All the dead humans will
come to life again. We must wait here in the house of our
ancestors and be ready to meet in the body of our mother.’"
(Caitlin Matthews, Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom, 25)
The devastating decline in the quality of
our environment dovetails with the degeneration of the psychological
sensitivity to conception, birth and the breastfeeding period
in technocratic cultures. Co-arising with psychotherapy
in these last few generations is the medicalization of the
perinatal experience. How has psychology (unwittingly) contributed
to the decline of childbirth and our planet?
Birth has been removed from the sacred ground
of home and brought to hospital. The separation from the
spiritual context of family and community has lent its imprint
to life's beginning. Treated largely as a manageable physical
event devoid of mystery, obstetrics has transformed woman
into an object from which the patient is extracted. Coincidentally
our planet has been transformed from living source, our
sacred ground, into a thing to exploit.
Psychology, in its behavioral, scientific
modalities, likewise emphasizes subject/object relations
and child developmental models, fixes symptoms on the Procrustean
bed of the dominant culture, and shores up the ego's illusion
of linear time (to name just a few ways theorists and therapists
contribute to ecological disaster).
Pre and perinatal psychology would benefit
by revisioning its theories in the light of partnership
culture. Conscious conception and freebirth focus on a sacred
sexuality, which is gender balanced and remembers our integral
relationship with the earth. A deep ecology of family is
supported by reclaiming the perinatal period from the experts,
be they medical or psychological. Pre and perinatal psychologists
can empower by divesting ourselves from the dominant model
of birth as secular event and reminding one another that
fertile sexuality and the bringing forth of new life is
potentially sacred work.
Honoring the mother as sacred ground, we can
remember that we are of that holy source. Pre and perinatal
psychology holds the possibility of realizing that we are
still related to our original ground. Soul holds us in that
primal relationship and as psychologists and perinatal professionals,
we have the responsibility to remember that healing one
mother, is healing the earth.
Birth offers us the remembrance that each
of us is the One Mother. And who is She? She was Creatrix,
Source, Weaver of Life. From Her breasts streamed the Milky
Way. Now she is anesthetized patient, surrounded by paid
paranoids who, rather than witness the Mystery whence all
life comes, MANage the medical event.
Childbearing offers access into ecstatic dimensions
of consciousness yet how many women and men becoming parents
realize this? The thrust of this presentation focuses on
spirituality (or lack thereof) in technocratic culture and
how this has an impact on the felt experience of conception,
pregnancy, birth and lactation as sexual experience.
In Judeo-Christian culture, which constellates believers
as children of God, embodying mature sexuality is problematic.
Further, in patriarchal religions, woman as powerful creatrix
is also missing. Our dominant religious milieu evokes obstetrics-
doctor as priest to deliver us from our original condition,
which is embodiment through a woman's body, spirit encased
in flash.
"... because of human alienation from
the Ground of our Being, we have developed gender definitions
that are distorted. And then Christians... have legitimated
those gender distortions by settling exclusively into certain
biblical metaphors for God until those metaphors have developed
the force of an idol. We have spoken of God as our Father,
our King, and our Master so exclusively that we have forgotten
the many other biblical metaphors that depict God in ways
that would undercut male primacy and female secondariness
and teach us a partnership model of relating." (Virginia
Ramey Mollenkott, Sensuous Spirituality, 84.)
New body parables that express the creative
power, the wilderness of woman's soul and the holy nature
of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding are sorely needed.
Pleasure and pain must be revisioned through a metaethics
of partnership, in light of the new gender complementariness
rather than dominion and separation. Our fear of pain, the
other gender and a punishing God are related- and traditionally
the opiates of childbirth anesthesia, avoidance of conscious
heterosexuality and religious dogma have been the strategies
employed to distract us from realizing that, from the soul’s
perspective, sexuality is spiritually.
From the current "war on drugs"
to the obstetrical theater, to the church and temple, people
are seeking safety from the raw power of life. Yet birth
is as safe as life gets. The ways we scare ourselves from
being wild woman, mother, midwife and healer are rooted
in fears fed by the dominant culture. To revision God from
being only Father, or Father and Son, or even Divine Parents
can help us become free to be fully inspired lovers, connected
to our power to be our own healers.
If we can embrace ecstasy as original condition, rather
than the Gnostic view that we are imprisoned in matter,
we can be co-creators of this world. Thus empowered as mature,
sexually and spiritually alive adults, we can more effectively
help heal our earth. Rather, if we are like children, where
conception, birth and the postpartum period are things that
happen to us and through which we are rescued from our responsibility,
how effective can we be in changing the condition of our
shared planet?
"Within our own time, the attempt to
reevaluate the birth experience has gone hand in hand with
feminism. It is no longer necessary for most women in the
West to endure the most painful of birth positions which
has been the Western ‘norm’ in hospitals: that
of lying on the back. Creative application of ‘primitive’
birth positions- walking, squatting, and kneeling—have
been adapted by Western women with great results. Birth
is, after all, something a woman does herself, not something
that is done to her.
"We have tended to treat cosmology in
the same way- it has been laid on its back and the forceps
applied to produce a strange metaphorical product. The birthing
Goddess has been replaced by the Father, Son and Spirit.
Physical creations, the Goddess and Woman have been polarized
to the preferred metaphors of mental creativity, the Divine
Masculine and Man.
"The earth wisdom of the surviving native
traditions of our planet speaks of a simplicity which our
world lacks. It is a wisdom which addresses the heart, recognizing
our kinship with each other and the rest of creation. It
is sacramental and incarnational rather than transcendent
in its approach to spirituality. It has humility, which
frequently underscores our ‘civilized’ paranoia.
For the native traditions, the Earth Mother is a reality:
the earth which feeds us and gives us plentifully all that
we need." (Caitlin Matthews, Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom,
24-25)
A spirituality which recognizes that matter
is holy, sexuality is life-force, and the genders are partners
can bring ecstasy back to birth, not as hyperbolic possibility
but actuality. Living ecstatically in the present moment
can bring a greater ability to respond to what presents
itself for healing. This is where spirituality, sexuality
and ecology all converge. Let us take solace in our eccentricity
as pre and perinatal psychologists. This is how circles
work in evolution: as spirals. Outcaste—out of the
circle—cast out—incarnation—birth—death.
Yes. How can anyone be outside the great round of being,
for wherever we are in the journey we are always, already
home.
This is my organizing question: When will
the Goddess return to our culture?
"When every woman can deliver naturally.
When we hold women high enough to have true respect for
women’s bodies & power of birth, the Goddess will
be honored. In order for this to happen, we will have to
honor differences in men and women. When sex & birth
become sacred again, and we respect her ceremonies, she
will return." (Hygieia College student)
I say, She is here now already.
In summation, pre & perinatal psychology
cares for the deep ecology of the family through conscious
conception and freebirth, soul-making partnerships at source.
Healing one mother is healing our earth.
Remember Me: Sacred Ground; PPPANA 6th International
Congress
Jeannine Parvati Baker ~ mother, eco-activist,
healer and midwife. Her Master’s work in Psychology
is on female sexuality. Founder of Hygieia College, a Mystery
School for perinatal professionals and others who care about
birth. Co-founder of Six Directions, a nonprofit educational
and charitable corporation devoted to optimal family and
planetary health. Her work has been published several times
in our PPPANA Journal and widely anthologized (see Who Is
Who in U.S. Writers, Editors & Poets, Who Is Who Women’s
International, for a more complete listing).
IN MEMORY
Jeannine Parvati Baker
Wise Woman, Writer, Healer and BirthKeeper
passed from this world
December 1 at 11:11am
Jeannine Parvati Baker devoted her life
to protect the rights of mothers and babies
to enjoy safe, beautiful, nonviolent births.
"As a spiritual midwife,
my primary responsibility
is to empower the mother
to give birth spontaneously."
Jeannine Parvati Baker