The Midwife is a Healer

by Gingi Cleopatri Allen

Modern medicine is overly focused on machines and tests, often producing false positives, as the primary way to support pregnant women. Yet the indigenous way, which honors spirit, mind, and body holistically, is the foundation of health for both the pregnant woman and unborn child.  Blood tests and ultrasounds can only capture a small snapshot of a woman’s condition. They cannot reach the spiritual and mental depths needed to support a truly healthy mother and baby.  

The goal of the midwife as a healer is the preservation of life and the cultivation of physical, energetic, and spiritual harmony.   Holistic health can not exist if any one of these dimensions is ignored.  It is the balance of these parts that indigenous ways of life achieved that can guide modern midwifery back to its rightful pathway as a healing art.  As midwife Elizabeth Davis writes in her book Heart & Hands, “the essence of midwifery care is to be humbly and fully available: an approach antithetical to that of medicine” (p 6).

Modern medicine has corrupted the pregnancy, birth, and postpartum process. Contemporary maternity care has drifted far from its roots in indigenous healing, where women were cared for in community, respected, honored, and supported in a holistic way.  Today, we must choose an approach better than what the colonized way of life has done to women and families.  The United States has some of the worst maternity outcomes among “industrialized nations”. Care now relies on OBGYNs and hospitals, as though their knowledge and practices were the highest form of care, even though they are relatively recent, and were originally taken from indigenous midwives and then distorted.  It is the ancient wisdom of the midwives, who were the first healers for women in all stages of their reproductive lives, that has proven to be the most complete form of care.

The challenge for the modern midwife is to integrate indigenous healing with today’s modern medicine. Anne Frye describes “the postmodern midwife” as being scientifically informed: “she knows the limitations and strengths of the biomedical system and her own, and moves fluidly between them to serve the women she attends” (p. xix Holistic Midwifery).  Humility is an important essential foundation in indigenous healing.  The midwife must possess this humility, allowing herself to be broken down by the work and then rebuilt by the lessons.  Humility keeps her open to the unseen forces, the parts that she can not control as a human being, beyond diagnostic tests, labwork, and textbooks. 

It is the modern midwife’s task to use modern diagnostic tools through an indigenous perspective, combining them with ancestral practices that keep mothers and babies healthy, sound of mind, emotionally stable, and physically strong.  She must revere the sacred trinity of holistic health: body, mind and spirit.  She must honor the sacred trinity of father, mother, and baby; pregnancy, birth and postpartum; past, present and future. All of these trinities must be taken into account in midwifery care for the best possible outcomes. She must develop a paradigm that encourages natural health, connection to the Earth’s medicines, self-love, acceptance, and a reverence to the divine world with attention to ritual and ceremony that honors each trimester of pregnancy and postpartum.

“Midwifery is a way of life, both grueling and transformative… It works a woman on all levels, either disintegrating her or bringing her to essence” (p. 249 Heart & Hands).  The midwife must commit to her inner work before and continually during her practice.  Her learning and evolving never end. Her mental and emotional patterns, her childhood wounds, must be addressed before she can sustainably support another person’s mental and emotional patterns.  

The midwife recognizes the sequentiality in her own life: her birth, the way she was parented, her coming-of-age and sexual experiences, her partnerships, conceptions, pregnancies, births, and postpartum journeys.  She understands that it is the sequence of everything in her life, and even the lives of her parents and grandparents, that shapes who she is and how she has become.  She uses this knowledge to inform her ego (her understanding of herself and how to better herself through humility and honesty).  She understands that relationships are mirrors, and that each relationship exists to teach her about herself.  Each client, every pregnant mother, reflects aspects of herself that she must also tend to, work on, acknowledge, and transform.

Because the midwife knows that relationships mirror the inner world, she understands that a client’s resistance to sacrifice is normal. At the same time, she knows it is her own reflection, her own example, that will support the mother to do her own internal work of betterment before the child is even born, so that less hardship and grief is passed into the child’s life.  The midwife must use compassion to reach her client, while shutting down her own emotional channel so that logic can guide sound decisions and recommendations, regardless of the pregnant woman’s emotional state.  It is how the midwife is with her clients, her presence, her steadiness, that builds trust and a doorway for the mother’s transformation. 

There is immense sacrifice required of a midwife.  One is called to be a healer, and no matter how many times she may try to turn away from that life, the calling returns.  It is a life mission that must be fulfilled.  The midwife must be prepared to make the same kind of sacrifices she recommends the pregnant mother to make in her daily life. She may be up all hours of the night and day.  She may be called away from her own family and loved ones, missing special celebrations.  She must cultivate a healthy sleep regimen and a self-care practice that includes a spiritual foundation, so that she has the strength to sacrifice on behalf of mothers and babies.   

There are spiritual contracts that the midwife makes with the unborn child and with the ancestors, and she must live up to them.  She is called to the work not because she seeks validation, but because she recognizes this path as the one her ancestors have set for her.  She must be in good relationship with the Earth, caring for it, trusting it and calling upon its power to guide her work.  The midwife knows her guidance is strong when she is rightly aligned with the Earth and her ancestors.  

She also understands that “the birth process involves complex physiological, as well as psycho-emotional, sexual, and spiritual aspects.  The biochemistry background necessary to understand the physical aspects of this process is complicated and beyond the scope of daily midwifery knowledge” (p.245, Holistic Midwifery).   The sacred trinity of mind, body, and spirit is a lifestyle to which the midwife must submit everyday. 

Not shying away from sacrifice is one of the most important steps in becoming a midwife.  A midwife must sacrifice time, energy, personal desires, and more. It is not just a job one does on the side; It is a full dimension of her being.  There is no clocking in and clocking out of the role.  From waking to sleeping, the midwife receives messages when she is in alignment with the natural and spiritual worlds, and she uses these messages to help her function properly as a healer.  To remain mentally and emotionally stable for her clients, she must face her fears, her  grudges, her own “mother wound”. 

The “mother wound” is a big concept in modern psychology.  It refers to the way a person has been wounded by their mother’s attachment style, her capacity to respond to the child’s requests, needs, and desires during pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and the first years of life.  In modern society, this concept places almost all focus on the biological mother.  In indigenous society, however, there are many mothers (many aunties), who share responsibility for caring for the baby or child.  With this shared responsibility and way of life, the child’s needs are more likely to be met, since it truly takes a village to raise a whole human being, with spirit, mind, and body in balance.  

In such communities, every person has a unique and special role in society.  Everyone is honored for their contribution.  In this way, no child is left behind.  Children are not encouraged to fixate solely on the ‘wound’ they received from their mother; the emphasis is on spiritual evolution, family, and gratitude.  Instability comes when individuals obsess over the “mother wound” and become more needy, focusing on lack rather than on gratitude and on how to evolve spiritually through challenge. This creates depression and a false reality.  Because of wounds and traumas, people end up distancing themselves from their families, from ancestral wisdom, and from the ways their bloodlines lived before them.  This mental and spiritual state is common in the modern world.  

The evolved midwife in the modern system does not live in blame, of her parents or of the system.  She looks at herself.  She faces reality, and makes sound decisions from that place.  She focuses on her own evolution so that she can be of service.  In this sense, she becomes an egoist in the healthiest way: one who studies herself deeply in order to grow.

As midwives become more in tune with their way of seeing and accessing knowledge, they experience what Anne Frye describes: "experienced midwives report that certain emotional, mental or physical signs and sensations of their own are reliable indications of the mothers progress in labor, particularly when it comes to the onset of pushing… the more open you are to your chosen spiritual path, the more attuned you will be to receiving these messages and the better you will be at applying their context to clinical situations" (p.413, Holistic Midwifery).

The midwife uses her ‘heart and hands’ to see.  Her heart, kept as pure as possible, not heavy with grudges or sadness, becomes part of her intuition and guidance from the invisible world, and part of her inner balance between mind and emotions.  Her hands carry the technical healing skills passed down from elders: how to be with and care for the woman and baby.  Her perception arises from all her past experiences, her education, and the way she was parented. Together, these create a knowing and eventually a wisdom that she uses to guide her clients.  

“The way in which one is educated has everything to do with how you practice, how you define yourself professionally and politically” (p, 220, Hearts & Hands). The midwife’s vision works through her hands, through what she feels and knows to be true.  Her eyes help her clinical judgement on the client’s health.  She uses a sacred trinity of sight and knowing: seeing, vision, and perception, to guide her care.

When a midwife is in true balance with herself and the Earth, she becomes a vessel capable of accessing knowledge to heal her community.  She is able to “decipher the unique and fluid patterns of each other’s health status” (p.5 Hearts and Hands). She uses all her abilities, ancestral, spiritual, and technical, dwelling in her heart, hands, logic, and connection to the invisible world, to find the right remedy for each client.  Her humility keeps her in constant self-reflection, always learning how to evolve and be better.  She knows her heart must be clean so she can focus on caring deeply for the mother, child, and whole family.  

Today’s midwife must choose to follow the path opened by her ancestors and the divine world, rather than the colonized modern world that often does more harm than healing.  For those who say yes to this pathway of healing, they must understand that it will be a life of challenge and sacrifice, in which their heart and hands, guided by spirit, will lead the way.