Birth as a Soul Experience

Benig Mauger

April 2-4 , 2004

“Everything I’ve learned about soul has been through my work with babies both in the womb and outside. As a mother, therapist and prenatal teacher, I am very aware of how much mothers and babies can be wounded by their birth experience, usually where the labour is medically managed.

“Technology has replaced nature in modern birthing rooms, resulting in invasive birth practiaaces. Hospitals and the medical system tend to view childbirth as a purely physical event to be managed by doctors, but any woman who has given birth and listened to her inner self knows birth is a soul experience. For both the mother and her child, pregnancy and childbirth represent an initiation and a transformation.

The words of the Old Testament ring true: Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Many of us call our babies to us, but more often our babies unborn souls call to us when they decide to incarnate through us. Before you came to birth I consecrated you. Babies come straight from God. You can see soul in a newborn baby’s eyes, for the newborn left the spirit world not long ago. How we make the transition from spirit life to earth life creates patterns that are imbedded in our souls. Understanding the formative nature of our prenatal and birth experience is vital to help us change uncreative or destructive patterns.
 Benig writes: “I was born two months premature and by caesarean section and experienced no bonding with my mother, who developed postnatal depression. I remained in an incubator for two months. The seeds of my work were planted then.’

This workshop has these goals:

• We recover soul through healing our birth wounds.
• We uncover some of the patterns that may have originated in the womb and at birth
• We learn about how archetypal and family patterns are passed on to the baby in the womb.
• We understand how our psychic inheritance, together with our experience of our parents, inform our thinking and behaviour in later life
• We honour the sacred nature of birth and heal the wounded mother archetype so prevalent in our society.
• We be inspired to make informed choices about prenatal and birth care
• We learn ways of creating fulfilling birth experiences
• We reclaim the Spirit of Birth as an empowering and joyful experience.

If we learn to respect nature and the Divine in ourselves, we can begin to look at childbirth with new eyes and conceive of a more holistic, soulful model of pregnancy and birth care.

Benig Mauger founded the Holistic Birth Centre in London in the 1980s. She is a Jungian psychotherapist in private practice in Dublin and is a founding member of Irish Analytical Psychology Association. She is on the editorial board of the International Society of Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine and she lectures and writes extensively from a psychological and spiritual perspective. She is a frequent speaker at National and International Congresses, her work has been published in Europe and North America, she’s becoming involved in broadcast media, and she’s the mother of three children.