Doula Pink Kit Presenter #10

5 June 2007

On 21/1/07 Wintergreen wrote back to Sonya.

'Hi Sonya:

'Great correspondence isn't it. We'll publish this on our blog so others can learn from what we are saying to each other. I never use anyone's full name. But so many people over the years have had similar discussions with me.

Thanks for catching me up on your life. We certainly do live lives! I guess that was the first lesson we all got from the skills that are now The PK Method For Birthing Better®. We have very full lives and all are so different. Focusing on all our stories and differences made it extremely difficult to get anything accomplished in regards to birth. There certainly didn't seem to be anything we shared in common. The Pink Kit Method changed all that.

That's why so many birth stories we hear nowadays are full of blame, shame and guilt. People are trying to fit their full lives into what will happen to them during labour and delivery. Or they expect their birth experience to fit into their full lifes.

For example, women may choose to go to hospital because they feel more secure or safer. She might not want the assessments, monitoring or procedures OR she may want them but not feel comfortable with when they are done OR the woman might feel fine with everything done. Or women may choose home births to try to avoid the 'interventions' or just (as one woman told me) so she could smoke a cigarette after birth. There are so many variations of what people want for their birth and what they actually get.

Curiously once you've heard a zillion birth stories, neither the place or the provider have much to do with how women remember their birth experience. The only reason we hear more horrible birth stories from hospital births is that there are 9999999 of those to 1 of the other. Just multiply that up.

The only way we (the families with whom I worked) could get past, beyond or ignore all the busyness of life, how birth could fit into each of our lives was to limit our focus and have some control of our experience. The only thing we shared in common was our body so that limited our focus to our body and all the things our body does in childbirth. This meant we could discuss the same thing across all borders. Thankfully men share the same one so learning the skills comes so easy for both sexes. This meant we could speak the same language with all women and with the other gender of our species.

The difficulty for CKT is what happens when we work with professionals who are focusing on their own practice and service rather than all their local pregnant families. Each individual provider wants to be perceived of as 'different' from others. They want their distinciveness to stand out. That's why a recent midwife responded to me by saying that she 'teaches the pelvis in her method'. The fact that she underlined that statement is trying to make a point. Her point is that what she is teaching is uniquely different from The PK which it might be. From CKT's view point that's exactly what stops birth from changing and what The PK can prevent.

But because of all the perceived of differences in all our lives, birth providers tend to attract people who think like them or have similar beliefs. The PK just leaps over all the boundaries and ignores the diversities ... rather focusing on what we have in common ... our birthing body. There is now this wonderful resource that all expectant parents can use that gives them the same skills based on how, as humans, we behave and need to behave during this dynamic experience. I didn't make up the skills, little by little we learned bits by paying attention, discussing, talking about, trying, refining and imagining and feeling in our own body. For example, if I say to you 'tighten up your rectum' most of us are doing the exact same thing but we needed to know what that would do during labour, how we could recognize if we were unconsciously doing that and how to not do that.

What is wildly significant is this. If a professional tells us, as women and men, not to tighten up our rectum in labour most of us won't really do that or do it now and again. If we learn it for ourselves based on reasoning out why that's important, then it will become one of our 'focus' skills that we'll use a lot and at every moment of labour. In other words, we become aware and conscious.

Why does CKT not work much with birth professionals? They tend to deliver 'trends' and the flavor of the month and they identify themselves by their beliefs which all of us might not share. Expectant parents believe professionals know things that we can't possibly know because of their training so we never feel skilled enough. Expectant parents can also just disregard them and say 'sure I should do that but when it hurts it's not possible'.

When we learn The Pink Kit skills for ourselves, then we know how to use them because we are aware of our body and have a clear understanding what it takes to work with our baby's efforts to be born.

You've been a love to share with me your personal beliefs and started this sharing with a quote 'Love is an expression of the willingness to create space in which something is allowed to change'.

I'm not certain I personally understood that quote and it's certainly not how I would define the word 'love' but then that's another example of another word we use and assume we all agree on what it means but we often neither know what it means nor agree. A friend of mine many years ago said: 'It's amazing we understand each other at all. There's at least one dictionary definition or maybe more, then our common usage, then the implication, innuendo, connotation and misuse.'

so, what am I trying to say? Well, what CKT has discovered when working with independent midwives/doulas is that all of them have very strong personal beliefs that they bring into their practice. Often they attract clients who have similar beliefs or their personal beliefs do tend to spill over into their practice strongly. This is very natural. We are personalities. This is also partly due to the education or their organization's goals. For example NZ midwives are required to promote 'physiological birth' even though that's a term not defined. Not only that but individual midwives now have to justify why they do a medical intervention and not allow birth to be physiological. Well that's just nuts.

However, The PK skills and resources are not a personality. The message CKT projects is that the resources fit into anyone's personal life and alongside all our differences. The reason this is a Truth is that these are skills based on human physical behaviors and nothing more.

This means that CKT, when we train PK Presenters who are birth professionals, need to get them to drop their personal beliefs, drop their personal practice and service beliefs and put on another hat when they offer The PK presentations that merely leads expectant parents through simple experience samples from several of the PK resources. CKT is not certain we should train birth profesisonals to be PK presenters and we're not even certain we should train presenters at all.

The reality is that expectant parent really don't really care who you are. They care who they are.

When they look for birth providers they try to fit the provider's belief into their own, or the hospital's or birth center etc. And it's often the personality (or style ) that people like or feel disappointed by. Not certain if that makes sense to you?

Keeping the PK outside the realms of personality, style or beliefs is what makes it accepted by so many people. What turns off individual women, men or couples is a lack of match-up between their own personalities and style and their birth providers. That's why you hear so many women say after a birth 'my doctor/midwife was so patient' or 'My doctor/midwife kept insisting I do what I didnt' want to do'. Most comments about birth had absolutely nothing to do with competency or skills.

On one end of the extreme of this personality matching is the typical doctor/patient relationship which has seemed to people to be cold and distant. but that's not actually true.

Doctors do what they do. They have their job and they leave lots of room for women to do their job and fathers to do their job in birth. That room is called 'time'. As you know most women (and their partner) are totally left alone for hours on end. That's lots of breaths in and lots of breaths out to use their own PK skills

Because of this perceived 'distance' between doctors and patients, there was a belief that midwives and doulas would offer families a greater closeness. Yes they do. At the same time all the beliefs, personalities and styles around childbirth have come with that closeness.

Whether this is good, bad, right or wrong I don't know. I certainly know that the amount of time between the onset of labour and a c/s has halved in NZ because of continuity of care. The reliance on midwives or doulas to get people through labour has just risen in leaps and bounds. The belief that all the things midwives and doulas offer will prevent the medical interventions. And all the things (accupuncture, reiki, homeopathics etc) are all things done on women or done to which just cultivates the belief that we can't do birth without these people doing this or that on us.

Indep midwives and doulas are often 'savers' or 'enablers'. They are either trying to save women from 'the medical community' or they are enabling them to be reliant on them by offering them all the bells and whistles. This removes self capability. Instead when families use the PK, they have their own set of skills and then use whatever else they want alongside but will ultimately rely on their own skills during birth. This is what produces the positive births.

Don't have a clue whether any of this makes sense to you, but there you go.'

NOTE:

I just got word that a lovely woman who worked as a midwife in Nelson, NZ has just died. Our relationship was never smooth. She believed she could 'teach' or 'do' the Pink Kit on her clients and tended to treat the message of Common Knowledge Trust has being insignficant. However, her practice had been full of difficulties lately. Andrea, one of the midwives with whom she worked and who inspires her clients to teach themselves these skills, told me of her passing.

Andrea then wrote this to me the next day.

'Let me tell you I have praised your existence and The Pink Kit x3 in 2 days.. I was trying not to be available for births as my head space isn't in it just at the minute but these births were so fast there was no time to find anyone else to cover for me anyway! Even the primp tonight had a 2 hr lab, 10 min second stage..she had the longest labour this week for me.

L. is a Buddhist and the funeral is out at the Buddhist centre in the Moutere...we were thinking of items to send with her. I said to Suzi when it gets to be my turn you bet it will include a pink kit.'

So with great love I farewall a lovely woman and feel sad that we never could come together in a common manner about the Pink Kit.