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Sophie Messager

Category: love

  • The miracles that happen when you have no expectations

    The miracles that happen when you have no expectations

    As I write this, I just came back from the annual doula retreat.

    This year was my 6th year there.

    I’ve written about the retreat before here.

    Organised by doula Selina Wallis, the retreat is a unique space for doulas and birthworkers to gather and recharge. It’s held in the most magical place. Cae Mabon is an eco retreat located near Llanberis, in Snowdonia. It’s a ten min walk down from a car park located at the end of a dirt road.

    Located on the side of a mountain, with a stream running on its side, and a lake at the bottom, the eco village is composed of dwellings that look like they belong in a Tolkien novel. One of them, in fact, is called the hobbit hut. Low ceilinged, and with grass growing on their roofs, the dwellings are dotted around a clearing in the forest.

    The dwellings are basic, containing about 4 beds each, and there is no running water or electricity in most of them (there is a shared washroom and a gas powered shower, and compost toilets). This maybe off putting for some but for me it’s part of the charm of the place, because it encourages us to spend much time outside.

    The place it’s in is just beautiful, with wild, ancient forests, and nature untouched by humans.

    There is a deep feeling of reconnection with nature, and the place is not only beautiful and peaceful, but it has a lovely, benevolent and calming energy too.

    As well as the huts we sleep in, there is a Viking style roundhouse with fire pit in the middle where we gather to sing songs, drum or listen to stories, from our resident storyteller, Rachel O Leary.

    There is a barn/kitchen with electricity and we take our meals and workshops there too. Someone is cooking for us whilst we’re there, which is bliss in itself for a mother like me.

    And the cherry on the cake is the fire heated cedar hot tub on the side of the stream, in which we hang out at night with a glass of white and put the birth world to rights.

    All of this would be blissful enough by itself, but we also have workshops there.

    I can trace almost every single aspect of the work I do today back to the retreat.

    The first year, in 2013 I attended the Closing the Bones workshop with Rocio Alarcon there. If I had been told back then 6 years later, I would have, together with Maddie Mc Mahon, trained nearly 350 people in offering this beautiful ritual, I would have laughed.

    But back to this year’s retreat and the title of this blog.

    This year I wasn’t as excited as I’d been in years past about the workshops planned at the retreat. We had a singing workshop and a Henna workshop booked. Singing is always lovely but I’ve been singing in a choir for over 16 years so it’s not something that’s new to me. Same with the Henna as we had done this already at the retreat in 2014.

    I was still looking forward to hanging out with like minded spirits in Cae Mabon this year, but I was also a bit disappointed about not learning amazing new skills.

    As with many other occasions in my life, when my expectations are low, it’s usually when I end up having a complete life changing experience.

    It wasn’t part of the official plan but when we got there, Alexandra Wilson, a celebrant, doula and end of life doula, offered to do a talking about the end of life doulaing training that she does, followed by a grief ceremony the next day.

    As with many topics and experiences I know little about, I was curious but not overtly excited.

    I went with my usual curiosity though.

    The talk about death doulaing blew my mind, because Alexandra talked about her experience moving from being a death doula to a birth one and talked about the similarities about the grief in birth and in death, and about the joy too. I didn’t get it so I asked a lot of questions and also for examples. I had never seen it through that angle, and by the end I got the concept of the grief in birth (namely the huge changes for both baby and parents), and for the joy in death too. She presented death in a completely different way to my own mindset. She explained that the more she worked with death the more she saw death as a welcoming big mama rather than the grim reaper most of us have in mind.  It made sense to me, after all, if you believe, like I do, that we are all spirits having a human experience, then all we are doing when we die is returning to the lovely place we came from.

    The grief ceremony blew even more of my mind away. After taking us through a guided meditation through the different doorways of death, Alexandra placed 4 objects representing tears, fear, numbness and anger on the floor and invited those of us who felt drawn to come forward to hold the objects and express their feelings. Something very interesting happened as we all shared loud, messy powerful emotions and tears, without the need to speak, each one of us sending and receiving what we needed. I was reminded of Brene Brown’s book, “Braving the wilderness” when she says that we need to share collective joy and collective pain

    ” Funerals, in fact, are one of the most powerful examples of collective pain. They feature in a surprising finding from my research on trust. When I asked participants to identify three to five specific behaviors that their friends, family, and colleagues do that raise their level of trust with them, funerals always emerged in the top three responses. Funerals matter. Showing up to them matters. And funerals matter not just to the people grieving, but to everyone who is there. The collective pain (and sometimes joy) we experience when gathering in any way to celebrate the end of a life is perhaps one of the most powerful experiences of inextricable connection. Death, loss, and grief are the great equalizers.”

    Alexandra then held the object herself and expressed her emotions loudly and powerfully. I had the realisation that it didn’t matter that I hadn’t gone to hold the objects myself (I had been drawn to so but had hesitated : something had held me back and I had come to understand that others needed it more that day), because when she cried, she cried for all of us, when she screamed in anger, she screamed for all of us.

    I’m 48 years old. I’ve never seen a dead person, because as a child when people died my family sheltered me from it, believing it was the best.

    The grief ceremony felt like it was the most powerful experience of shared grief I had ever had in my life.

    The following day still we had yet another unplanned workshop. A woman called Samina who works at Cae Mabon did a movement/dance workshop for us. Again I didn’t expect much but it was another incredibly powerful experience as we moved silently and in an undirected manner as a group. I shed a deep layer of lack of self love during that experience. We all have deep rooted fears of not belonging and not being loved, so when during the danced we had to pair, fears around lack of self love I have been working on for well over 2 years (since I took my Reiki Master training) resurfaced, and once again I was the little girl who was worried about not being picked and not having a partner. Only this time it didn’t happen and I had a deep realisation that a layer had been peeled away. Just like that. Difficult to put into simple words, but it was instant and deep, yet the culmination of many months of work.

    I came away from this retreat a different person, feeling I’d healed deep wounds and peeled away layers of myself I no longer needed.

    Once again I was shown the magic that can happen when you have no expectations

     

     

     

  • Choosing love over fear as a birthworker

    Choosing love over fear as a birthworker

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    As a doula the biggest lesson since I started supporting women has been to choose love over fear.

    I remember very early on in my doula life I witnessed a very traumatic birth -it was traumatic for the parents, and it was extremely traumatic for me. I cried for days afterwards. The mother had an unnecessary instrumental birth and I saw it all happen, and it was very shocking to witness. It was the first time I witnessed obstetric violence (if this term is new to you-it is sadly very real, and you can read about it here).

    And yet in the midst of this – I was upset, I was angry, and I hadn’t slept for 2 nights in a row, so I really wasn’t in an emotionally stable state -I was forced to make a choice between love and fear. The mother had to go to theatre and when I met the parents in the recovery room, a nurse abruptly asked who I was, and stated that there was no space and that I would have to go and wait outside. I remember vividly thinking very fast that I had two choices: challenge her by saying we had been granted the right to be there by the head of midwifery (fear), or try to win her trust (love). I heard my mentor’s voice in my head saying “when there is a midwife you don’t like in the room-try to ask yourself what you like about her”. The nurse was a big African mama -a larger than life character – and I reminded myself that I loved this kind of woman,  and I asked her where she was from, stating that I loved her accent. Curiously, in the middle of all this, my question was really genuine. She looked very surprised, and stated where she was from and saying that people didn’t usually like her accent. I restated that I loved it. She never asked me to leave after that.

    This lesson is still following me 4 years later, as I have bumped into this particular nurse on many occasions since, including last week, and every time we greet each other like old friends. I guess this wouldn’t be the case if I had chosen the fear route. I think the Universe keeps on putting her on my path so I do not forget this lesson.

    I’m not trying to gloat here- because even as I write this, I find it hard to believe that I found the strength to do this.

    But the interesting thing is that, at the time, doing this soothed my anger and upset.

    I think I needed the reminder recently. Sometimes when medical interventions happen during a birth and there is some level of emergency, and the adrenalin is high in the room, sometimes people aren’t gentle or caring and it is really hard to witness and shift out of the fear and stay grounded in love.

    I have had to remind myself that those who perpetuate violence as also victims of a system which discourages connection and kindness.

    Recently  I didn’t quite managed to stay as grounded as I would have liked because things happened too fast. I feel very protective of the mothers I doula, especially during labour and birth, and it is so difficult to be a gentle warrior and not let the anger rise through when they are treated without respect. I think that’s why I bumped into this particular nurse again.

    We have all heard Gandhi’s “be the change you want to be in the world” and Martin Luther King’s ” Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

    This cannot be any truer than in the life of a birthworker

    As birthkeepers, especially in the midst of unkind behaviour, we cannot help those expressing this behaviour by being unkind back.

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    I struggle a lot with finding the right balance with this, and I don’t always get it right.

    Some behaviours, like a doctor who attempts to examine a mother without introducing him or herself (this is, sadly quite common-according to a Birthrights survey-it happens about 20% of the time, 26% in London), I try to stop by plastering a big smile on my face, placing myself between the doctor and the mother and introducing her and her partner, then asking the doctor their name.

    It’s not easy when what I really I want to say is “who the fuck do you think you are sticking your fingers inside someone’s vagina without introducing yourself?”.

    But I don’t think it would help the doctor or the mother, or the situation much if I said that.

    So I try to stay grounded, and send positive loving energy around.

    It isn’t easy.

    Becoming a Reiki practitioner has helped highlight this for me.

    Recently at a birth, as I walked out to get some water, I saw a registrar I really dislike because I have seen her doing this not introducing business, and being brusque and callous with clients in the past.

    My client was due to have an obstetric review, and I caught myself thinking “please not her!”. Then I caught myself in that state of fear and shifted it quickly to “if she comes in, please let her be kind and gentle”. Then of course somebody else came in.

    Beside trying to positively affect energy and behaviour in the room, I also have to do some work choosing love over fear for myself. After a birth which ends in lots of interventions that the mother was hoping to avoid, I cannot help but go through some with “what ifs”, and wonder if I could have facilitated a gentler, a better outcome, if only I had done this or that sooner.

    But I am getting much better at it over the years. I catch myself into this narrative and I am able to step back, watch it, and stop it.

    I am also getting better at accepting that I haven’t “failed” by avoiding certain interventions during labour, or preventing unkind caregivers from interacting with her.

    I am slowly accepting that I am not responsible for the behaviour of those who enter her space. I am only responsible for my own behaviour, and how I choose to hold the space, and react to what I witness.

    I am getting better at catching myself going into a fear mode and giving myself a mental kick up the arse to get back into a grounded, loving state.

    I am getting better at returning myself to a peaceful state.

    I still have an enormous amount of work to do- but I am learning.

    If you are pregnant and feel drawn to work with me, head over here. If you are a birthworker and this resonates with you- look here.

  • Have you got impostor syndrome? Here’s how I dealt with mine.

    Have you got impostor syndrome? Here’s how I dealt with mine.

    Do you sometimes suffer from impostor syndrome? Do you worry that you do not know enough, that you haven’t got enough to offer?

    I’ve been reminded this week that we all have different levels of knowledge. That others know more than us and that we know more than others. This doesn’t mean that we do not have much to offer. And there is nothing to be gained by belittling each other’s levels of knowledge.

    I have suffered from impostor syndrome at every career change in my life.

    When I moved from academia to biotech, I suffered from it big time. All I knew was very specific, in depth academic knowledge, and suddenly I felt like a fraud, because my new knowledge was a lot wider and less deep. It took me I think at least a couple of years to shake that. In fact, a similar way to what I wrote in my “head versus hand knowledge” post, it took other people to point it out to me, for me to start acknowledging that what I was doing was worthwhile.

    A friend, who had stayed in the academic sector, expressed awe at the breadth of my knowledge. Another friend drew me this little cartoon he called “the field of knowledge”. It looked like this silly little drawing drawing below : the stick man at the bottom of the pit on the left of the picture is an academic, digging one deep hole. The other little stick men on the pits on the right are digging lots of little, shallower holes, but many more of them. My friend challenged me by saying: “who’s to say that one kind of knowledge is better than the others? Who’s to say that depth is better than breadth?”. This was a light bulb moment and was very grateful to this friend for giving me confidence like this.

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    Whilst still working as a scientist, I embarked on a women in science mentoring programme. At first, I was assigned a mentor, and it was a very useful, life affirming experience. But a couple of years into the programme I was asked to mentor someone myself. My first reaction was to refuse: I wasn’t qualified or experienced enough. But the programme organiser insisted so I took on a mentee, and you know what? I really enjoyed it, and so did the mentee. I think I did a good job, and I learnt a lot from the process.

    Of course I felt the same when I started working an antenatal teacher, slightly less so as a new babywearing consultant, because the profession was brand new at the time in the UK, and quite a lot when I started as a doula, then later on as a workshop facilitator. I was worried somebody would find out I was very green and call me a fraud. Now I look back and I think what a load of crap!

    For starters, knowledge takes many forms – not just the academic kind. Self learning and experience aren’t as acknowledged as academic credential in our culture, and intuitive knowledge is totally dismissed. You can only truly learn your craft by doing it. A bit like when you’ve just got your driving licence, and you find you have to really concentrate at turning the wheel, at using the clutch and looking into the mirrors. When you have had enough practice driving doesn’t feel like a tricky activity at all – in fact you can often drive lost in your thoughts, and not realise that until you have arrived at your destination.

    I have learnt a tremendous amount about myself and others, with an incredible level of depth, since I became a doula. I have learnt many skills, both practical and emotional, again by reading, attending conferences, workshops and study days. I have learnt a lot from my brilliant, supportive mentor when I was a new doula. She helped me trust myself and grow in my own way. But mostly I have learnt how to be a doula by being a doula. By watching women labour and give birth and watching how the hospital system work and drawing lessons from it.

    Since I became a workshop facilitator I have learnt yet another layer of knowledge which makes my serving of women even better. I have also learnt that I will never stop learning. And that every birth is different and not to have any preconceived ideas and expectations.

    Some coming back to the title of this post, there will always be people who know more and people who know less than you. And that’s OK. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have a lot to offer. If the journey of life is like climbing a mountain, there will always people further up and further down the path than you. And as you reach a ridge, catch your breath and reflect on how far you’ve come, you’ll see that the mountain actually carries on.

    So whichever ridge of the mountain you are standing on right now, there are people who can benefit from our knowledge and experience.

    You can help them climb up, and there are others further up who can help you climb up too.

    What matters most is that you help people go up in a way that is right for them, and that you are both honest and humble about your level of knowledge.

    By stepping into who we really are and where we are at, we are both acknowledging our own journey and helping other acknowledge theirs too.

     

  • Why you may want to have a plan C (for caesarean) in your birth preferences

    Why you may want to have a plan C (for caesarean) in your birth preferences

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    When I support couples antenatally, I always encourage them to write a birth preferences document. I do not like the word “plan” because if a plan goes to pot, then you’ve left with nothing (I love this article on the topic).

    I liken writing your birth preferences to going out for diner in a restaurant: you need to see what’s on offer before you can decide whether you fancy a set menu, a la carte, or just a starter and a pudding. If you don’t see the menu, you just get given the dish of the day, which might not suit your tastes at all.

    Similarly, I like to remind parents that the people working in the restaurant are there to serve them, not to serve themselves.

    I sometimes meet resistance from parents who say that you cannot plan birth, and that they would prefer not to have one in case they end up disappointed. I understand that point of view, which is why I like to suggest to parents that they have a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C, as part of their birth preferences. It isn’t a box ticking exercise by the way, it is the process of thinking about all the options and writing them down which is useful. The midst of labour, when you might have been awake for hours and maybe stressed as well as tired, isn’t the best time to weigh up options about interventions you have never heard about.

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    It also helps your medical caregivers, who you will be meeting for the first time during your labour, to establish rapport with you and know how best to support you.

    Again going back to the restaurant analogy, if you came to dinner at my house and you hadn’t told me you were vegetarian, and I had cooked a beef stew, this wouldn’t be great for you, but this wouldn’t be comfy for me either.

    So plan A might be your ideal birth scenario: for example a natural birth, in a low key tech environment (home or a birth centre), using a birth pool and/or relaxation and breathing techniques for comfort (this is just an example by the way-I have been in the birth field long enough to know that birth prefs are like marmite and that one woman’s dream plan may be a low key vaginal birth and another a planned caesarean, and this is totally fine by me).

    Plan B might be looking at things like: what if your labour is induced, what if you have complications that require you to be in the obstetric unit and have constant fetal monitoring, what if you need an epidural, what is your baby needs instrumental help being born. By looking at the interventions and the scientific evidence behind them you will truly be able to make an informed decision about what is right for you.

    Plan C covers what you might want to think about if you baby needs to be born by caesarean, be it planned or during labour (the term “emergency caesarean” is the biggest misnomer of all times-it conjures an imagine of blue lights flashing and medical people running down corridors, when most of the time(crash sections are very rare) is it decided calmly and takes more than 30 min or so to setup-it should really be called an “in labour ” caesarean), what may happen in the few hours after birth and what recovery might look like. Again there are many options, for example you can ask for the cord clamping to be delayed so that your baby received an optimal level of blood, you can have skin to skin in theatre and even feed your baby then if you want to. This is known as a “natural caesarean” (watch the video here, and here is a brilliant natural cesarean birth preferences blog post by doula Lindsey Middlemiss) and if you do not know about it then you might be given the type of caesarean that your obstetrician is used to performing, which might be different.

    It is something I find tricky to navigate and completely follow the couple’s lead, because I am also aware of the school of thought that by talking about interventions, you are also prepping your mind for it (if I say “don’t think of a tree-what pops into your mind?), but I am also aware that our current maternity statistics have very high intervention rates (the UK caesarean rate for 2014/15 is 26.5% which means that 1 in 4 woman is likely to have a caesarean), and that it is therefore realistic to prepare for this eventuality.

    I remember supporting a couple who had planned a birth centre water birth. When after pushing for a long time there was no sign of baby and it became obvious baby needed to be born by caesarean, they had a part of their birth preferences covering that. They had the kindest doctor, who took the time to read their preferences and facilitated most of it. Later on the mother told me how much she had hated writing this part of the document because she didn’t want to entertain the idea that her baby would be born by caesarean , but that when it came to it, she felt that she had a positive birth experience because of it.

    The main reason behind the planning and the thinking is that research shows that it isn’t how the birth unfolds, it isn’t how the baby ends up being born that makes a positive birth experience or not. It is HOW THE PARENTS WERE MADE TO FEEL during the experience. The parents who feel respected, treated with kindness, and with whom the decision making process is shared with their medical caregivers, tend to have a positive birth experience regardless of the process.
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  • Head versus hands knowledge

    Head versus hands knowledge

    I’ve just realised that I don’t value my “hand knowledge” enough

    We live in a culture which values and glorifies “head knowledge” over any other of kinds of knowledge. Intellectual knowledge, academic knowledge, whatever you call it. This is the type of knowledge you get from getting a degree, from getting formal education ,from reading books etc. And it also happens to be the type of knowledge upon which our society places the highest value.

    For years, I also thought about it in this way, that it was the only type of knowledge worth having. I thought that I had to read papers, and cram my head full with facts and figures. I thought I had to know everything, and that if I didn’t, I was incompetent. It wasn’t actually spoken, but it was implied as a rule during my years as a biology and PhD student. Because I was new, I was treated like a young ignorant person (something I often refer to as the ‘young grasshopper’ attitude) by my supervisor and by the other scientists in my PhD lab, and the message implied that I didn’t know enough. This feeling stayed with me for years, so much so that when I was speaking at conferences, it wasn’t delivering my talk that filled me with anxiety, but the questions asked at the end of my talk: what if I couldn’t answer them?

    Yet I wasn’t aware of this, but all this time there was always another kind of knowledge, even in the field of biological research: I did a lot of practical work in the lab, and to become good at it, I had to learn with my hands, with my body. This wasn’t an intellectual process. And yet, although this wasn’t spoken, it was implied that this knowledge was less valuable, because that the people in the lab like technicians, who only did benchwork where considered less valuable than the ones working at their desks. I remember really enjoying switching between bench work  and desk work as a student scientist.  It gave me a good balance of using my hands and using my head. I would have loathed spending all my time at the computer.  I loved spending time at the bench, using my hands, it felt very similar in a way to cooking. I guess I always had that need for that balance in me. But I wasn’t conscious of it, or didn’t put words on it, that realisation came much later.

    The intellectual knowledge came easily to me, so I didn’t value it. I have noticed that we don’t tend to think much of what we can do effortlessly, as if effort and value go hand in hand.

    It was only after I quit science to become a birthworker that I realised I had the same hang up in my early days in my new career as I did in my early days as a scientist. The young grasshopper feeling came back, along with impostor syndrome.  When I started teaching physical skills in my antenatal classes, and also the closing the bones massage, I felt particularly uncomfortable when massage therapists and bodyworkers turned up to learn from me. I felt like a fraud, like a home cook showing a Michelin Star chef their favourite dish. Who was I to teach them anything, and what were they going to think of it? I guess I just didn’t value much of my hand knowledge at that time.

    Interestingly, everyone I taught gave extremely positive feedback. And antenatal classes assessors told me that I was a natural at teaching physical skills.

    Now I realise that I just assumed I was crap at doing stuff with my body, because this isn’t what I had been trained to do, and because the way I learnt it was completely different from my scientific training. The rebozo techniques, the birth positions, the massage, the breathing and relaxation techniques, I learnt them by either teaching myself or from other people, through an informal, apprenticeship type of approach. It wasn’t ratified by a university degree, and often, gasp, horror, there wasn’t even a certificate to prove I had learnt stuff!  So surely this couldn’t be good?

    Interestingly, as part of training for my university diploma in antenatal education, I learnt that we are all kinaesthetic learners : we learn by doing, rather than by listening or watching. Research is clear about this:  for instance, attending a lecture has a learning retention rate of 5 to 10% whereas practising things lead to a retention rate of around 70 to 80%.

    It took a couple of conversation with a massage therapist friend, Stephanie, and my osteopath friend Teddy for me to start shifting my thinking. Within a short time I practised the closing the bones massage on them, they both enjoyed it a lot and praised both the technique and my skills. Only then did I start to reflect on the idea that maybe I was actually ok at doing this stuff with my hands.  I realised I hadn’t reflected on it much until then, and that I had just assumed I wasn’t particularly good at it.

    The crunch came when I told Stephanie that head knowledge came easily to me and hand knowledge didn’t. Stephanie told me she was the opposite. This was a light bulb moment: I had been dismissing my new skills because of how I looked at them through the filter of what I considered to be valuable knowledge. Only then did I start thinking that I could do good things with my hands.

     

    The shift from scientist to birthworker gave me an very interesting insight on my scientific years. As I trained to become a doula, I learnt a lot about signposting and being non judgemental and positive in my interactions with others. I changed the way I was answering questions as conferences-when asked something I didn’t know about, instead of feeling defensive and uncomfortable, I acknowledged the pertinence of the question and threw it back to the audience-this caused such a positive shift in energy in the room!

    When faced with something we don’t know we can react in either of two ways: defensiveness, or admission of lack of knowledge followed by an expression of wonder. Defensiveness (I’ve never heard about this-therefore it isn’t true), is a fear response. It is a reflection of the recipient feeling incompetent, often followed by dismissing the point of view that is being put forward. Amazement, or wonder, on the other hand, is a love response. “I’ve never heard about this-how interesting” . Guess which of the two attitude fosters connection?

    Today in my work as a doula, I sadly observe many medical professionals behaving in the defensive way described above. I understand that this is the product of education and culture but I wish for more enlightenment and desire for connection.

    This brings me to the third kind of knowledge-that my change of career has taught me much about: heart knowledge. This is more difficult to explain and capture, but I guess some of the concept above illustrate it-connection is key. Heart knowledge is deep knowing. It is compassion, love and connection. I would say head knowledge comes first, then body, then heart, heart being the deepest of the three.

    It is said that knowledge is like the layers of an onion. In my work as a doula I have been humbled to move on from stuff I knew in my head, to stuff I knew in my body, to stuff I knew in my heart. That is what the essence of what the work of a doula is. Heart knowledge.

    True, connected support isn’t about head knowledge, it isn’t about the facts (though this is sometimes important too), and it isn’t about how good you are at giving a massage. It is about how present you are, how you are holding her, with your heart wide open.