The Portal: Conception, Pregnancy, Birth, and the Postpartum Period: a Compassionate Inquiry Training
The Portal is a Compassionate Inquiry based, comprehensive and experiential 28-week trauma-informed training for health professionals who serve as providers of support for pregnant and birthing women, people, and their partners. This includes midwives, doctors, nurses, doulas, lactation consultants, therapists, coaches, bodyworkers, educators, and other professionals.
Why this training?
Many years of research in the field of perinatal psychology show a direct correlation between the way we were born and the subconscious behavioural and emotional patterns in our adult lives. Our early imprints stay with us for the rest of our lives. What we experienced in taking our first breath, continues at some level in every breath we take.
Since these experiences are implicit (not in conscious awareness), they are even more powerfully influential than the experiences we do remember. Our body remembers everything that we experienced even when we don’t consciously remember, and those memories create a filter through which we experience ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us.
With the knowledge that all mothers/parents are doing the best they can with the trauma they carry and the resources and support they have available, this information on how trauma is passed on, is not meant to trigger maternal/parental guilt. Instead our intention is to advocate for the awareness and support that is so needed by pregnant and birthing women and people, so we can change this cycle. Fathers/partners also deserve the support for their journey into parenthood. Families can only thrive in a community of support and connection.
It is essential to realize that during pregnancy and birth there is no separation between the fetus and newborn and their mother/parent. What the mother/parent experiences is what the infant experiences. This is when the mother’s/parent’s unintegrated trauma, including transgenerational trauma, is sensed and taken in by the newborn.
By becoming aware of and healing these early experiences, we have the potential to stop the reenactment of pain from being handed down to the next generation. We become empowered to stop the inheritance of trauma. Here lies the possibility for profound improvement in one’s self-esteem, self-compassion, ability to relate lovingly with oneself and others, to parent our children with attuned connection, to be creative, freely expressing from our essence, and to live a life filled with joy, health, creativity, and fulfillment.
For professionals who serve as providers of support for pregnant and birthing women and people, including midwives, doulas, physicians, obstetricians and educators, this knowledge supports us in holding an empowering space for people to trust in their innate ability to birth, bond, and nurture their child. An individual who is supported in trusting their innate ability to birth and nurture their child is better able to connect with the intuitive wisdom of their body. They are much less likely to experience postpartum depression. Birth becomes a doorway of initiation, an empowering journey of transformation into motherhood/parenthood.
For further information: https://compassionateinquiry.com/portal