Many women find that giving birth can be a spiritual, transformative experience. This aspect of birth can be enhanced by choosing a birth ritual, one that will help you focus on the symbolic value of your journey. This page is a list of such rituals. It is meant only to serve as inspiration. You may wish to choose or create a ritual that is meaningful to you, or let the birth speak for itself. Baby showers can also be a wonderful time to symbolically invoke the power of birth.
If you wish to use a birth ritual, but the idea of planning something else seems too overwhelming, ask a friend or labor support person to help you plan. If you have a spiritual path, you may wish to explore its birth traditions for ideas.
- Keep a pregnancy diary. Write your hopes for your birth and child as well as describing your physical experience.
- Have your partner or a friend take a new picture of your belly every month. Put them all in the same frame, with a picture of your birth, or you holding your baby, at the end.
- Have a mehndi party instead of a baby shower. You and your female friends and relatives can paint each other with henna. Henna the belly!
- Instead of a baby shower, have a candle blessing. Give out unlit candles to your friends. Ask them to share their hopes and prayers for your birth, sending their love into the candles. Create a phone chain, and have them all light their candles when you go into labor. You can use the same phone chain to announce the birth.
- At your baby shower, have each of your friends write in a journal you picked out a blessing for you, a blessing for your birth, and a blessing for your baby. Tell them in advance what will be expected.
- Ask your friends and family to each give you two beads. With half of the beads, make a necklace for yourself to wear during the birth. With the other half, you can make a bracelet for your baby or a crib mobile.
- If you have a spiritual tradition, pray regularly to the deity of your choosing during your pregnancy. At the time of labor, give them an offering. When the baby is born safe, give them a second offering in thanks.
- Ask your friends who are mothers already to plan a rite of passage for you. Let it be a surprise.
- Do a belly cast.
- When you are in the early stages of labor, have a friend loosen and brush your hair and untie your clothes, to clear the path of birth of obstructions. After the labor, let everything be done up again to show that you have closed the circle. (From _Circle Round: Raising Children in Goddess Traditions_.)
- Include some inspirational pictures or objects in your birth bag that you can hold or look at during labor.
- Choose a poem or holy text that you would like to have read to you by your partner or support person while you're giving birth.
- Let a special prayer or greeting be the first thing your child hears after being born. If you don't have a spiritual tradition, consider whispering the baby's name into his or her ear, or saying "I love you."
- Donate your umbilical cord blood. Let the life you have created help another family in need.
- Have a post-partum mum party. Ask a friend to host it. Ask your friends to offer you home-cooked meals, "coupons" for child care, or gift certificates for pampering treats.
- Ask if you can take home your baby's placenta. Bury it in the earth and plant a tree or a rosebush over it.
- Write a birth story. Read it at your child's christening or first birthday party, or save it to share with them as adults.
