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GUIDED JOURNALING PRACTICE FOR THE SELF-REFLECTIVE BIRTHWORKER

Grab your pen and paper. Take a few nourishing deep breaths. Today we will dive into a prompted writing and visual expression practice.

Draw your birthworker timeline.

What is this? Where did your journey with birthwork begin? Speak to your calling to birthwork (give dates, seasons, impactful people)? Follow your journey through the years, or months, what woman did you work with, where did you work, and what study or personal development have you undertaken? I included in mine arrows flowing from year to year, the twists and turns, the leaning in and outs, being rejected from University Midwifery education, and then the flow-on effects.

Doing my birthworker timeline allowed me to see on paper, my evolution and commitment over the years, from part-time doula to full-time mother carer. How the births I attended were medicine for the time and my timeline allowed me to acknowledge the deepening of my craft through the seasons, the expansion in my capacity to hold and do more.

What did your birthwork timeline bring up for you? Is there contentment or discontent? Did it spark any curiosity about where you’ll go next and what will come? Perhaps you already have commitments lined up?

Journal prompts:

You may like to set a timer of 7-10 minutes per prompt and soften into it, allowing whatever is alive to meet the paper…

• Where in birthwork have you or are you appeasing?

• How can you be more compassionate toward yourself in your role as a birthworker? Reflect on a time when you were hard on yourself and how you might offer yourself more compassion moving forward.

• Reflect on a time or times your birthworker intuition was spot on. What did it look like? How did it feel?

• How do you process experiences of loss or trauma in your work? Do you have a deathcare plan?

• Do you storytell within your work? What stories or myths bring you solace?

• How do you tend to your inner world and outer world with self-care? Do you have any rituals or practices that hold you while you hold mothers?

• Write a debrief list, a list of people you can call to debrief, and receive reflections and or awareness from.

• What do I need to unlearn from this … (pick which is relevant for you:) lecture/this birth I attended/this course I did/this conversation I had? What do I need to lay on the alter? What do I need to return to the earth?