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A birther with medium light skin and long brown hair sits holding both hands of someone with medium-dark skin, short black hair, and a short black beard. The latter appears intently focused on the birther. Behind the birther, someone in a woven beige cardigan applies counterpressure to the birther's lower back.

Philosophy

Annie's Considerations As A Birth Doula
 

  • The birthing process spans the prenatal and postpartum period. All references to "birth" and "birther" on this website encompass this understanding.
     

  • Birthing is a natural process. Each birther will know viscerally what they need and how to birth. A supportive environment allows the birther to proceed accordingly.
     

  • Every birth has the potential of being an ecstatic and pleasurable experience.
     

  •  Skillful birth support is often as much about getting out of birthers', babies' and their attending loved one(s)' way as it is about adding one's experience and knowledge.
     

  •  Honoring birthers' and babies' autonomy, along with birthers' informed consent, and privacy, helps to promote the best possible birth outcomes. 
     

  • Every birther, partner/ supporting loved one and baby deserves birth support that recognizes all the various aspects of their journey and the vastness of who they are.
     

  • All of our memories -- including intergenerationally-transmitted memories, how we experience our own birth, and memories that seem at first glance unrelated to birth -- converge to influence our expectations around birthing. As these become witnessed, we release ourselves to experience the full, wondrous potential of the process that's unfolding.
     

  • Each person present at a birth has unique gifts to offer awaiting recognition and invitation.
     

  • The birther’s loved one(s) are the people who will accompany the birther and child as life continues. Centering these relationships in a birther’s support honors essential connections and allows them to deepen. The birther's loved ones may be human or non-human, and may be present physically or in spirit. 
     

  • Neonates are fully sentient and communicative, even if non-verbal, and carry implicit memories from the birth process and prior to birth.
     

  • Birthing opens a birther up on all levels: physically, emotionally and energetically. Prenates and newborns are also profoundly sensitive to everything transpiring around them. Birthers' and babies' openness tasks their communities to align themselves with what's life-affirming. In so doing, each person gains a chance to renew their own relationship to life. 
     

  • What makes the world an accessible place for birthers and prenates/newborns is likely to be what makes the world accessible to life as a whole.  
     

  • The birth experience is a child’s introduction to what being on Earth is all about. It is each parent’s and community's potential (re)introduction to the same. This (re)introduction, nonverbal, energetic, and visceral, remains imprinted upon each person present.
     

  • We can change the world one birth at a time.


    - Annie, Birth Doula and Founder     of Transitional Space Birth Services VT 


     

 

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What's In A Name?

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Donald Winnicott, a pediactrician and psychoanalyst, uses the term transitional space to denote a “place” where we can remain connected to our sacred and unknowable innermost core -- the source of our aliveness and creativity -- even as we navigate the shared outer world.
 

When I think of the above, I remember conversing with Indigenous elders of various nations about babies, and how each describes a baby as a visitor from the spirit world (or from the stars). In her book Red Medicine, Patrisia Gonzales writes: “Thus, the child must be sung to and offered prayers for him or her to stay." My practice aims to create the kinds of environments that would encourage not only newborns, but also birthers and partners/supporting loved ones -- who were all once children -- to remain fully present, navigating from their innermost sacred cores.)
 

According to Etymology Online, the noun transition originated in the mid 15th century from transicion (nominative transitio) meaning “a going across or over.”  The name of my practice tends to conjure up the image of someone receiving support as they cross over into a new way of being in the world -- be it by means of childbirth, supporting a birther, or being born. This too is accurate. My intent is to be there for birth processes as they need to happen, with reverence for liminality and the potentially world-changing view from the edges that birthers, partners/ supporting loved ones, and prenates/newborns all carry.

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Light filters through green leaves



​Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

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