My birth(day) story

And what yoga has to say about birth

Ashley, circa 1988

Greetings!

It’s been a while since I’ve written. I’m technically still on maternity leave but it turns out giving birth in spring inspires my overall creativity. Right at the moment when I have the least time to give to my creative muscle, the muse appears. So it goes.

Birth is the beginning of a cycle for both mother and child. The story you tell yourself about birth—your own, and that of your child’s—can have impacts that last a lifetime (or more).

Stories have always been important to me. From the time I could walk and talk I was telling stories. In middle school, while my friends were playing sports, I was writing stories in an after-school club called Power of the Pen¹. I think in story. It’s natural, then, that birth stories feel particularly powerful to me. I hadn’t come across many birth stories until I read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth while I was pregnant with my first child. Inspired by empowering stories of birth, which are not necessarily the cultural norm, I’ve decided to write and share my own birth stories on my 37th birthday. Well, at least the first one. I started writing and ended up with 6,500 words. So this will become a series 😂.

What yoga philosophy has to say about birth

Before I dive into the first story, a quick overview on how birth is viewed in yogic philosophy. This is a yoga newsletter, you know 🙂.

Reincarnation is a core concept in yogic philosophy and most Eastern traditions. In Classical yogic thought, you are reborn into the world again and again until you reach enlightenment, each successive birth an opportunity to layer on learning (or unlearning) and deepen understanding and connection. Enlightened beings transcend karmic attachments and free themselves of the suffering inherent in being alive on this planet. Death is not the ultimate end, just the end of a cycle. Birth is a fresh start. A try again moment. A second or third or ten thousandth chance to do things differently.

An energy worker once told me I was decapitated in a past life for being an outspoken woman in a time when women were supposed to stay quiet (nothing much has changed eh?). This is apparently why I have so many issues with my fifth (throat) chakra.² Each action you take in your life is affected by karmic residue from past lives. But you always have free will. The point of showing up on your mat to meditate or practice Warrior Twos and Chatarungas is to develop enough discernment so that when you are about to make a decision that keeps you stuck in the same destructive pattern, you’re able to break free and make a different choice. Being born again isn’t good or bad—it’s just an opportunity to rewrite your destiny.

Speaking of being born again,

Depth Writing With Dr Rachel

recently shared some fun prompts to help you think about your own re-birth stories if you’re interested in (re)writing out your own birth(day) story.

April depth writing prompt: Re birth

The importance of your birth in Primordial Sound Meditation

But I digress. One more yoga thing before we get to the stories. One of the reasons I love practicing Primordial Sound Meditation is because of its association with your birth. This meditative technique uses mantra as your point of focus. The mantra you are assigned is based on the vibrational sound the cosmos was making at the time of your birth. This is determined based on the position of the moon when you were born.

It is said that ascetic yogis deep in meditation were able to discern different vibrational frequencies from the Earth as the moon transited the sky each night. Each position was ascribed a Sanskrit sound, known as a primordial sound. When you use this primordial sound as your meditation mantra it provides an opportunity to connect with the purity of universal consciousness present at the time of your birth before the world’s conditioning began to shape your life experience and write your story for you. It could all be a bunch of hooey, but mantra meditation has been a transformational practice that helps me rewrite my own stories.

If you’re interested in receiving your own personal mantra and learning how to meditate with it send me a message and I’ll add you to the waitlist for my next meditation course.

Okay, now for my birth story.

My birth story

I was born on Sunday, April 24, almost two weeks past my due date on moving day. The day before I was born, my mom was moving furniture and household goods into her new home with my dad, her parents, and her sisters. By that evening her back hurt. She couldn’t sleep because of the pain and around four in the morning got up to go to the bathroom. That’s when her water broke. She almost slipped and fell from the surprising mess.

My mom and dad went to the hospital and I was born around 7am. Three hours from the time her water broke and she had any idea she was in labor. For her first baby. The doctor almost didn’t make it. My mom got annoyed at a nurse who insisted I was breech (I was not) and this nurse’s panic about a non-issue caused unnecessary anxiety during her birth experience. Almost all of her experiences show up in my own birth stories³.

I was a colicky baby and screamed at the top of my lungs every night from 7pm-midnight until my mom switched me to formula at three months. Every time I’m warily trying to shush and calm one of my screaming babies my mom is quick to remind me of karma (and she is not spiritually invested in Eastern philosophical traditions). But she also has no problem taking said screaming baby and doing some of the grunt work. She’s been there/done that and the screaming doesn’t bother her. No other relative will go near the fussy baby—those blood-curdling screeches prompt immediate hand-backs to Mom or Dad.

Lessons learned

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my mom about birth and raising a baby, it’s this paradoxical duality between being an anxious parent and a chill one. Some moments my generational anxiety has me spiraling down rabbit holes of (highly unlikely) doomsday scenarios. There have been multiple moments where I’ve been convinced my child has meningitis because their neck hurt 🤷🏻‍♀️. Other times, I’ve intuitively understood that common baby issues are part of growing up and will resolve themselves with time. I’ve watched plenty of friends try to fix “problems” that I’ve also experienced with my kids but taken in stride. It’s hard to watch your baby be uncomfortable but the reality of life is that learning new skills (including your body learning how to digest food, use its senses, and adapt to a constantly evolving brain) is uncomfortable at first. The best we can do as mothers is be present and be calm.

There are thru-lines between my birth story and who I am today.

I take my time but when I’m ready I move fast.

I worry about things that aren’t real issues.

I complain a lot but then I’m over it and move on.

Up next: Oliver’s birth story

Have you ever written out your birth story, for yourself or for your own children? I found the process healing and it was an opportunity to connect with my mom and learn more about her experience. If you are unable to ask your mom about your own birth or if any of your own birth experiences were too traumatic to revisit, consider the prompts in the article shared above to re-write your story and be born again.

I’ll be sending out my kids’ birth stories to paid subscribers over the course of the next month in between our regularly scheduled New Moon Nidras and Full Moon Flows.

If you’re interested in receiving my more personal essays, or want to join us for monthly practice, please become a paid subscriber.

Coming up

• 4/27 - New Moon Nidra

• 5/12 - Full Moon Flow

✨ The light and wisdom within me honors and acknowledges the light and wisdom within you 🙏🏻

With gratitude,

Ashley

P.S. - If I were going to be re-born as an animal, I’d come back as a turtle. 🐢

1. Power of the Pen was a middle school creative writing club. You received prompts and had a time limit to write creative short stories based on the prompt. It was awesome. There were district, regional, and state competitions and I won an award at a district competition, for which I was very proud of myself. I thought this is a national program but I looked it up and it is not, so I forgive you if you’ve never heard of it. In fact, it’s unique to Ohio. Their tagline is “Ohio’s Original Interscholastic Creative Writing Program for Middle Schools.” Ohio gets a lot of crap—just look at the slang Gen Alpha has come up with—and I don’t live there and believe there is a lot backwards with my home state, but politics aside, Ohio is actually a pretty cool place to grow up.

2. The fifth chakra is the energy center dedicated to expression. I have a lot to say but have a really hard time saying it out loud, sharing my work, speaking up and out, being vulnerable, etc. Working on it.

3. Some aspects of delivery are genetic. My mom had quick births, and apparently so did my maternal grandmother, though she was put under for all of her births because that’s what they did back in the day (wild, right?). I also experienced precipitous births with all three of my children.