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Part I:  The Kintsugi Process

Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth. Rumi

 Learn to Listen Empathically to Your Own Story

(Four Weeks)

The Kintsugi Process is a prerequisite for Birth Story Mentoring Part II.  In preparation for giving the gift of empathic, deep listening to someone struggling with their birth experience, you must first give it to yourself. You cannot guide another through a place you have not yet gone. Begin by turning your ear inward,  listening to the story you are telling yourself about yourself, the medical system, and birth in our culture.

What does "kintsugi" mean?kintsugi

In the 15th century Japanese began repairing broken ceramics with gold or silver lacquer, a process they call kintsugi (pronounced kin-tsoo-gee); “kin” golden, “tsugi” repair.

In the West, a broken teapot or sculpture will be thrown away or repaired with invisible glue to conceal the cracks and make it look like new. But the Japanese view once-broken pottery—after the pieces are fused with gold—as even more beautiful and valuable than the original piece. No two ceramics break in the same way, so the lines and patterns of every repair is one of a kind.

The same holds true for birth stories. No two people—even when they are in the same birth room—experience or are cracked open by a birth the same way. Like a treasured ceramic unexpectedly dropped and shattered at your feet, unforeseen events in birth can suddenly shatter expectations, beliefs, dreams, confidence, and even relationships. Our first task is to gather up the scattered pieces and discover that what initially us can become a source of compassion.

Who the Kintsugi course is for:

Every birth-related professional--midwife, lactation consultant, therapist, social worker, chaplain, and life coach —who wants to learn about listening to birth stories that have cracked you open and the stories you are telling yourself.

Upcoming Courses

How this course works:

  1. One week before each live call (including the first one), you will receive:
    1. A link to a pre-recorded lesson in your email
    2. Access to written modules on the Birth Story Listening online course
    3. Practice-homework assignments and suggestions for the week
    4. Valuable written feedback on your homework and the opportunity to further accelerate your skills and comprehension by learning from peers on the Forum.
  2. A weekly, one-hour live consultation call guided by your Birth Story Facilitator. You and your peers will bring questions and insights to this call, and learn from lively demonstrations, role-plays, and a solution-focused dialogue with your facilitators.
journaling
The Kintsugi Journaling process begins with exploring birth stories but can become a pathway to exploring all of your life stories in a more meaningful way.

Nine Birth Story Gates

FIRST STORY GATE: NO STORY

In the hours surrounding birth, most women are so immersed in living the experience that they cannot analyze it or find words to describe what they are experiencing. In the precious first hours after giving birth, “floating between the worlds” where time seems to stand still, many women are not yet able to organize the sequence or meaning of events, and so they pass through the Gate of No Story.

SECOND STORY GATE: GRATITUDE AND RELIEF

Hospital routines, early social visits with story swapping, and the demands of baby care quickly take a woman out of her in-between the worlds wordless trance. In the early weeks, many women enjoy an initial phase of elation and relief that labor is over, accompanied by gratitude, praising everyone and everything that helped in any way, including technology, drugs, and interventions.

THIRD STORY GATE: RELATIONSHIPS

At this gate, the story-teller reviews who was there, who wasn’t, who helped in unexpected ways, and who, if anyone, was uncaring. The task at the Gate also includes examining how giving birth or becoming a parent is changing relationships with your mother, father, partner, relatives, friends, birth attendants, older children, other mothers, and most importantly, your relationship with yourself.

FOURTH STORY GATE: SOCIAL BIRTH STORIES

The social birth story emerges with the first postpartum phone calls, tweets, and visitors. It is often a superficial story (at first), and depending on who is listening—and how they are listening, what is embellished or left out changes each time the story is told.

FIFTH GATE: MEDICAL BIRTH STORY

The medical story has become the dominant birth story in our culture; it is often long, detailed, and emotionally-charged. At first the storyteller is trying to piece together, in
chronological order, what happened, and why. At the Fifth Gate, the story is told in a style that Arthur Frank, author of The Wounded Storyteller, calls a “narrative surrender,” which happens when society, and women in particular, follow the cues of birth-related professionals and objectify their experience of giving birth by telling their birth stories in medical terms, rather than in their own voice. When this happens, it is not her story she is telling, it is an explanation of what went wrong and the rationale for medical management.

SIXTH GATE: THE REVOLVING DOOR

On her ascent out of the underworld, the Sumerian warrior queen Inanna had to pass by the annuna, the judges, for a second time (her first encounter was during her quest). To this day, every initiate passes through self-judgment during their rite of passage and again during their return. Taking a spin in the Sixth Gate is an unavoidable part of the heroic journey; trying to avoid it with positive thinking only ensures you’ll be in it longer. This Gate shows up weeks, months, and even years after giving birth, and for too many, it becomes the resting Gate—for the rest of their lives.

SEVENTH STORY GATE: HUNTING NEW MEANING

It is the soul’s hunger to understand the metamorphosis of the self that began and was forever changed by this rite of passage that awakens the inner-Huntress. The Huntress has the gifts of far-seeing and inward-seeing when reflecting on the interconnection of personal and collective birth stories. No longer looking to others to affirm, validate, approve, or explain what happened, the inner-Huntress begins to stalk habitual patterns of thinking and old assumptions. Passing through this gate, new words, phrases, images, and metaphors appear unexpectedly and rearrange the narrative of your story.

EIGHTH STORY GATE: SELF LOVE AND COMPASSION

This Gate over the heart opens to a lightness of being, self-acceptance, compassion, and forgiveness for yourself and others; there is a sense that ten thousand influences,
known and unknown, came together to cast an invisible, unknowable web between conditioning, fate, and destiny to co-created the birth in the only way it could be.

NINTH STORY GATE: WHEN NO-STORY BECOMES MEDICINE

Upon crossing the threshold of the Ninth Gate, there is no longer a need to tell the old birth story (especially from beginning to end) to gain sympathy, advice, reassurance, or praise. The story-teller has come full circle, from no story to no story. From now on, the gold gleaned from competing the heroic journey becomes wisdom Medicine to be shared only when needed.

We cannot heal our stories alone. “No one heals without community. Traditionally [healing] circles formed around genuine wisdom keepers, but we are in short supply of elders these days,” observed Dr. Lewis Mehl Madrona. It is up to us as Birth Story-Mentors to help others complete their heroic return “home.”

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