In this insightful conversation, midwife and lactation consultant Alison Shaloe shares her 30-year journey supporting women through pregnancy and birth. She discusses her work at the Sacred Fertility and Birth Sanctuary and offers a refreshing perspective on how childbirth can be approached as a transcendent, empowering experience rather than a medical event.
Key Highlights:
- A Spiritual Awakening: Alison reveals her personal challenges with cesarean births and breastfeeding that led to specializing in tongue-tie support, and how Reiki opened her to spiritual dimensions of birth, including the ability to hear messages from babies.
- Breaking Through Dogma: Alison discusses the challenges of speaking about spiritual aspects of birth in a society dominated by scientific dogma and fear, sharing how her book evolved from clinical focus to include channelled information from spirit babies.
- Altered States of Consciousness: Our conversation explores how women naturally enter altered states during labour—a necessary surrender that's rarely taught in midwifery education but is essential to the birth process.
- Patriarchal Systems in Birth: Alison highlights how current birth practices often reflect patriarchal attitudes that interrupt women's natural birthing processes, from computerized systems to unnecessary interventions that disempower women.
- Honouring Women Through Ritual: The importance of ceremonies like "mother blessing" and "closing the bones" is discussed as essential cultural practices that honour women's journey into motherhood and support significant life transitions.
- Creating Sacred Birth Spaces: Alison shares her vision for birth environments that honour the spiritual and emotional connection between mother and baby, emphasizing the need for privacy, respect, and gentle first moments after birth.
You can find Alison on her website
https://alisonshaloe.com/
Music by my brother Olivier Messager
