Authors
Valerie Malhotra Bentz
Publication date
2022/12/21
Source
Mindfulness in the Birth Sphere
Pages
66-82
Publisher
Routledge
Description
This chapter reviews childbirth from the perspective of the Four Cornerstones of Mindful Inquiry—critical theory, phenomenology, hermeneutics and Buddhism—expanded by somatics, neurobiology and the Indigenous worldview. Mindful Inquiry is a way of research in which the researcher’s being is front and center. Deathworldly provinces of meaning are increasing on the horizon of our experience. The call to return to the Indigenous worldview that dominated most of human history is also a call for mindful pregnancy and childbirth within a caring community. Transformative Phenomenology, which informed the expressions of lived experience, is a call to such change of consciousness. My pregnancy as an unmarried mother and birth experience were not mindful. By contrast, William Hart, a gay father, describes his mindful experience of being “pregnant” and fathering his sons. Both of us had in common a deep …