Amelia’s Blissful Birth Story
I thought I knew what birth was.
I had already given birth twice. Healthy babies. No complications. A success, by every standard that mattered to everyone else. That was enough, I told myself.
Because what else was there to measure?
But somewhere beneath the relief, beneath the quiet pride of having made it through, something in me didn’t settle. Not loudly. Not in a way I could explain. Just a faint, persistent sense that something essential had slipped through my hands.
It would take a long time before I understood what that feeling was. Nothing obvious, nothing anyone would have charted or questioned. But looking back, I can see it now with an almost aching clarity: I was there – but I wasn’t in it.
I moved through birth the way you move through a storm you’re trying to survive. Bracing. Enduring. Praying for it to have mercy on me. Birth, as I understood it then, was something to get through. Something to manage. Something to survive. I didn’t question it.
Until I did. When I became pregnant again, a different possibility began to take shape – slowly at first. I began to consider something I hadn’t allowed before: what if birth wasn’t a medical emergency waiting to happen? What if it didn’t need to be controlled, corrected, or directed at every turn?
Some people claimed that, under the right conditions, birth could move along the same pathways as pleasure. That the same chemistry is involved. That the same deeply intelligent systems are activated.
I didn’t fully believe that. It felt almost like too much to even hold.
But something in me recognised it enough to become curious.
1. Preparation
If any of that were even partially true, then preparation needed to look very different.
It would have to begin deeper down – beneath the advice, beneath the plans, beneath everything I had been taught to expect.
At the root of it. In the place where fear forms before it even finds words. Asking, with honesty and courage: what was I actually preparing for?
What if preparing for birth wasn’t about strategies for pain management – but about understanding what in me feared it?
What if it wasn’t about making birth predictable – but about becoming someone who could stay…even when it wasn’t?
So I did not prepare for this birth by trying to convince myself it would be blissful. If anything, I assumed it might not be.
Instead, I started paying attention to what happened in me when I imagined going through labour again.
A first layer of parts feared losing control. Manager parts – hyper-aware, anticipatory – already scanning for what could go wrong. Wanting a plan. Wanting orientation. Wanting to know how to stay ahead of it.
Other parts remembered hospitals. Places that felt safe in some ways, but disempowering in others – where authority is quietly handed over.
There were deeper layers too. Parts that knew, in a very real way, that birth sits close to loss, to uncertainty, to the edges of what we can control.
And alongside that, a belief I hadn’t fully questioned: that someone else might be better equipped to handle that uncertainty than I was. Some younger parts really found comfort in that.
That if I followed instructions, complied, made the right decisions – then the risks could be minimised, perhaps even avoided altogether. That safety could be guaranteed, if I was willing to give up sovereignty. Exiled parts that felt safer when someone else was in charge.
There were parts that were afraid of being judged. Of not doing what would be considered responsible, reasonable, safe. Protective parts that tracked approval. That oriented toward getting it right – in the eyes of others.
And beneath that, something even older. Parts that carried a quiet fear of being punished for stepping outside what is accepted. For trusting myself too fully. As if there was a cost to that – to not complying.
None of this was irrational.
It all made sense.
At some point during this preparation, I found myself returning to a story I had heard in my Internal Family Systems training – one that Richard Schwartz often tells about being caught in a riptide.
The instinct is to fight. To push against the current, to try to get back to shore. But the more you fight, the more exhausted you become. At some point, the only way through is to stop resisting. To float, even in the uncertainty.
In Dick’s story, there is a moment where he realises he might not make it out. So he speaks to his parts.
We might die here, he tells them.
But nobody is alone. I will stay with you, whatever happens.
And something shifts. The panic settles just enough for him to stop fighting the waves, remember to float, and eventually find his way safely back to shore.
I had heard that story before. But this time, it landed differently. I could feel it in my body – how much of me still didn’t trust that I could do that. That I could handle the intensity of birth.
So that became the real preparation. Not breathing techniques. Not birth plans.
Trust.
Not as an idea. Not something I could think myself into, or repeat often enough to make it true.
But as an embodied relationship with every unsure part of me. As a place inside where nothing had to be banished in order for me to stay. Where fear could come closer without taking over. Where the parts that braced, that tightened, that expected overwhelm – and the parts that carried shame, that felt too much, too exposed, too wrong – were met without turning away.
Something fiercely friendly. Strong enough that, when the moment came, I could say: I will stay with you, no matter what.
That kind of trust is built slowly – each time I noticed the impulse to pull away from discomfort – and chose, instead, to remain.
Again and again, I returned to the same place: I will stay.
Over time, something shifted.
My body no longer interpreted intensity as danger. It began to recognize it – and soften around it.
Around that time, another layer began to surface. Something that had been there all along, hidden in plain sight.
I had been working with Mugwort, hoping it might help the baby – still breech at 36 weeks – move into a more optimal position.
At night, after laying the older two kids to sleep, I would sit with a warm mugwort foot bath, a candle nearby, a quiet prayer to Hecate Propylaia, guardian of the threshold of birth.
It became a small, steady ritual. And in that space, something came to focus: what I believed about birth had not come from direct experience.
It had been absorbed. Gradually, over years, through stories, conversations, and the way birth is spoken about in our culture. The message was remarkably consistent. Birth was dangerous. Difficult. Unpredictable. Often traumatic. Something to be managed carefully, because it could easily go wrong.
As I began to prepare more consciously, I could feel how much of that background was alive in my body – a quiet anticipation, an expectation that something about birth would be overwhelming, or beyond my capacity to meet.
I also knew, very clearly, what the standard medical approach involved with its cascade of interventions – and the fact that none of them are neutral. And still, a part of me believed I would definitely need it. That medication was not really a choice, but a necessity. Almost a basic right – because the underlying assumption, consistently reinforced, is that physiological birth is inherently unbearable.
So even as I questioned other aspects of the system, that assumption had remained largely intact. Unexamined.
Working with Mugwort seemed to bring that layer into sharper focus. A plant of the womb, of dreaming, of older, less verbal forms of knowing. Plants have a way of revealing things.
So Mugwort became a kind of bridge.
Through that bridge – at some point, I can’t say exactly when – I became aware of her. My great-grandmother – a woman who birthed ten children at home, at least one of them breech.
I didn’t even know her name. I had to ask my mother later.
Celeste.
And with that, more of her story began to come through. Naming her made her easier to find. In the quiet of those evenings, I began to sense her more clearly. She was not cautious about birth in the way I had been taught to be.
She was… unbothered. Steady. Unhurried. Confident in a way that didn’t come from knowledge, but from lived experience. As if this was simply another thing the body knows how to do. No drama. No urgency. Just a different baseline.
What I could not yet fully believe in myself, I could recognize in her.
It didn’t feel like a new idea.
It felt remembered.
A quiet, steady knowing:
Women have done this. My body knows this.
Once the burden became visible in that way, it also became possible to begin releasing it. To stop holding it as truth.
And alongside that, something else became available.
Not just the absence of fear, but the presence of a different kind of inheritance – one that carried memory, capacity, and a quiet form of confidence that did not need to be taught.
2. Separation
And then labour began. Late in the day, as the sun and moon were moving toward alignment for the new moon. Not in any way I could clearly identify at the time. I had gone out with my partner and children to buy a few last things for the maternity bag. I remember walking through the aisles, looking for what I needed, but something had already started to shift.
My attention was no longer fully on what I was doing. I found myself moving slowly, going back and forth between shelves, not quite deciding, not quite thinking.
Just… there.
At the time, I didn’t question it. There was no sense that anything significant was happening. Looking back, I can see that I had already begun to turn inward. The thinking mind was still present, but no longer leading.
Something else had started to take over.
I went for dinner with my parents, then home. Into bed with my children and partner. Nothing in me was marking the moment. There was no clear beginning.
It was only much later – when my body moved into a completely different kind of intensity – that I realised what had already been underway for hours. I was being pulled somewhere deeper, quieter. Nowhere I could access through thought.
My attention moved – away from the outside, into the body, into sensation, into something immediate and entirely non-verbal. There was no sense of needing to leave the space or change anything. The room remained dark and quiet. Familiar. Nothing was being managed. And without trying, I was already deep inside it.
At some point, the sensations became more distinct. Waves – clearly physical, at times intense. I was aware of them. My partner was lying beside me, holding my hand in the dark, gently touching my arm, keeping track of their rhythm.
And yet, I did not connect it. I did not think, this is labour. This was not unfamiliar to my body. It felt like something I already knew.
The same embodied intelligence. The same intimate, erotic, relational field. The same current that had been present at her conception. It was not separate from that. It was the same movement, unfolding further.
His touch seemed to amplify it. Not by changing the intensity, but by allowing my body to open to it more fully. To receive it. The sensations were there. The intensity was there. But there was no interpretation attached to it.
I was not observing what was happening. I was inside it. The closest reference point I had was not pain, but something else entirely. Something deeply physical. Rhythmic. Absorbing.
A kind of pressure the body knows how to meet. A quality I recognised, even if I would not have named it that way before. It moved along a familiar edge. Not the edge of pain – but the edge of something that could open. Something that builds. Something that gathers.
It felt, at moments, closer to the edge of orgasm than to anything I had been taught to expect from labour.
That threshold where sensation builds – where it could tip either way. Where there is tension, yes, but also a kind of anticipation. Not really separate from pleasure, but not quite the same either.
And instead of pulling away from that edge, my body stayed. Opened into it.
And something in me responded to that.
3. Liminality
In between the waves, I drifted in and out of sleep. At one point, my three-year-old daughter woke briefly. She turned toward me, still heavy with sleep, and wrapped her arms around me. For a few moments, her tiny hands gently caressed my face.
I remember a very distinct physical response. A strong wave of warmth moved through my body – soft, expansive, unmistakable. Only later did I recognise it for what it was. At the time, it simply felt like a deepening of connection.
To be labouring – and at the same time being held by both of them – my body responded immediately, and it was one of the most profound sensations I have ever known.
Not because it was overwhelming – but because of its precision. Nothing felt random. Nothing felt excessive. Each wave rose with purpose and seemed to do exactly what it needed to do. Strong, powerful, focused. No more, no less. As if my body and Amelia’s were working in complete coordination, responding to each other in real time.
It felt… exact. Like something that just knew its way. A quiet certainty that she was well. That I was well. That there was nothing to correct, nothing to manage, nothing to worry about. There was trust.
And still – there were moments where I could feel parts of me wanting to leave. An impulse to step outside, to disconnect. To escape the intensity by moving away from it.
I could sense it clearly – I knew these parts well. But they did not take over. They did not flood me. They trusted my lead. And so I stayed with them.
Not pushing them away. Not overriding them.
Just staying.
And they softened. Everything we had practiced – all the inner work, all the conversations, all the presence – was there.
Not as something I had to remember, but as something already in place. I could feel it happening, my whole body yielding rather than bracing, the whole system surrendering.
The pelvis softening, widening, responding from within – not forced, not directed. The cervix opening in rhythm with the waves – not something I was doing, but something I was allowing.
Time changed. It lost its structure. There was no sequence anymore – only movement. Only sensation. The intensity read as something to ride, something to enter.
Something that built, that gathered, that asked for more of me – and was met.
A closer reference at this point was expansion. Pressure that asked the body to open. Sensation that moved toward fullness – toward that same threshold I had felt before.
That edge. Where the body could contract away or open further in. And again – my body stayed. Opened. Moved toward it.
There was a kind of surrender in that that did not feel passive. It felt active. Participatory. Relational.
And at some point, the edges of ordinary perception dissolved. It felt unmistakably like crossing into something else. A threshold. Not metaphorically – but physiologically. Neurologically. As if the body had access to a different state entirely.
The closest language I have is this: It felt like entering a psychedelic field.
And there was support. I was not alone in it. I could feel their presence.
My great-grandmother Celeste. Steady, unmoved, certain.
Mugwort. Holding the doorway open.
Something else – Hecate, at the threshold.
No instruction, no narrative.
Only a quiet, unwavering orientation.
Stay.
Stay.
Stay.
And I did.
4. Emergence
At a certain point, about two hours in, the nature of the sensations suddenly changed.
Up until then, the waves had been building and receding – something I was fully inside of, but still able to move with. Then, without any decision on my part, my body began to push.
It was not something I initiated. Not a choice. Not an instruction. Not something I could prepare for or improve.
A reflex. It rose from somewhere far below thought or intention – below anything I could influence. Any attempt to control it became immediately irrelevant. In that moment, it became unmistakably clear: there was nothing I could do to make this happen better.
Anything I might have tried – any effort, any strategy, any attempt to “help” – would have been completely out of place.
The body was already doing something far more precise than anything the mind could organise. A deep, downward surge that took over the entire field of my body.
The quality of the contractions shifted. More downward, more purposeful. No longer rising and falling – but gathering, thickening, spiraling downward, and drawing her through. I could feel her descending with each surge, the movement through my pelvis precise and unmistakable. The way each contraction didn’t force, but guided. Rotated. Advanced her in small, exact movements.
There was no confusion in my body. No hesitation. No searching. Only knowing. I was not directing it. I was being moved by it. My diaphragm responded on its own, my breath changing without instruction.
Everything worked because nothing was being overridden.
My sounds changed with it. Deeper, louder. Primal. I remember my partner reacting immediately – he sensed the shift as clearly as I did.
“Amelia is here,” I said.
There was a growing pressure, a fullness deep in the pelvis, and with each contraction my body bore down in perfect coordination with her movement. But there was no sense of effort in any of it.
At the same time, something else began to return.
Until then, I had been almost entirely absorbed in the process, with very little sense of time or narrative. But as the intensity increased and her descent became undeniable, my awareness began to come back online.
Not fully – just enough to recognise what was happening. I remember thinking, very simply: Oh. I am giving birth. Today.
There was no space to go further than that. The body was already continuing the process, each contraction bringing her closer, the tissues surrendering in response.
There was a moment – brief, almost irrelevant – where I could sense how easy it would be to leave this.
To step out of my body. To try to manage it. To look for direction. But that pathway was no longer compelling. The intelligence moving through me was so complete – so precise – that there was nothing to improve.
Only one thing was required: to stay.
And when I did, the force intensified. Not chaotic, not overwhelming. Focused. Directed. Unstoppable.
My body curled forward on its own. The contractions surged – larger now, fuller. And I could feel her moving with it.
Down.
Turning.
Advancing.
Each contraction bringing her lower. Each response from my tissues meeting her exactly where she was.
When it became clear that we should leave for the maternity unit, the transition was immediate.
The journey took five minutes. My father stayed with the children. My mother held me – anchoring me through each wave as they moved through.
As her descent continued, the intensity did not break. It continued – more concentrated now, more demanding of my full presence, but still something I could stay inside of.
I could feel the moment her head began to crown. The sensation was strong, focused, expansive – but not something to escape from. It felt like the edge I had already come to recognise, the same threshold where intensity and pleasure meet, only now there was no way to step away from it. No retreat.
And I didn’t try to.
My body adjusted on its own, softening, yielding, a reflexive movement happening through me, not by me. I could feel her head pressing against my sacrum, shifting it backwards, creating space. I moved into a forward-leaning position on all fours, instinctively allowing my sacrum to move freely. Grounded. Open. More space. I could feel her body rotating further, deeper, smoothly into the hammock of my belly.
All the tissues completing their final opening sequence.
I held onto my mother’s arms, rocking and moaning as strong contractions came thick and fast with little resting space in between. No pause. Only movement. Down. Through. Out.
At 5:50 in the morning, just as the sun and moon arrived on the horizon, Amelia was born.
5. Integration
The shift was immediate.
As soon as she was born, a surge of energy moved through my body that I can only describe as power. Clear, physical, undeniable.
I felt strong. Alert. Completely present.
There was no collapse. No depletion. No sense of having been through something that had taken from me.
If anything, it felt quite like the opposite. Like something had come online.
I knew, very clearly, that I had just moved through an intensity I would previously have assumed was beyond my capacity. More sensation than I believed a body could hold.
And not only endured it, but remained present inside it. That changed something. The threshold for what my body now recognises as tolerable shifted. Intensity no longer carries the same meaning. It is not automatically a signal to brace, to contract, or to leave. There is more space in it now. More choice.
Looking back, the contrast with my previous births is difficult to ignore. At the time, I had considered them successful. We were alive. The babies were healthy. That was the measure I had been given.
But now, having experienced what it feels like for the process to unfold without interruption, it is clear how much more is available. Not as an ideal, and not as something to achieve. There’s no medal for going unmedicated. This is not an argument against pain relief or intervention when they are wanted, needed, or freely chosen. What I grieve is not that I medicated my earlier births, but that I did not know what other capacities might have been available to me. I wish I had known what else was possible in my own body, and I wish I had known that inner preparation can change what birth feels like.
None of this is about doing birth “better.” It is about not being taken away from my own experience. It is about choice.
The first disruptions entered after we arrived at the maternity unit. I agreed to have an IV line placed, as a precaution. That felt reasonable at the time. Now I see it as a clear break in what had been a fully intact birth process.
Shortly after, I noticed something being administered through it. I asked what it was.
“It’s for your own good,” I was told. “For the health of your uterus.”
I asked again, more directly: “Is this synthetic oxytocin?”
The response was vague. Not a request for consent. I said I did not want prophylactic oxytocin. I asked them to stop the drip. They didn’t.
I was told I would be putting myself in danger. I understood the evidence differently, and I did not want it. They were still hesitant. So I stopped it myself.
About twenty minutes later, before the placenta had been born, they began to pull on it.
I asked them to stop. We have time, I said.
But the timing of the shift was ending, and they needed to move me to the next unit.
And just like that, the logic of the system fully entered the room.
Nothing had gone wrong. And yet something that had been working with precision was no longer being allowed to complete in its own time.
Only later did I begin to understand what that kind of coherence requires. How easily trust is broken – even under the guise of “just checking”.
How deeply we are conditioned not to trust birth – especially at the moment it matters most. How little space there is for these conversations in the way birth is usually approached.
And how natural it had once felt to place more trust in something outside my body – something measured, monitored – over what I could feel so clearly within it.
How little sense that made now.
Looking back, it is clear to me: something like this does not need to be directed.
It needs to be fiercely protected.
It is already precise. Responsive. Self-regulating. And easily disrupted the moment something external assumes it knows better.
I cannot unlearn what this felt like.
And I know I am not the only one whose body carries this capacity. For many women, it is simply buried – beneath layers of fear, conditioning, and experiences that taught the system to disconnect at the very moment it most needs to stay.
And this is the work. This is where preparation actually matters. Preparation, I see now, was never about removing discomfort. It was about learning how to meet it.
To locate it in the body. To separate sensation from the story around it. To stay with it without collapsing, tightening, or leaving.
Only from there does what is experienced as “pain” begin to change quality – not because the intensity disappears, but because it is no longer met with resistance. It is met directly, described, entered, expanded – until it shifts, releases, or dissolves. This is not abstract. How you meet intensity literally codes your system, it teaches your body what to expect next time.
And birth makes that very visible. There is a point where there is no strategy left. You run whatever story your body already practiced under intensity.
You meet what is happening with the capacity you have built.
Or you leave.
The body opens in birth in much the same way it opens in orgasm. Pain and pleasure are not opposites here; they are expressions of how intensity is met – with resistance, or with conduction.
If the system contracts, overrides, or disconnects, that is what shapes the experience. If it has learned to stay, to soften, to allow, then something else becomes available.
Amelia’s birth changed me in ways I am still uncovering.
It didn’t just bring my daughter into the world. It changed my relationship to power, trust and sovereignty.
And I feel that in the everyday. In the demands of life with three young children. In the moments that stretch me, in places that would once have taken me out.
It makes me wonder how much of what feels overwhelming in early motherhood is not only the reality of caring for a newborn, but the absence of a true crossing – a threshold that was not fully lived.
Because birth has the potential to be exactly that – a rite of passage that changes how you meet everything that comes after.
And this, more than anything, is what stayed with me.
I did not prepare for birth by mastering it. I prepared by becoming intimate with what happens in me when intensity rises. By building a system that can stay coherent in the fire.
This is what I now know in my body.
If something in you recognizes this – even faintly – this is the kind of inner capacity we can begin to reclaim, gently and practically, through Internal Family Systems.
Amelia latched onto my breast immediately, nursing strong and steady – and has been there ever since.
6. To Amelia
As I write this, you are asleep in my arms, your perfect face resting softly on my chest. Four months old. Spring has arrived. The evenings are warm now. A soft pink light is settling around us as the sun sets. There is a sweetness in the air – everything is blooming.
And you – your whole face lighting up, those sweet cheeks lifting into a sudden smile – are what I find myself waiting for every day.
I watch you, day and night, memorising the weight of you here, the warmth, the softness, the way you settle so completely into me.
And already, it feels impossible to remember how we ever lived before you.
You arrived at the threshold – at that quiet point between endings and beginnings. Scorpio Sun and Moon on the horizon. A child of the deep waters.
Steady. Certain. As if you had always known the way. It felt, in those hours, as if something older than me knew exactly how to bring you through.
You come from a long line of women who have done this before without question. Women whose bodies knew the way, even when no one was watching.
You met me at the edge of what I thought I could hold. And you stayed there with me – until I could stay too. Not only in my body, but in my heart and in my soul.
I don’t know who you will become.
I don’t know what you will have to face, or where you will be asked to stay when everything in you wants to leave.
But I know this – your body will know more than you think.
And if you can stay with it, even a little longer than feels possible, something will open.
Not because it’s easy. But because it’s yours.
You didn’t just enter the world that morning. You changed the way I meet it.
And I have a feeling this is only the beginning.
Stay.
And you will remember what is yours to claim.