I have been present at births, and I have witnessed the mother, eyes closed and her very being inhabiting a different place. Michel Odent calls this 'labour land' and importunes us to not disturb the labouring woman.
Michel Odent is a French surgeon and author who has a special interest in environmental factors that influence the birth process and the primal period. He listened to the midwives and mothers at the hospital unit he was in charge of, and he made the changes they asked for, prioritising the needs of the labouring woman (which are seldom considered in modern settings, if the attendants even know what those needs are) over the convenience of the hospital and its staff.
The basis of not disturbing a woman in labour is supporting the physiology of labour which depends upon the regular pulsing of the hormone and neurotransmitter oxytocin. Oxytocin has been called the 'love hormone' because it is present in social bonding, during a shared meal, or a situation of trust, during lovemaking, breastfeeding and birth. Michel Odent also dubs oxytocin 'the shy hormone', because the pulsing of it into the bloodstream is very much more effective in privacy, and the presence of adrenaline stops its production.
From this physiological basis we can understand that the labouring woman's needs are for privacy, and this includes not being observed. Along with this feeling of privacy, a woman needs to feel safe, otherwise adrenaline will be present, and will inhibit the oxytocin. Other ways that adrenaline can rise is if the woman feels cold, or hungry, if the lights are on, or are too bright, or if anyone tries to engage her in conversation. Conversation, or the answering of questions, belongs to the realms of the thinking brain, the neocortex, or 'new brain'. The neocortex belongs to humans alone, and its activity during labour is part of what makes labour painful and slow for human women, unlike other mammalian species.
We share the structure of the 'old brain',sometimes called the 'mammalian brain' with our mammalian cousins, and this part governs the autonomic process of the body like breathing and digestion, and labour, processes that happen without us having to think about them. Respecting the above parameters will allow labour to unfold in the way that nature carefully designed it to, and allows the woman to be present to the epic and timeless interior odyssey that labour is.
I have personally experienced five labours, one medicated and four without pharmaceutical pain relief. I recall small fragments of intensity beyond imagining, of my self being on the outer edge of a world where no-one in the room could reach me. I recall an event like being on board ship in a raging storm, grey black clouds and boiling sea, of being on a forest floor, slowly dragging myself to my feet, of the sudden presence of many generously loving beings of mine, and we are laughing at our own party. At that point my husband was knelt close to my face, and murmured his sympathy at my extreme suffering, for that laughter was coming out as a scream.
It's unsurprising that labour would be a complex experience that engages all parts of a woman's self; physiology and biology are only part of the story of bringing a new human life on to this planet. No two humans will ever be more closely entwined on so many levels than growing one inside the other.
What has all of this got to do with you, if you're not personally in that particular phase of life, or close to someone who is? Well...we were all grown inside the body of a woman, and birthed by her. It's a universal human experience, and we as a culture have been shielded from its rhythms and secrets and rendered as helpless children in the face of the industrialised medical system, which serves only itself and its own dark purpose. And yet birth is possibly the most extreme and seminal experience of our human lives, and it behoves us to grasp the breadth and depth and impact of it, if not the details.
Only then might we begin to grasp the impact of separation of mother and infant after birth, for nature designed them to be as one. Neither can ever be whole again when this occurs, and the understanding of this can help those of us affected by it to move on in our existence without the unrealistic expectation of complete healing.
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