How i learned to trust my intuition: part 2

Part 2 - From academia (where I always had to (pretend) to have the answers) to birth doula (where my greatest asset was my ability to hold space for uncertainty)

Photo by Rebekah Vos on Unsplash

After walking away from the PhD I sat on my meditation cushion for a month, crying and feeling like a failure. Meanwhile, the Universe was busy dropping hints: several people told me I would make a good birth doula, a friend gave me a book on midwifery and I met several doulas in person. After a while, I listened and signed up for a training. It felt less like following my intuition and more like being bashed over the head with a baseball bat, but I suppose it counts.

My new career was humbling in the extreme. Every single birth felt like it was designed to teach me the exact same lesson: you cannot control this, no matter how much you know. I tried to teach my clients to prepare, prepare, prepare and then - on the day - to completely let go. Most of them found the letting go part the challenge.

Nobody can ever predict the outcome of a birth (you can’t even predict what will happen in the next five minutes) and yet my brain tried to EVERY SINGLE TIME. “Listen”, it would say. “I know I’ve been wrong every other birth. But this time I know I’m right.” It never was.

Luckily, by this stage I could largely differentiate between my thinking and my intuition. My thinking is LOUD, repetitive, fear-mongering and urgent. Intuition or inspiration feels calmer, quieter and gives me space to decide. It’s not pushy and it doesn’t make me feel bad when I’m not ready to listen.

As I became more experienced at birth work, I simply learned to ignore the loud, urgent thoughts so that I could be present to what was actually happening in the moment - which made me more open to the inspiration I just mentioned. That said, there is no way to “hack” birth, even if you are plugged into your gut. I would often find myself saying something along the lines of: You’re currently X number of centimeters dilated and you could be fully dilated in twenty minutes or twenty hours. Either way, we’re going to do the exact same thing right now, which is to listen to your body and respond to its needs. Some women embraced that reality and some fought it. Most did both; humans are complex.

At times I told myself that I should be developing some kind of prescient sight or sixth sense about how things would go at a birth. Occasionally I would look back and realize that I had been given hints and gut instincts, but in a humble way; a nudge to make a suggestion about a technique or an inkling that a particular position might help and so on. Still, that doesn’t remove the hard work of preparing my clients beforehand, offering them tools to practice (breathing, moving, hypnosis, etc) and then  - on the day - giving them permission to listen to the cues of their body. My job is then mainly to hold loving space while they navigate both the knowing of their bodies and the uncertainty of the eventual outcome.

What does it mean to “know” in these circumstances? Honestly, what I gained as a birth doula was less about knowing and more about unlearning, unraveling and unschooling. All the times as a student and a professor that I had felt like I should know the answer, that I had to prove I was master of a subject or an expert at something, I had to unlearn it all. It would have been way easier to immediately shift from being an academic know-it-all to an intuitive know-it-all. I could have called myself a “birth guru” and gathered myself a following of adoring fans. My ego would’ve loved that.

Instead a far more humbling process occurred. I moved from pretending I always knew the answers (which is basically what academia is when push comes to shove) to openly stating that my job was to live in the Mystery with my clients. I know some people didn’t hire me because of this. They wanted a doula who promised that they would get their perfect, vaginal birth. But I’m a doula, not God - and intuition seems to be about 5 per cent knowing and 95 per cent having the patience until the next wave of knowing hits.

So hang on, I hear you say. What’s so great about that? Why am I learning to trust something that leaves me in the dark 95 per cent of the time? Obviously I’ve asked the same question - I think we all do - but here’s the bottom line. If this journey is ultimately about learning to trust the Universe (of which I am only a tiny part), then constantly knowing the answers misses the point. Because if I already know then why bother to trust something bigger than myself? The ego wants to believe that it can be a self-sufficient entity when it comes to knowing and functioning effectively. But that’s just another version of the kind of bullshit I learned in school: that being uncertain gets you a B minus at best and being totally sure of myself was the way to get an A.

Instead, this process recognizes that we all hold a piece of the puzzle. Sometimes I know, sometimes you know, sometimes we need to turn to a mysterious force that I call The Universe (but you might call God). That way, we are forced to be in connection not only with our own inner truths, but with a tribe of people we trust and a loving Higher Power that we can surrender to when human knowing fails. This is the larger context that intuition exists within.

Thus, being a birth doula has been a process of continuously letting go of my ego, of my need to know, my need to be right and my need to know the timing or the outcome of things. In its place I have learned to be flexible, to have faith that the outcome will be as it needs to be, to trust the process and to hold space for unpredictability. Whilst doctors (and sometimes midwives) want to predict how big baby will be, how long it will take to emerge and how a woman will handle it, I try to be the voice of humility: you can prepare as much as you want for this birth but on the day, you will be asked to be with an intense visceral experience and to respond to it with as much grace as you can, not knowing how it will go but having faith that you and your team will respond to the unfolding of things as best we can. And when birth brings you to your knees - as it generally does - I will be there to hold your hand, look deep into your eyes and remind you that you are not alone.

Which brings me to tarot. It’s not an obvious segue, I’ll grant you, but it was where the Universe - and my intuition - has led me.

Next week - from Birth Doula to Tarot Doula