By Rita Brhel, editor of The Attached Family

Pregnancy is such a transformative event in a woman’s life: Suddenly, life is about more than just yourself, there is a new life blossoming inside you, and how you lead your life from here on out determines the very future of that new, little one. And for a father-to-be, pregnancy is just as life-changing: The wife becomes a mother, the couple becomes a family, the father finds emotional depth he likely has never known before.

Riet van Rooij, mother of two from the Netherlands, has spent 12 years counseling women and men on fertility, pregnancy, and birth through her Freyja practice. And now she brings this expertise to readers around the world through not only her website, Freyjamethartenziel.nl, but also an update of her 1999 book, now with a companion CD of the exercises and visualizations she describes in print – Pregnant with Heart and Soul — and translated in English and German.

Let’s turn to van Rooij for her insight into how to find our spiritual path through pregnancy.

RITA: Hi Riet. You have gained such a vast knowledge base through your many years as a pregnancy coach. What first inspired you to follow the career path of spiritual midwifery?

RIET: What inspired me was my experience of the birth of my first child. The truthfulness, the bare truth of that experience, was similar to the dying of my father when I was 16 years old. During his illness and death, my mother, sisters, and brother were not in a position to share our feelings with him and each other.

The start and the ending of life have a similar potential, or capacity: to undo us from shallowness and superficiality, and to make us descend to our essence. Birth and dying have the potential to open our hearts.

In the days after the birth of my son, I decided to my contribution in life would be to stimulate people to live profoundly and fully aware of the human experiences of life and death. The purity of it is so binding.

RITA: And in time, you were led to write your book.

RIET: I decided to write a book when I realized, after so many years maternity guidance, that there was too little challenge for me in giving about the same course over and over again. It felt routine, and that was not what I wanted to offer the parents-to-be that came to me. But I didn’t want all my experiences and ideas to disappear when I would stop giving courses, so I decided to be an inspiration to as many people as possible with my message before I went to new challenges, by writing a book. Pregnant with Heart and Soul was the result.

RITA: How have readers responded to your book?

RIET: In the Netherlands, the reactions tend to be relieved. Some of the comments I have heard are: “Wow, this is a book with a spiritual message that’s down-to-earth at the same time. Realistic, not normative at all!” “Practical, supporting, friendly” and “Have received a lot of support from it. Also when things went different than I wanted, it gave me a lot of good ideas and inner strength. Thank you!”

I have received letters from a number of parents here in the Netherlands, as well as the United States and Australia. Recently, a father of three wrote: “Everything I wanted to know. I am reading the book. As a father-to-be, I would like to have read this book before my daughters were born. Fine examples that feed the imagination, own experiences, and still enough knowledge and practical information between the lines for people with a less spiritual attitude. Happy writing style, totally not nagging or didactic. Maybe I’ll go for a fourth daughter. …”

Another man wrote: “Inspiring and supportive. How to prepare, as a man, for your woman’s childbirth? To read this book! My wife had the book and was very enthusiastic about it. I share her enthusiasm now all the way. As a man, you’re a little on the sidelines during pregnancy and childbirth. But through this book, I felt very helpful, supportive, and at my ease during the birth of our first child. The book describes how you can make contact with your child when he is still in the womb and describes very concretely and practically what you can do during the birth. This ensures that you will feel more involved immediately. Example: Our child was to week 37 breech, and Pregnant with Heart and Soul helped us to determine how we wanted to go. All in all, a beautiful, supportive, and inspiring book.”

RITA: Your book is certainly touching parents-to-be, especially the father who, as the second father described to you, don’t always know how to be supportive during pregnancy and birth. How do you see your book affecting how women give birth? What changes would you like to see in our birthing culture?

RIET: Becoming pregnant and giving birth to a child are ultra-secular, and highly spiritual experiences, at the same time. Pregnancy is a period rich in spiritual growth if parents-to-be live through the various aspects of it consciously. Women, and fathers-to-be as well, are able to experience the soul as their natural wisdom, their inner depth, their intuition.

An essential component of devoting attention to the spiritual, intuitive side of pregnancy and birth is communication with the unborn child. You can make contact with your child’s soul, separate from kicking little feet and a little bottom turning away. In my view, you can already communicate with your child on an intuitive level from the very beginning of the pregnancy. Contact with the child inside your belly is not reserved for people with special gifts. On the contrary, every parent-to-be is naturally capable of this.

The assumption that an unborn baby is a conscious soul also has consequences for how we approach the child during the birthing process, how we welcome it, and how we handle him or her after the birth. Furthermore, your experience of the delivery can be deeply influenced by the realization that the way in which your child is born is linked to what this soul is coming to do on earth — what he is coming to learn and bring.

“Forget everything you’ve learned,” I always say, playing things down a little, to women who are inclined to put together some kind of film script for their delivery. The course of your delivery and even the way in which you deal with your labor pains depends only to a small degree on the way in which you have prepared — or not. Delivering a child is an authentic experience that by definition you will experience differently than you imagine beforehand. Giving birth requires you to be able to let go. Your preparation can indeed provide you with beacons to guide you, but a distinctive feature of delivery is that at a certain point, your body takes over from you. The trick is to surrender to it. When preparations and intentions degenerate into spasmodic control, they get in the way of the natural process of delivery.
 
Every delivery has its own character, which is determined by various factors. It is not simply a question of being able to relax, having or not having good contractions, being able to push well, or otherwise. There are women for whom giving birth is relatively easy, while for others, it is the most extreme thing with which they are confronted in their lives. In addition to physical details like your body’s build and the size of your child, the degree to which you can be present in your body and the temperament of your baby play a role. On an even deeper level, all these details are connected with the topics your soul wants to investigate in this life and with what your child is coming to do: the reciprocity between the both of you is a part of the connection of your souls.

With my book, I hope to support parents-to-be in their physical well-being, in the communication with their partner, in their connection with the spiritual dimension of life, and in the contact with their unborn child. With the ideas and methods I am passing on, I hope to provide impetus to go through the pregnancy soulfully in a contemporary sense, and thus to hold life in reverence. Besides this, my book is intended as a plea to take our unborn children and newborn babies seriously by communicating with them at the level of the soul.

RITA: As you know, the first of Attachment Parenting International’s Eight Principles of Parenting addresses pregnancy and birth. How does your book work to further the Principle of Preparing for Pregnancy, Birth, and Parenting?

RIET: I am astonished of the similarities in my message and yours! In my book, there are many suggestions to help parents-to-be to follow the Principle. My book gives hands and feet to them, on many ways, to reflect, research, and be prepared, as for example in the chapter on self-images — to become conscious of your values and convictions. I write about coping with fear and tension, listing and examining, sharing, accumulating baggage, delivery and the art of letting go, visualizing, affirmations, a circle of helpers, welcome celebration, walk your talk, and so on. I believe there’s a strong match between API and Pregnant with Heart and Soul! My book will feed and support API members!

RITA: What would you say is the most important part of your book?

RIET: Making, seeking, and getting contact with the unborn child, the theme of the third chapter of the book, including a step-by-step visualization on the CD. In the book, I say it in the following words: “How on earth do we know whether we are truly encountering the essence of our child or just a product of our imagination? Well, who can say…? Ultimately I think this question is immaterial. We open our heart if we are seeking contact with our unborn children. That is what’s important!”

In the seventh chapter, which addresses the delivery, my message sounds: “Every delivery has its own wisdom, tells its own story, and in one way or another reflects how things are with you in life. It is a metaphor for the path you have trodden and that you have yet to tread. This applies both for the woman giving birth and for the child that is being born. By being born, your son or daughter is introducing himself or herself and giving voice to his or her being. Not surprisingly, on the level of the soul there is no distinction between nice, easy, or natural births and tough, difficult ,or medical ones. Delivery and birth are forms of the soul expressing itself.”

That’s why my book’s title is Pregnant with Heart and Soul, with emphasis on the heart and the soul. In short: Tuning in, listening, and working together on the level of the soul; alertness, intuition and trust.

RITA: Are there any tips you can give parents-to-be while they wait for a copy of your book?

RIET: To enjoy your pregnancy. Talk to your child, sing for him, dance with your belly and the new life in it, open your heart, share with the father, and trust on the power of the connections from soul to soul between the three of you — or more, when you have already children — in whatever form life will develop from the very moment that you are in now.

RITA: Thank you for your time and insights, Riet. Do you have any closing thoughts?

RIET: I end my book with a conclusion that fits wonderfully with the words that your questions evoke: “In writing this book, I wanted to pass on the ideas and experiences that I have accumulated in my counseling work and in my own role as a mother. Not a single thought or suggestion in this book is intended as a norm for ‘the best way to live through a pregnancy,’ ‘the ideal birth,’ or ‘the perfect contact with your child.’ I only wished to awaken your curiosity to all that your pregnancy and your child are bringing. I wanted to inspire you to look in a way that helps you to be in touch with the rich diversity of reality and to follow your own truth within this. I wish you much pleasure and devotion and a lot of courage on the path of parenthood.”