Ibu Katherine...On Prayer

What you go after eludes you.  What you become, you attract.

All that is required...truly required to help another person is love.  Simple, clean, humble love.  A deep love.  An impossible love that can only come from a place in us that was never born and will never die.  A love that was once offered to us that has crushed our own heart in its transformative way and that then served as the healing point, the strength we forgot in ourselves...a beacon of trust in us that was shrouded in doubt.

As doulas, mothers, sisters, friends of girls and boys and men and women and humanity, the path to love is prayer.  Prayer is an action/inaction of the deepest intent and hope and want and love and care.  An impersonal request from your personal divinity which, regardless of your memory of its presence, remains as a wellspring of strength and will never fail you.  Your belief in this divinity is what your families rely on their moments of vulnerability  They seek your knowledge and memory of this in yourself and also for them.  They ask for your reminder to them of this in their birth journey.

Of all the tools you will bring to a birth, bring your Divinity.  Bring your heart.  Bring your song of prayer.  For yourself...to remain humble and open to all who come to receive this new child.  For the mother...to remember the things she thinks she has forgotten about herself.

When things get difficult at a birth and you are baffled, say a prayer of help to all the doulas and midwives whose help you need to tap into at those times.  The power of prayer connects you to them...heart to heart allowing you access to information and help you didn't know you had!

So in your doula training, in your work,, in your play, while you drive your car, cook your meals...pray.  Pray every day with every breath and every desire and every need that you see.  Pray from the depths of your deepest deep.  Make everything you see and hear and feel and smell a prayer.  Walk a prayer with every step you take.

Try to make your prayer a song from the Divine, not your song to the Divine.  But don't worry about the song or the sights or the sounds or the desires or the need.  Just pray.  You see, just the intention of prayer is from divinity.  And that makes your heart a receptacle for the answer to come.

In practicing this each moment, you become a walking prayer and then a peacemaker.  And then everyone around you begins to respond in peace.  And then you become peace.  The environment relaxes, people begin to see and believe again.  All of a sudden, a baby is born and this child finds itself surrounded by peace.

A peaceful birthing reverberates out to the room and all the people present.  It's a memory that is permanently implanted into that child's cells and the Program of Peace is what this child will operate from its whole life.  It is stronger than environment or genetics.

It just is peace.  And then she/he teaches peace on a cellular level their whole life, just by being peace.

When a baby is born in an environment of peace...when a woman is believed and loved and encouraged during her time of birth, when mom and babe are honored as accomplished journeymen, the result can only be a certain strength and hope that transcends all the doubt and fear that life will present.

Love,  Katherine

---