The Other Side of the Glass

Part One was officially released June 2013 in digital distribution format. To purchase to to www.theothersideoftheglass.com If you were a donor and want to download your copy send an email to theothersideoftheglassfilm@gmail.com.

The trailer

Friday, April 06, 2007

Placental Remedy ---- Seeing birth as sacred could change the world

I just received a link to a very interesting site http://www.placentalremedy.com/.

Our theory is, that having a remedy at hand for your baby that is made from her/his placenta is like having a bit of a magic potion for the baby. A remedy to use at times of illness, shock, transition or change and when you intuitively feel to. You will see also from the homeopath's case studies that is used for others as well.

It will seem more than a little odd for some, but I find it quite fascinating. I am very, very touched by the magnitude of it. I had to stop reading to ponder and to write. It brings up such feelings of loss for me as a baby and as a woman. I have come to believe in my training, healing, and therapist experience that the loss of the placenta, the disregard is a huge spiritual wounding. Perhaps, it even creates the search for "the other" that is so universal in our culture. I wonder how people are who were born with lotus birth and respectful care of the placenta. What are they like? How do they relate to the world, to the self, to others, and spiritually. What is their relationship to God, the Source?

What I have read today makes so much sense -- somatically and soulfully -- and I have to do some work around it. For a year or so now my own healing has centered around what happened to me after I was brutally dragged from my mother's body with huge metal tongs. My cord was cut immediately to "resuscitate" and "save" me. So my cord didn't pulse until my mother's body knew to release the placenta -- the "other" in my uterine life who sustained and nourished me. My clavicle was broken to make room yet thick forceps were able to fit. I wasn't touched with the highest of regard and welcomed as in the new version of The Secret tells us we need. "Welcome to the planet, Little One." (I always greet the new soul/baby this way.) What if every baby was touched and held only by the mother and father and loved ones, undrugged, and greeted with, "You can be and do anything you want -- Earth is a harmonious, beautiful, safe, and prosperous. " What if the baby's placenta (Life Source) was also treated with sacred regard and baby and was allowed to separate from placenta and mother in reverence -- placenta released when mother's body knows her baby is safe and umbilical cord intact with placenta released by baby's body when he knows it is time to do so. What if this happened without harsh scrubbing, chopping off of precious oxygenated blood, and bizarre hospital rituals before being allowed to gaze into mother's eyes, smell her, feel her, and nuzzle up to her breast to "re-connect" with her?

Oh, mama --- the level of harm to our bodies and souls weighs heavy on me today.......

I have been worrying this week about my GI Joe's health. I did a healing session in September -- spontaneous after a massage and therapist left to go to another room for an hour. I began to cry with the loving touch of massage from this wonderful woman. I was grieving my son's leaving and longing for him and truly wondering how it is that mothers get through deployment of their babies into war. I was feeling the most intense of feeling of loss and separation. Those earliest moments that were stolen from us ... feeling the loss of life energy (our blood and breath) that get stuffed down deep in the body and the heart of the mother. His was "a good birth" by modern obstetric standards. Twenty- three year old wounds have so many layers. I cried deeply, and as I know to do with the healing work, I allowed myself to go to that place again, but to stay "on the edge" of it, to feel and observe, rewire it, not cathart it.

I went through the birthing of this son and intended for healing of several things -- the disruptive and harsh staff, a unnecessary scalp monitor, and early cord cutting. I was very drawn to healing his head of any early wounds to create new energy as he went into battle. Because I didn't even know it until I read his hospital file twenty-two years later, I didn't know to hold his sweet, soft, precious head and tell him how sorry I was. It is criminal what medicine robs us of.

At the end of GI Joe's last semester before graduating college in December '05 and heading to office training in January, o6 he had a very enlarged spleen as a result of mono. Being so health conscious himself and so physically fit and strong (excellent prenatal care of an already health conscious mother covers a multitude of obstetric sins throughout the lifetime), he was just unaware of the mono illness until it took over his spleen. I had seen him the week before and noticed he was tired --- but it was the end of his last semester. Of course, every one in college is tired then and usually sick. Later, when I learned of the mono, I asked about his housemates and he laughed saying they are such couch potatoes who would know if they had mono or not. He had gone to the doctor only because of the severe rib pain, thinking he'd somehow broken a rib. I know in energy medicine, the spleen is about angst about humanity and probably other things as well. This illness -- mono, an enlarged spleen, and no time to really heal was on my heart and mind during that post-massage healing moment where I intended to heal my son and my body of our separation wound.



In the healing energy we can "re-experience" that which we didn't. I experienced birthing him alone in our timing and kept the placenta intact (working the severed separation that is so acute during such horrid circumstances such as deployment brings up all sorts of unhealed woundings of times separated). It was quite beautiful. I imagine I know what a perfect UC birth is (as I didn't have the real concern of safety as I would in real time birth). I have been "holding him" in my heart and mind since then with his placenta and cord intact, able to receive everything he needs.

On http://www.placentalremedy.com/:
I had tried a whole heap of other remedies for each symptom and nothing really worked. When I finally gave Mimi her placental remedy it seemed to reset her personality and she was over the symptoms very quickly. Within a few days she was completely better. I gave the remedy to Iris, Mimi's older sister (for whom I had not made a remedy using her own placenta) a few times when she was having a reaction to the food chemical salicylate. She was in the moment wild with anger and aggression and the remedy settled her explosive physical symptoms. The remedy feels like it works in a strong way in a reset like capacity. April Love Homebirth Mum 2007

I don't have contact with him right now, but when he is in very emotional place I FEEL it and I do the emotional work. We mothers have that connection. I have always been an empath but didn't know it until I began to do my own healing of my birth and learning the techniques for settling my nervous system and to differentiate my own somatic sensations (emotions) from the other's persons. While he's been deployed I FEEL and experience and transmute, I guess, what he is feeling and what he is unable to express and process there. They are in life and death nervous system alert (Flight/fight) 24/7 and it is hard to have a place and person with whom to let down. Soldiers don't cry, you know. Men and boys don't cry and do not show weakness. Society teaches them that. Soldiers have to be given "permission" to cry it seems by the Chaplain when they lose a buddy.

This week I became aware (that mother's intuition and worry) of his spleen, and his emotional exhaustion from what he is seeing, doing, and being challenged spiritually with, and I did some more work using Emotional Freedom Techniques (http://www.emofree.com/). I was aware of his spleen and his placenta again --- and the need for my body to have supported him more. I grieved this loss -- not being able to give my baby everything he was supposed to have to sustain him throughout life. MY baby needed me --- needed my body to keep supporting him. My body knew it then and knows it now. All of our bodies do -- no matter how much our mind minimizes and denies what happened to us and our babies, and no matter how much we convince ourselves that our birth was fine. Could mother's guilt, regrets, worries, anxieties just be our body's knowing and grieving? Could the self-medicating of our society and especially depressed and melodramatic women be because during these profound and sacred experiences we were drugged and violated? And, our mind needs us to remain numb?

So much was robbed from us. How can a woman truly begin to feel all that has been denied her body and soul, and, that harmed her baby? Cruelly, arrogantly, robbed by medically trained, controlling, misspoken, cruel people who have their schedule, their paycheck, and their license as their first priority -- not the mother and soul coming into her life. Shame on them. Damn them. And this was robbed of my mother and me too, and of my daughter and grandson and I couldn't stop them -- the medico. And, so I did what I could this week to heal my body and to support my son -- energetically. Energetically, if quantum physics is true, and I think it is is, I believe we can do whatever is needed. Our physiology is much more than just flesh. We are energetic beings and connected. Somehow, my body has awakened to the traumas and the wrongs and I am blessed to know of and be open enough to consider the new science and the new technologies to support healing. (http://www.emofree.com/ and http://www.castellinotraining.com/, http://www.pnri.net/, http://www.birthpsychology.com/).

What IS the reason for supposedly highly trained, caring, intelligent human adults to do such atrocities to a newborn human and to his or her mother? How can this be perpetuated simultaneously as promoted as natural, normal, and as the right thing to do --- morally and scientifically? I have been feeling outrage in recent weeks at the early cut cording in the hospitals here --- it is absolutely outrageously violent and damaging. I am considering how illogical it is for medical caregivers --- who boast and control us with their "scientific armor" that has wrongly grown into controlling us under the lie of truth --- to believe that what they are doing is right. HOW CAN THIS BE!?!? Is cord/placental blood being stolen by hospitals? It BLOWS me away that 90% of the adult population -- birthing women and men are so manipulated and controlled by obstetricians and labor and delivery nurses, those who routinely, daily are violently abusing women and babies. I was one of them when giving birth -- but at the first birth I attended I was appalled and remain vigilant about the need to stop the abuse of women and babies in hospital, socially sanctioned violence.

From the selfish act of inducing for anything other than medically necessary to the robbing of the baby's placental blood, I am wondering about how it is logical and clearly obvious that a mother's body totally supports and protects the gestating baby via the placenta from the first Milli-second of life through labor and birth, and yet this collective belief and panic that baby will die if not severed from her and roughly resuscitated is perpetuated as scientific. (sorry, long sentence). How barbaric. Absolutely, no regard for the need of the baby to have his or her blood -- the rich oxygenated blood from the placenta -- the good stuff, and zero regard for the baby's need to TRANSITION from life in the womb WITH the placenta -- the SOURCE OF LIFE -- to being a separate human.

To separate from the mother and the Source and to become a physiological independent baby is tantamount on every level -- physiologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Look how awesome we humans are that we can survive under these circumstances. And, look at the consequence to many of not having their blood and not having the gentle, physiologically transition of separation from the womb. There is no science or logic to dictate the immediate, harsh severing of mother and baby. Her body will continue to care for the baby while the cord and placenta are intact. WHEN the baby is ready her body will release the placenta. WHAT OTHER EXPLANATION is there for the transitioning of her baby to her arms. God, it makes me nuts. WHY WOULD THEIR BODIES NOT continue to work together?!? To believe that the mother's body stops caring for her and doing everything possible to PRESERVE her newborn's is totally IGNORANT x 100.

Lotus birth makes so much sense to me --- I have often wondered how did humans sever the umbilical cord throughout history? Did they chew it? How did they clean the baby? Humans are so grossed out by the way animals clean their babies. What happened when women weren't near water? HOW did humans survive? In third world countries cutting the cord with a dirty instrument is one of the leading causes of infection in the newborn. It is still a leading cause of infection in modern birth -- direct opening to the baby's system. Medically trained obstetric caregivers seem to me to be some of the least intelligent people about the human body and physiology, and so dictated by rituals to maintain the political status quo. I mean, really, where is the research to show that letting the placenta and cord release is dangerous? How could these medically trained people rob a baby of their blood -- their life source? What is socially acceptable now has little to do with the real needs of the human baby.

I presented the self-attachment information to the staff at a hospital trying to attain Baby Friendly status. They said that many mothers don't want to touch the baby before scrubbing because of her own body fluids. That really surprises me, and yet it doesn't it. A culture of pseudo-perfection as defined by airbrushed pictures of perfect women, of course. Maternal choice, feminism, women's rights to her body ... blah, blah, blah. If a woman can't touch her baby with her own fluids and must be out shopping in three days as a form of some medal of achievement, it's highly unlikely she'll be receptive to keeping the placenta and cord intact until the baby's body releases it. What a shame. What a harmonious, gentle, compassionate world we could have if we would. Of course, this would require a rearrangement of our values and of our time. We would also have to care for new mothers rather than expecting competing Olympic feats of getting back to work and activity. Check out www.sacredwindows.com -- the care of women for forty post partum days.

It makes perfect logical, scientific sense to me that physiologically, the placenta will pulse as long as it is needed to sustain the baby. This is logical to me I want to scream -- I feel it in my cells. One of the physicians I worked with who did homebirth said the baby at a homebirth was struggling and the cord pulsed for well over a half an hour. There is no reason or hurry at homebirth to sever the mother and baby. There is no magic number in which the placenta should should stop pulsing and detach from the womb. Homebirth shows this is as variable as the "due dates" and length of labor. ACOG had Godly determined that it is safe to cut the baby's lifeline after thirty seconds. It's absurd. Where is the research for this? And, what the hell is their reason for doing so? It makes total sense to me that the woman's body KNOWS what her baby needs during labor, birth, and the first minutes and hours --- just as her body has known every second of development from pre-conception on. The knowing of Birth is not in our conscious, thinking neocortex brain --- from preconception throughout motherhood, it is our body, the unconscious that knows what our baby needs. Obstetric medicine is destroying this.

Dr. Todd Gastaldo advocates for a social ill to charge MD's and nurses with child abuse for the treatment of babies and women in birth, but especially around the continued ritual procedures and protocols of forcing women in to semi-sitting and supine positions when it is well-established that this closes off the pelvic outlet up to 30% or more and because of the early cord clamping. I agree -- and all of it is done by medical people promoting the rights of women to choice and pain relief. No woman would chose to harm her baby over the short term experience of labor and birth when so much is available to support her to birth naturally and without fear, but to trust her body to know what to do and to care for her baby -- as it did throughout pregnancy. Gastaldo refers frequently to Dr. George Morley who I have also referred to here. Again, Dr. Morley's temporary baby asphyxiation experiment as it appears at http://www.archives.com/ (note the word "asphyxia"):

"[T]he umbilical cord [is] immediately closed between finger and thumb...The[fetal heart rate/FHR] will decelerate quickly to about 60 bpm...the color will change from purple-pink (normal at birth) to pallid blue(vaso-constriction and asphyxia.)...Few midwives or obstetricians will be able to observe, without interference, a deep, prolonged FHR deceleration on a non-breathing newborn for a period of 60 seconds. Common sense will soon release the finger and thumb."

http://web.archive.org/web/20050204093128/http:
//www.cordclamping.com/acog-cp.htm. Read http://www.cordclamp.com/ for the most in depth, scientific, and relevant information available about the truth about early cord cutting/amputation.

Mamas, and men .... when are we going to rise up and put a stop to this abuse of women and babies in the name of science? I believe if we American citizens could do that we wouldn't be in Iraq right now. We wouldn't be ineffective in demanding our political will. Obstetrics is the politically sanctioned manufacturing of dysfunction, disempowerment, and disability.

No comments:

"Soft is the heart of a child. Do not harden it."

A public awareness reminder that things that happen behind the scenes, out of our sight, aren't always as rosy as we might think them to be. Perhaps its a restaurant cook who accidentally drops your burger on the floor before placing it on the bun and serving it to you. Here it's an overworked apathetic (pathetic) nurse giving my newborn daughter her first bath. Please comment and rate this video, so as to insure that it is viewed as widely as possible, perhaps to prevent other such abuse. -- The mother who posted this YouTube. How NOT to wash a baby on YouTube Are you going to try to tell me that "babies don't remember?" There is no difference to this baby's experience and the imprinting of her nervous system/brain and one that is held and cleaned by the mother or father either at the hospital or at home? By the way, this is probably NOT the baby's first bath. The nurse is ungloved. Medical staff protocol is that they can't handle a baby ungloved until is has been bathed (scrubbed if you've seen it) because the baby is a BIO-HAZARD -- for them. Never mind that the bio-hazard IS the baby's first line of defense against hospital germs.

Missouri Senator Louden Speaks

Finally, A Birth Film for Fathers

Part One of the "The Other Side of the Glass: Finally, A Birth Film for and about Men" was released June, 2013.

Through presentation of the current research and stories of fathers, the routine use of interventions are questioned. How we protect and support the physiological need of the human newborn attachment sequence is the foundation for creating safe birth wherever birth happens.

Based on knowing that babies are sentient beings and the experience of birth is remembered in the body, mind, and soul, fathers are asked to research for themselves what is best for their partner and baby and to prepare to protect their baby.

The film is designed for midwives, doulas, and couples, particularly fathers to work with their caregivers. Doctors and nurses in the medical environment are asked to "be kind" to the laboring, birthing baby, and newborn. They are called to be accountable for doing what science has been so clear about for decades. The mother-baby relationship is core for life. Doctors and nurses and hospital caregivers and administrators are asked to create protocols that protect the mother-baby relationship.

Men are asked to join together to address the vagaries of the medical system that harm their partner, baby and self in the process of the most defining moments of their lives. Men are asked to begin to challenge the system BEFORE they even conceive babies as there is no way to be assured of being able to protect his loved ones once they are in the medical machine, the war zone, on the conveyor belt -- some of the ways that men describe their journey into fatherhood in the medicine culture.

Donors can email theothersideoftheglassfilm@gmail.com to get a digital copy.
Buy the film at www.theothersideoftheglass.com.

The film focuses on the male baby, his journey from the womb to the world and reveals healing and integrating the mother, father, and baby's wounded birth experience. The film is about the restoring of our families, society, and world through birthing loved, protected, and nurtured males (and females, of course). It's about empowering males to support the females to birth humanity safely, lovingly, and consciously.

Finally, a birth film for fathers.

What People Are Saying About the FIlm

Well, I finally had a chance to check out the trailer and .. wow! It's nice that they're acknowledging the father has more than just cursory rights (of course mom's rights are rarely acknowledged either) and it's great that they're bringing out the impact of the experience on the newborn, but I'm really impressed that they're not shying away from the political side.

They are rightly calling what happens in every American maternity unit, every day, by its rightful name - abuse. Abuse of the newborn, abuse of the parents and their rights, abuse of the supposedly sacrosanct ethical principal of patient autonomy and the medico-legal doctrine of informed consent, which has been long ago discarded in all but name. I love it!

In the immortal words of the "shrub", "bring it on!" This film needs to be shown and if I can help facilitate or promote it, let me know.

Father in Asheville, NC


OMG'ess, I just saw the trailer and am in tears. This is so needed. I watch over and over and over as fathers get swallowed in the fear of hospitals birth practice. I need a tool like this to help fathers see how very vital it is for them to protect their partner and baby. I am torn apart every time I see a father stand back and chew his knuckle while his wife is essentially assaulted or his baby is left to lie there screaming.
Please send me more info!!!!
Carrie Hankins
CD(DONA), CCCE, Aspiring Midwife
720-936-3609


Thanks for sharing this. It was very touching to me. I thought of my brother-in-law standing on the other side of the glass when my sister had to have a C-section with her first child because the doctor was missing his golf date. I'll never forget his pacing back and forth and my realizing that he was already a father, even though he hadn't been allowed to be with his son yet.

Margaret, Columbia, MO

In case you don't find me here

Soon, I'll be back to heavy-duty editing and it will be quiet here again. I keep thinking this blog is winding down, and then it revives. It is so important to me.

I wish I'd kept a blog of my journey with this film this past 10 months. It's been amazing.

I have a new blog address for the film, and will keep a journal of simple reporting of the journey for the rest of the film.


www.theothersideoftheglassthefilm.blogspot.com


I'll be heading east this week to meet with a group of men. I plan to post pictures and clips on the film blog.

I'll keep up here when I can -- when I learn something juicy, outrageous, or inspiring related to making birth safer for the birthing baby.

Review of the film

Most of us were born surrounded by people who had no clue about how aware and feeling we were. This trailer triggers a lot of emotions for people if they have not considered the baby's needs and were not considered as a baby. Most of us born in the US were not. The final film will include detailed and profound information about the science-based, cutting-edge therapies for healing birth trauma.

The full film will have the interviews of a wider spectrum of professionals and fathers, and will include a third birth, at home, where the caregivers do a necessary intervention, suctioning, while being conscious of the baby.

The final version will feature OBs, RNs, CNMs, LM, CPM, Doulas, childbirth educators, pre and perinatal psychologists and trauma healing therapists, physiologists, neurologists, speech therapists and lots and lots of fathers -- will hopefully be done in early 2009.

The final version will include the science needed to advocated for delayed cord clamping, and the science that shows when a baby needs to be suctioned and addresses other interventions. Experts in conscious parenting will teach how to be present with a sentient newborn in a conscious, gentle way -- especially when administering life-saving techniques.

The goal is to keep the baby in the mother's arms so that the baby gets all of his or her placental blood and to avoid unnecessary, violating, and abusive touch and interactions. When we do that, whether at home or hospital, with doctor or midwife, the birth is safe for the father. The "trick" for birthing men and women is how to make it happen in the hospital.

Birth Trauma Healing

Ani DeFranco Speaks About Her Homebirth

"Self-Evident" by Ani DeFranco

Patrick Houser at www.Fatherstobe.org

Colin speaks out about interventions at birth

Dolphins