Fall is coming, the season of dying leaves and of the ancestors. Everything is winding down and moving inward. As we shift into this contraction of the seasons, there is also a move inside. We start moving inside the classroom, inside the house, inside the body. It is a time of connection and community, but it is also a time of increasing solitude and cabin fever. It is the beginning of the hardest time of the year to resist media as a way of breaking the monotony and a good [...]

How Cervical Dilation Checks Undermine the Imaginal Power of Birthing Women. Imagination is more important than knowledge.  – Albert Einstein I recently had an epiphany while explaining to a client why I don't do Cervical Exams, and why I don't teach women, or their husbands, to do them either. I started explaining the notion that cervical checks are an unnecessary intervention that don't actually give us any useful information about labor progress, and that when a woman asks to be checked I prefer to ask her to check in [...]