Birth Affirmations
for the child of God
We (men as well as women) have to battle a ridiculous amount of fear and misogyny surrounding birth in our culture. If this is a new concept to you, Reader, I compel you ardently to immediately do some research on the sordid history of medicalized birth in America, and then research the wonderful normalcy of birth as it was created by God to be. If you, like me, have already done the research and are looking for ways to break free of the chains of fear that we have been conditioned to view birth with, you've likely already heard of birth affirmations.I spent hours on Google one day, searching for birth affirmation color pages that were not new agey and that honored faith in God. They do not exist. God put it in my heart to change that, so I set to work tapping into the talent He gave me, and I sketched a few Christian birth affirmation color pages-- the first of their kind, to my knowledge. I hope these are a blessing to birthing mothers everywhere who wish to honor God in the way they give birth, and arm themselves with strength and knowledge. I will be working more on these to add more to the collection, so hopefully one day in the future I will be able to compile an actual color book with perforated pages for the owner to color and detach to be hung on the wall in their birthing nooks. But thats far, far in the future...
I only have one pre-colored option right now (its quite time-consuming), for those who don't want to sit down and color a detailed page like these, but there'll be more to come.
One more thing: When I first discovered birth affirmations, I didn't really understand what to do with them. Reading them once and forgetting about them is not going to affect much change in a paradigm of fear that has taken decades to form. This is what I recommend: print them off, color them, hang them up around the house in places you frequent often (on the fridge, inside the cupboard door, on the piano, the bathroom mirror, above the kitchen sink, on the window in front of your sewing machine, in your office above your computer, above the changing table...), and read them ALOUD every single time you see them. There are several reasons to do it like this, and I may do a blog post about them at a later time. Suffice it to say, there is a reason tv commercials cost so much to the company who wants just 10 seconds to sell their product. What you see, coupled with what you hear, affects how you think and believe. We've spent basically our entire lives SEEING on tv the excruciating horror-film-like birth scenes, and HEARING the birth horror stories of people who love to spread more fear (in actuality, most of those horrors could have been avoided by NOT drugging the mother into twilight sleep or by NOT allowing the doctor to strip membranes...). To undo those undercurrents of fear in our hearts, we must take similar measures as it took for the fear to get in there in the first place.
I hope you enjoy these, and I would love to hear back from you about how birth affirmations have helped you overcome fear and motivated you to take charge of your birthing experience. I am certain other readers would enjoy seeing your own creative take on coloring these affirmations as well, and I would too!
