Preach It!

No one can tell a woman what is best for her and her baby ... waterbirth, homebirth, hospital birth, doctor, midwife, Unassisted Childbirth (UC) or cesarean surgery ... it is for her and her baby to know. The best we can do is support her to access, trust, and know her own inner wisdom and communicate with the Being within her - the One whose birth it is through her womb and the man. - Janel Mirendah, Attachment/Birth trauma therapist, Filmmaker of The Other Side of the Glass.

Watch It! (The Trailer)

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Trying to be reasonable about measles and vaccines

I have written a few posts on Facebook about the measles with my usual flare for "riding two horses with one ass" (a Hungarian saying my ex, the Hungarian used to say about me, sometimes in humor and often in frustration - the guy who said, pick a side and I will debate the other side), and this quote as my foundation:

"The technique of infamy is to invent two lies and to get people to argue heatedly over which of them is true."  Ezra Pound

I have this to say about vaccines, gun control, racial injustice, police brutality, bullying, rape, feminism, child abuse, porn, abortion, war, climate change,... fracking, poverty ... whatever you are polarized about ... Mommy War and Choice ...and arguing about:
 
I believe without a doubt, and I believe someday soon that the world will know (US probably last) that the separation of the mama-baby at birth for unnecessary, invasive acts is the core issue of everything we suffer from. The root.

This is the time when disturbed that wires the baby's neural system (brain) to be (unconsciously) dependent on systems (strangers, medicine, obstetrics which is pseudo science based). The human baby - each of us - were in our most potent, defining moment other than conception. The experience of separation at this profound moment - meant for connection - wired our brains and relationship with mother and world.

Mother has huge, huge experience at this most powerful, but vulnerable time meant for her to be in her power as woman. The experience of separation usurps power of mother by disrupting her instincts that are to be defined and empowered in this moment of meeting her baby outside the womb and her baby meeting her. Disrupting this time - minutes and hours after birth meant for connection and attachment - programs mama-baby for loss, pain, and disconnect. This allows for systems to override her instincts from that moment on.

Baby's nervous system is in critical period of brain development is learning. Our brains do not go to "off" to accommodate harsh and disruptive people and procedures. It programs baby (programmed each of us when we were newborn baby girl or boy) to connect and attach to others in the room and to pain and loss ... As normal.

This, my friend, disturbed labor and birth and mama-baby connection outside womb -attachment - is the root cause of War on women and the Mommy War. The "theys" - authority and politicians - need women to fight over actions and protocols designed and defined by them, and lumped together as women's "choice" and "rights" but ignores the question of "When does your baby have rights, a choice?" The system wants women to forget that she is making choices for her baby as well as herself. It is maintained by many generations of (men/medicine) disturbing women's most powerful act: bringing forth another human being AND separating baby from mother.

Vaccine war, gun control war, racial injustice war, police brutality, bullying, rape, feminism, child abuse, porn, abortion, war, climate change, fracking, poverty ... whatever you are polarized about ... Mommy War and Choice ...and arguing about .. The war on the war... IS a result of and is maintained by disrupting birth, by abusing the newborn baby, and by separation of the mama-baby.

By the way, here's a video being hailed as so great.  Think again. Mommy Wars.
I posted it with this comment:  "Damn. I thought at the end it was actually going to be about the baby. What nature and science say human baby needs, not a la carte parenting. Pouting."
 
Christa Battle, friend, responded: "My thoughts exactly. Parenting has become so 'parent centered' with egos and pride and mommy/daddy wants and needs coming first..."

Exactly what I am talking about!!
Friend and colleague, Andrea Nielson-Void says it well, "Cos it's a formula ad trying to shut up anyone who mentions breastfeeding and bottle feeding isn't the same...It's very good at making anyone who mentions it's an ad aimed at improving the perception of a formula company look like they're contributing to the mommy wars and don't think women are just doing their best for their family."

In other words, this video is serving to inflame the Mommy Wars, and tragically, it is doing so by perpetuating confusion about WHO our choices are about, and by presenting two (multiple lies) and promoting people arguing about them ... heatedly.  THEN, it shows them all racing to save the baby, but then gives the propaganda response in that touching, emotional moment. It's about the parents.


Speaking of "it's about the parents" ... here's another epistle of a response I shared on another Facebook post:
Melissa Andersen... you raise a point I was discussing with someone ... A new ah ha I had ... How vaccines are one more aspect of how the rights of women and choice fuels wrong choices for children.

You said, and it classically shows this conflict a
nd contradiction:

"I refuse to buy into the "But measles aren't always deadly" no- but they are often devastating. I worked as an administrator at a school where one mom had a child that caught the measles. She couldn't come to school. She couldn't go to work. She became behind in classes and couldn't graduate on time- which meant I could not place her with a position until she took another semester of courses. She had to go back and live with her family who wound up abusing her kids. Because her son had the measles. So yes, I understand that this mom is out of work for a long time because of possible exposure. I would be pissed too. It is serious. And needs to be treated as a serious disease."

So measles aren't deadly but the inconvenience to society is devastating? So it needs to be treated as a serious disease? Measles is not a serious disease but this debate IS a symptom of culture and it's systems that does not support mothering.

The answer to children getting sick and this cascading into poverty (so can so many things cause that*) is not to shoot children up with vaccines ...so they can continue to be in institutionized care so their mothers can prove equality by making a living. (Read Mothering Denied now called Mothering Matters).

*time caring for my father as he passed interrupted my time and income... But we don't put our elders down like we do animals so that we can move on with our life. Loss of job, cancer, leaving marriage, slipping on a banana peel and breaking your leg are just some of the things that can happen in our culture that put us on path to poverty ... because we as a culture do not provide a safety net for everyone... because of that, most of us are financially a paycheck away from devastation.

The answer is to fund mothering. FOR CHILREN'S SAKE. Not for women's rights, but future men and women's rights. The babies and children.

There is a big difference in saying that measles are devastating but not deadly because it inconveniences women who are terribly unsupported by their culture. It justifies doing it?! Something that generations of us have experienced? Something that science shows is done wrong?

I know someone whose roommate in the eighties was recruited by the government, and his tuition provided and his housing provided and the new car provided, and he was groomed to "make germs." This is part of the engineered poverty. There is no humane reason for a woman to go into (worst) poverty because her child is sick. This is - vaccination of children - is part of collective decision based on poor values, based on social engineering.

I totally get what you are saying. My own experience as a child and as a mother, and decades of looking at this engineering on backs of children made my ah ha moment this week. My third and fourth children had chicken pox at the most inconvenient time for my job and work. My third came down with the chicken pox the day his father left for a conference for 5 days. I was to do a presentation at work which I cancelled. Wasn't well received as I was in university where women were fighting the fight - for rights. 1986ish. You can thank "us" for both vaccines being normalized and for poverty. Not the systems and people leading us by our noses.

Fourth came down with the chicken pox when we traveled from Illinois to New York for a job interview. Her health and safety were a risk only because we could have potentially been unable to find a quiet place for her to recover. Fortunately I stayed with my sister in same city & I took more time off. You'd think I'd be big advocate for getting those kids vaccinated. Nope. I was thinking of when I had measles, mumps, and chicken pox, fondly almost - not "oh my god I was so sick" - because of the time with my mom being cared for. Same with my kids. It was a full week of me just caring for my son and daughter. Same with first two. It's hardly the end of the world to be mom when kids need us.

I have been a single parent several times with multiple marriages, so I am very fully aware of the issues related to being a single mother. And the complications of children being sick, in particular to women with hourly jobs. But, those are symptoms of the "serious disease".

This lack of regard for children and lack of support for mothering (while funding war) is a cultural shame and it is cultural neglect, from a very long standing entrenched disregard for mothering, and further it is a disregard for children, hence humans.

We need as a culture to fund mothering. There is enough money to do and to end poverty. It just needs to be the will of those in charge of money.

Www.theothersideoftheglass.com a birth film for and about men is my film about how we can create the world we say we want by protecting the mama - baby relationship at birth.
Alicia Collins-Goveia summed it up well for me:  "Well put Janel!! I thought the same thing when I read that... So get the MMR vax so you don't end up homeless?? What??? Ok... Said mother could have also missed two weeks of school due to a miscarriage, pneumonia, cancer treatment etc.

Measles wasn't the problem in that sorry. Our system is..."

This kind of conundrum thinking is what prevails in our culture, because we believe one of the two lies and do not look at the information, the research, and we believe in the fear. Fear fed and fueled by the keepers of systems who make a lot of money is the cause of the heated debates over two lies.
 

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Microbirth. Please watch this very important film

Microbirth, a film about our microbe environment, is online right now through January 2, 2015.

This film is going to create the shifts in thinking we need to make birth safe for every human, and save the planet" ... a endeavor many are looking at with serious concern.  I always say that until we who were so harmed at birth and since, get WHO the baby is, as David Chamberlain has implored of us for forty years, we will not shift birth back to truly normal.  This film just might shift some thinking about birth being about the baby .. about the baby's rights and needs. In that process, this information is going to be hard for many people - because we have not been born in the way that the science of this film is showing us. 

There is a tendency to want to deny this new information as a result of the shock of hearing the way one was born was damaging.  It can't be. We trusted the people who are educated experts, authorities, to "deliver" us, keep us safe and alive. To do no harm.  The system - people who make the system - has been able to deny that what they do is harmful and not based in science; and therefore, have also denied and withheld support for healing, that IS based in science. So, we “agreed” with them:  denied what happened to us. Denied that our experience was scary, painful, or abusive when our babies are bruised and separated from mother, wailing; and, when mother feels violated and fathers feel excluded. "No, no, your feelings are wrong.  Babies don't remember .. now, go on home and forget this happened." Everyday we know more about how this is so far from the truth.

TV and movie births - starting with Little Ricky's comical entrance into world in I Love Lucy, the first sitcom - have taught us what to believe about birth: nature is inept and therefore, women's bodies don't work.  Society now believes that birth is the realm of men, not women. Birth is a medical and life threatening event and can't be safe if not overseen by the male model of medicine.  Microbirth tells us the consequences of generations of us being welcomed to the world via hospitals and technology that disrupt our personal environment. We have learned to deny nature. Deny what happens.  We have built social and personal thinking and denial systems to accommodate this, on behalf of medicine, by denying our personal and collective loss and pain.  For this reason, people will defend their birth choices (ie, planned cesarean) and will deny what was done TO them, their informed choices denied and manipulated by a system run amok so that emergency cesarean has sky rocketed. These practices by medically trained and government/system sanctioned caregivers are not held accountable to science, logic, or what the heart/body knows. It is harming humanity and the planet.

Let’s support one another in our deepest wounds. Let’s look for ways to support people who were born by cesarean, (or who had immediate or 3 minute cord clamping - another issue I implore society to collectively challenge and revert to how nature intended, as we have breastfeeding). Nature has a plan for human conception and gestation and birth that supports the optimal human and thriving. Nature also has a multitude of back up plans for all of the possible disruptions of human birth.  Perhaps, the epidemic of disrupted birth - induction, drugs, cesarean and premature separation from mother/loss of placental blood - is pushing Mother Nature and the divine plan to the limit. 

I believe not all is lost. There is hope to reverse this and stop what scientists in the film say is happening and will happen to humanity.  We can all support ending the medicalized model of birth that is clearly so damaging by holding the medical system accountable and demanding that physiological, mammalian birth - that worked for eons to get us all here today - become our norm again. 

Microbirth, the film, online now, demands of us to put our resources into creating ways to support those for whom birth was disrupted. We are demanded to ban together, to rise up, whether we have ever had a child or not, or will or not, to create a healthy humanity.  We need to focus resources on healing those who were harmed while also focusing on stopping the harm of those coming into human life now.  Part three of  Zeitgeist movie, also online, is a film that also discusses the ecology and environment of the human being and how disrupting this disrupts humanity. It covers how religion has dominated our thinking. My film The Other Side of the Glass discusses how our primal nervous system imprints for war - inner and outer - are created in the experience of being born.  

Science, religion, and psychology are coming together to look at the impact of the human being's first experience that defines life. There is support for healing from the imprinting of our body-mind-soul of how we came into this realm of human form.  The healing can occur at any age, birth to elderly.  We can, at any age, experience a process that creates integration of what we experienced in primal period - conception through infancy.

Janel Mirendah at Heal Your Baby. I focus on supporting newborn and infants to have experience of sharing their story and then with mother (and father and others who will support the child lifelong) to have their Moment of Awe (tm), also Chapter two of my film.  The first three chapters are available online at www. The Other Side of the Glass.
Judith Cohen - travels to provide three day group healing process for adults.

Raymond Castellino, Founder of Prenatal and Birth Therapy
Karen Melton at Heal Your Early Imprints
Myrna Martin

Buy It!

Part One: The Other Side of the Glass: a Birth Film for and About Men officially released in digital download format on June 2, 2013. Go to www.TheOtherSideoftheGlass.com to purchase a digital download.

Men have been marginalized in birth for a long time. The old joke is that a man was sent off to boil water to keep him busy. I believe they were making the environment safe. Birth moved to hospitals and for forty years women were separated from their partners who was left to wait in smoke filled waiting room. Finally, he would see his baby from "the other side of the glass." Now a man can go in the birthing room and even get to hold his partner's hand during surgery. But they are still marginalized and powerless, according to the fathers I interviewed around the country.

Historically, birth has been defined by the medical establishment. The midwifery and natural birth movement now advocate for need "to educate and prepare men to protect their wife and baby" in medical environment. Seems logical ... if we process with the same illogic that got us here.

Through the voices of men - and doctors and midwives - men share heart-touching stories about how this is not workin' out. A man is also very likely to be disempowered and prevented from connecting with their newborn baby in the first minutes of life.

Now is the time for men to take back birth.

The film is about restoring our families, society, and world through birthing wanted, 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.

Donors, check your emails or email me at theothersideoftheglassfilm@gmail.com for info to download. Release on DVD is not planned at this date.

FREE online! watch Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 10 at www.vimeo.com/75767434

"Doctor's Voices" - Stuart Fischbein, MD - Part 1

Doctor's Voices - Michael Odent, MD

Human Rights Violations

Resources - Healing Birth Trauma

"The Other Side of the Glass" has the potential to open up feelings that have been denied and ignored for a very long time. How to heal the trauma of birth at any age will be addressed in the film. Meanwhile, these are pioneers in the field.

Raymond Castellino and Mary Jackson - www.BEBA.org

David Chamberlain, Ph.D. - www.BEPE.info

Judith Cohen - www.judithleecohen.com

Myrna Martin - www.MyrnaMartin.net

Karen Melton - www.HealYourEarlyImprints.com

Wendy McCord, Ph.D. - www.WendyMcCord.com

Wendy McCarty, Ph.D. - www.WondrousBeginnings.com

And, many, many more all over the world at www.BirthPsychology.com
In both relationships and life trust begets trust.
Generosity begets generosity.
Love begets love.
Be the spark, especially when it's dark.

--Note from the Universe, www.tut.com

"Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so children have very little time with their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of the peace of the world." - Mother Theresa