#116 — Crossing the Threshold to Motherhood: Ceremony, Ritual, and Healing Rites of Passage

How do you prepare for birthing another child when your first birth experience was traumatic? Can new mothers be realistically expected to process and integrate their birth and transformation experience when they work up until 40 weeks and are back just a few weeks later? How can we create space, ceremony, and ritual to promote healing, integration, and to fully honor women crossing the threshold into motherhood?

Kari Azuma was a successful leadership coach for five years before the traumatic birth of her son in 2015. Navigating and healing from her postpartum depression and “full-blown identity crisis” were among the most challenging experiences of her life, but also inform what she views as her life’s work: reigniting the view of motherhood as a rite of passage—full of ceremony, healing, and powerful ritual—for Western mothers.

She also makes the spiritual case for paid leave: motherhood is a profound transition that we simply cannot prepare for when working up until we give birth. Kari believes that much of the trauma we experience in birth as well as the postpartum depression and anxiety is at least partly to blame on the negligible space we give women on either side of their births. In other cultures, rites of passages are demarcated by space leading up to the transition to emotionally and spiritually prepare. This time is filled with ceremony and ritual and ideally, allows the woman to cross the threshold to new mother and give birth in a fully embodied, empowered way.

We speak to Kari at 37 weeks pregnant with her second child, a daughter, and learn about all of the healing work she has done personally over the past three years and how that has profoundly influenced the type of coaching work she does now. We get to hear about the ritual and ceremony she is creating in her own life leading up to her second birth and how we might incorporate this type of slow, quiet, space for ourselves.

IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT

• How Kari is creating space in her life for ceremony leading up to the birth of her second child.
• How her desire to have a home birth and her birth expectations with her first child turned deeply traumatic when she ended up with her “worst nightmare” of a hospital c-section.
• The ways in which having a traumatic birth opened a new portal for her and the work she feels called to do, guiding women through the passage to motherhood.
• How she spent three years healing, processing, integrating the birth experience, the death of her old self, and her own birth as a mother.
• The ways in which she is navigating holding hope and setting intentions for the birth of her daughter with a planned VBAC at home, while simultaneously releasing the idea that she can control or fight her way to a preferred birth experience.
• The spiritual case for paid leave or why Kari believes that some postnatal anxiety and depression can be linked to how little time and space we give mothers to slow down and prepare on deeper levels for the birth of their children.
• How she helps clients honor this transition to motherhood through traditional rites of passage ceremonies and rituals.
• How hard it can be to ask for and step into open space before birth when we are used to pushing hard and driving projects forward.
• The counterintuitive healing power of being in a space with people who aren’t expecting you to heal.
• How severing one’s past self and incorporating one’s vision for oneself as a mother are some of the crucial parts of becoming a mother that Western culture is missing today.
• How a coach of pregnant and new mothers balances business with her own pregnancy and maternity leave.