BIRTH: The Psychedelic Trip of a Lifetime
Artwork by Cynthia Meyers
Before becoming the editor of Fat Nugs Magazine, I worked as a birthkeeper and postpartum care provider for nearly a decade. I still do this work for my community, because it has become undeniable to me that birth and motherhood have innumerable characteristics in common with plant medicines and the shifts they invoke. From the fact that both mind-altering plants and mind-altering birth are burdened by illogical rules and regulations, to the truth that birthing and tripping in captivity amongst strangers is a seriously bad idea; the two worlds are really one, and it’s time to restructure our lives accordingly.
My perspective comes from the knowing that birth itself is a psychedelic trip meant to catalyze families into a paradigm of love, connection, and oneness with the universe, just like mushrooms do. Allow me to explain this through the lens of story and intuitive knowing.
BIRTH IS THE MEDICINE
I gave birth to my third daughter, freely and without the presence of anyone but my husband, on my bedroom floor. I retrieved her from the depths of my soul, where hers was entangled with mine, a depth I had never before accessed. She led me there. I could feel her tiny legs propelling her deeper and deeper into the portal, asking me to assist with the expulsion she so desperately wanted. She was ready to traverse the realms and breathe the air, as opposed to the waters of her own private ocean. She was born wet, slippery, pink and wide-eyed into her father’s hands. She and I couldn’t take our eyes off of each other as we processed, together, the most holy of experiences available to humankind.
This is not the same way I describe my first two daughters’ births. They were mechanical, medicated, scripted, manipulated, violated, and stolen from me. The epidurals numbed me. The doctors rushed me. I felt no tiny feet pushing against my ribs in an effort to move toward the light. I felt no depth. I felt nothing at all. My mind was preoccupied with texting people updates. Hands went inside of me, measured me, stretched me, emptied bags of my urine, inserted needles and took my blood.
Sounds like a pretty bad trip, yeah?
We are now in the Age of Aquarius. Secrets are being shared, truths are being revealed, and we are moving toward a new way of being human. This new way, which is really the old way, which is really the eternal way, centers nature and all of her gifts. Many of us have realized, with the assistance of plant medicine especially, that we are connected to nature; we are nature; and we are meant to live embodied lives in congruence with our natural surroundings.
"Trust. Let go. Be open." - Bill Richards (Clinical Psychologist/Psychedelic Researcher), and Every Birthkeeper That Ever Was
This has led to a modern-day renaissance akin to that of the 1960s and ‘70s, a time during which psychedelics and natural birth were weaving themselves into the fabric of society in such a way that governments and medical complexes everywhere were feeling really fucking threatened. We’ve all likely heard of Timothy Leary, but the story of Stephen Gaskin, professor of creative writing and semantics turned psychedelic thought leader, and his wife, Ina May Gaskin, self-taught independent midwife, speaks to the deeper nuances of this time beautifully.
Ina May is well known in the birth world for co-founding The Farm and writing the books Spiritual Midwifery and Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, both of which contain powerfully psychedelic birth stories. Along with a crew of other self-taught midwives, Ina May witnessed and supported the births of 11 babies in a bus caravan for the Astral Continental Congress speaking tour her husband was leading in the interest of calling in a spiritual and social revolution.
This photo depicts the first Astral Continental Congress van birth as witnessed by midwife Ina May Gaskin. The photo, titled “Power Pilgrimage,” is a part of the award-winning BIRTH UNDISTURBED narrative series created by British photographer Natalie Lennard.
In the year 2022, we still want to free our minds, our plants, our bodies, and more. So long as we have access to people who know people, the concept of legalization is really nothing more than a small hurdle that many of us simply walk around to get to our destination. We grow our own mushrooms, we synthesize our own LSD, and we birth our own babies.
Yes, we birth our own babies. Doctors don’t “deliver” them and real midwives don’t “help them out.” Sovereign mothers birth their own babies with their own bodies thanks to a divine synthesis of hormones and internal desires made real. When allowed to do so freely, without observation, interjection, or shaming, the process of bringing our babies earthside unfolds as the most epic of all psychedelic trips. This is the way birth was designed to be.
When birthing, a mother’s hormones are released in such a way that she is able to enter an altered state. Oxytocin, the “love” hormone that is also released during love-making and other potent moments of bonding, flows freely, creating what are known as contractions or surges. The beta-endorphins soon kick in, serving as a “painkiller” while creating feelings of pleasure and euphoria. According to Dr. Sarah J. Buckley, renowned obstetrician turned freebirthing mother and author of the book Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering, these beta-endorphins can reach such high levels that “the laboring mother can transmute her pain and enter into an altered state of consciousness.”
Stated another way, “The mother reaches a point in her traveling where it is time for her to go alone. The endorphins released by her body during her embarking have begun to change her consciousness and she enters, more deeply, the realm of the altered state. She travels to the edge of her normal reality, parts the Veil and goes beyond. The Veil is my nomenclature for the curtain that separates ordinary reality from the deep altered state.”
This quote comes from one of my most favorite independent midwives, Whapio Dianne Bartlett, director of The Matrona - a foundation that offers transformational programs in the realms of birth, healing and wisdomkeeping. She has a beautifully psychedelic way of explaining the different aspects of a woman’s birth journey, which she describes as “The Holistic Stages of Birth.” These aspects perfectly parallel psychedelic journeys - especially those that involve mushrooms.
OUR BIRTHRIGHT TO JOURNEY
As a birthkeeper and mother, I know all of the above to be true. A birthing mother always leaves this world and enters another when she hits a certain stage. When birthing in a comfortable and familiar setting, ideally at home or out in nature, the mother is able to sink into that altered state and allow her body to experience the journey of birth in her own unique way. And yes, it is absolutely possible for a mother to journey so profoundly and intuitively that she experiences her birth as blissful, orgasmic, and completely out of this world. It is possible for any mother; she simply has to choose it, and pay close attention to her set and setting.
This sentiment is echoed by radical birth thought leader and mother of nine, Yolande Norris-Clark, whose newest offering, PORTAL, provides women with a blueprint for a blissful, transcendent birth. “Any kind of birth demands an altered state of consciousness,” she shares.
“This is not optional. Birth is biologically engineered to create that altered state of consciousness from within, from the mechanism of your body/mind/psyche. If you’re being harassed and agitated and your nervous system is being constantly enervated by stress in any way, that sympathetic nervous system process that is intrinsic to birth is going to shut down, and you will experience birth not only as intense, hard, and painful, but it’s also going to be far more likely to be prolonged, and even to stop. It’s very challenging, in my experience, to be calling ourselves into full presence when our bodies are being violated.”
On the other hand, when a mother is allowed to journey through birth in the way she wishes, where she wishes, and without the presence of “authority figures,” there is nothing standing in the way of her transcendence except her own ego, doubts and fears - all of which she can work with both before and during her birthing time. River Shannie, a mother who birthed her son freely at home in the presence of only her partner and daughter, shared her psychedelic birth story with me, and it beautifully represents all of the above:
“I went on the deepest trips of my life during Nuala and Griffin's births. [I remember when] the DMT of birth was beginning to kick in. I experienced a flashback to a psychedelic experience I had in the past. DMT is one of the chemicals released by a woman's brain when she gives birth. It is a hallucinogenic tryptamine that occurs naturally in many plants and in our brains. The realms I accessed during my children's births taught me about the wildness and the power within me. That same wildness and power is within us all.”
She continued: “I felt the presence of the beings from my past psychedelic experience. I was happy they were with me. I had learned from them last time and I welcomed the familiar feeling of being comforted by their presence… Then, I centered myself. I suddenly flew away from irritability to a blissful state of altered consciousness. I was making my way deep down the path of labor with sensuality, courage, and glee.”
Yolande addresses DMT in PORTAL, even going so far as to explain how to maximize your body’s capacity to produce this chemical. The presence of DMT during birth (and orgasm and death for that matter) is yet another testament to the ultimate truth at the center of life itself: birth is meant to be a pleasurable, transformative, transcendent, psychedelic experience of love; one that is meant to give human beings a spiritually connected beginning to their life on land.
“There is a reason that scientists believe that the mother’s brain, as well as her baby’s, produces DMT, ‘The God [Spirit] Molecule,’ during the birth process,” Yolande shares. “The purpose of birth is to connect us to heaven. Birth is the zenith of orgasm. It’s sheer gorgeousness, and it’s made for our thriving.”
Man or woman, can you relate? Those who have engaged with psychedelics and plant medicine are familiar with the concept of journeying through altered states of consciousness, and many understand that intentional journeys often complete themselves in such a magnificent way that the traveler feels blissfully reborn. A lesson is learned, a wisdom is unearthed, a body is rewired, a mind is set free. They have experienced what is known as a Hero’s Journey. They completed a cycle, one in which they willingly took themselves into the deep below, made a discovery of some kind, and then traveled back up to “reality,” where they share their tale of triumph.
Mothers have been birthing with this understanding for all of time. Up until men took over the birthing realm, women were often honored post-birth in the same ways warriors were when they returned home from battle. It wasn’t until midwives were burned, banned, and regulated at the hands of the church and their friends, the male practitioners of scientism, that birth was moved into the hospital - a place where everything spiritually profound is ritualistically removed from the process altogether. Women have been routinely drugged and abused ever since. Their memories of how to birth outside of the system have been systematically beaten into oblivion, and the sanctity of birth has been severely compromised for far too long.
Kaitlin Coghill
Our deeply depressed society is evidence of this, and Stanislav Grof, the psychiatrist who developed holotropic breathwork and noted the undeniable similarities between LSD trips and birth/rebirth, concurs. Birth trauma leads to serious psychopathologies, according to his research from the 1960s and ‘70s. It sure is a good thing we have psychedelics to help everyone process said birth trauma. If only we’d facilitated the psychedelic birth that was their birthright all along; then maybe they could have avoided a fear-based life of disconnect and suicidal ideation.
In the same way we must free birth from institutionalized captivity so as to prevent inflicting more birth trauma upon mothers and babies, we must be very, very careful with the ways we choose to “legitimize” psychedelics. Thanks to the trending miniseries titled How to Change Your Mind, we know that psychedelics are currently being studied in clinical settings with clipboards and machines that go ping.
Dr. April Bolding, co-author of one of the more popular books recommended to expecting mothers titled Pregnancy, Birth, and the Newborn, addressed this in a speech she gave at the 2019 Portland Psychedelic Conference (a speech that can be found on YouTube for those interested). Medicalizing psychedelic trips is in nobody’s best interest, and the boundary between research and a complete rebirth takeover must be maintained. Psychedelic journeys of all kinds, including birth, are meant to take place in familiar, comfortable settings, and/or nature.
THE INTEGRATED MOTHER
From this point onward, birth must be treated like a sacred psychedelic journey; the one in which we are the vessel that creates the means through which Source presents itself. Our naturally occurring chemicals are the compounds that activate our unconscious realms, elevating us to new states of being human. Just as you wouldn't numb yourself for a psychedelic trip, women shouldn't numb themselves for birth. The experience is intended to help the mother transcend her current level of creativity, life experience, endurance, and overall self mastery. It is meant to reveal a new version of herself, the one that can mother intuitively and with confidence.
Psychedelic itself means “soul-revealing.” Birth absolutely and obviously does this, and in more ways than one. The mother, of course, is cracked open and her highest self is revealed. A new version of her Earthen self is then born and revealed as a result. Her baby's soul is completely centered in his or her human body upon being born, and thus it is revealed.
Upon deeper contemplation, it is almost as though the creation of the baby within the mother is the seed of the psychedelic medicine itself. The baby contains the spark of life just as a plant does. His or her energy field becomes one with the mother’s, continuing in this way for the duration of the entire pregnancy, birth, and the first three to six months postpartum. This is by divine design, and, when encouraged and supported, mothers and babies can essentially experience a year-long psychedelic transformation that expands their minds, opens their hearts, and prepares them for life in its entirety.
Those who journey with mushrooms and the like experience a post-psychedelic afterglow and integration period, just like a newly reborn mother does in the hours and days after naturally birthing her baby. Even the baby is having a psychedelic adventure post-birth, as it has recently been acknowledged that an adult’s brain on LSD functions in a similar way to that of an infant. Infant brainwave states are wildly special, allowing them to simply live in a dreamstate.
“Mothers have taught me that it is not appropriate to interfere with this important stage of birth (the return, the immediate postpartum),” Whapio states. “This is an incredibly high and holy moment and if we truly understood birth and the ramifications of returning from an altered state…the re-integration…we would protect the privacy of the mother and baby at this time more than any other.”
When understood in the context of psychedelic sciences, birth - which creates a naturally transcendent synthesis of hormones within the human body - can be seen for its potential and benefit as opposed to solely its inherent risks. Psychedelic plants and pharmaceuticals simply mimic what birth has been designed to do all along. This is why the plants and the fungi are calling us back. They are here to remind us of our true nature, to elevate our relationships with ourselves, each other, and our shared cohesive environment. Nothing is separate. Birth is not separate. Birth is an act of creativity, love embodiment, and ecstasy. It is fear alone that introduces pain and discomfort and disconnect from Source and intuition, and it is a lack of reverence for mothers and birth that breeds the fear.
When choosing how, where, and with whom to birth, a mother should look to the ways in which a person plans for an intentional psychedelic trip. She must avoid anything and everything that is unnatural and invokes fear. She must prepare for transcendent bliss, and settle for nothing less. This is her birthright. This is her baby’s birthright. The generations that came before us and that will come after us deserve all of this, and more. Every birthing mother can be the catalyst for profound healing in her family and the world at large if she simply surrenders to the psychedelic birth experience that is built into her and her baby’s cells. It is theirs for the taking, and it is guaranteed to be the trip of a lifetime.
