The Importance of Birth Stories
Since the beginning of time the transmission of knowledge, courage and wisdom from one person to another or one generation to another has found its expression in stories. Stories enacted in rituals, represented in art, narrated and sung in myth and poetry, written down in books and in contemporary times through images captured on film.
Birth Stories offer women a unique opportunity to open into a non-rational understanding of this mysterious rite of passage. I encourage expectant mothers to read birth stories often as a meaningful avenue of preparation. Ina May Gaskins, Spiritual Midwifery, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth and Sheri Menelli’s, Journey into Motherhood are perfect.
The power of stories and their ability to shape consciousness and experience is examined by modern thinkers Robert Coles, James Hillman and Joseph Campbell below.
Stories, literature and poetry bring us a deeper knowledge of ourselves, life, and the world. The whole point of stories is not ‘solutions’ or ‘resolutions, but the broadening and even a heightening of our struggles. Stories are--we know this from the Bible--they’re the way to teach. Stories encourage the moral imagination to work, and they are concrete and connected to everyday experience. Abstract formulations and risks are in one ear and out the next, and even if we memorize them, they don’t have the flesh of the daily life. With stories we learn how to do it because stories are based on experience.
Robert Coles
Stories are means of finding oneself in events that might not otherwise make psychological sense at all. Economic, scientific, and historical explanations often fail to give the soul the kind of imaginative meaning it seeks for understanding profoundly psychological experiences. Fantasy is a dominant force in life. Soul-making goes hand in hand with deliteralizing consciousness and restoring its connection to mythic and metaphorical thought patterns. Basic stories are containers and givers of vitality.
James Hillman
Greek and Latin and biblical literature used to be a part of everyone’s education. It used to be that these stories were in the minds of people. When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you perspective on what’s happening to you. With the loss of that, we’ve really lost something. These bits of information from ancient times, which have to do with the themes that have supported human life, built civilizations and informed religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage, and if you don’t know what the guide-signs are along the way, you have to work it out for yourself.
Joseph Campbell