Dear friends and family,
On the occasion of Mother's Day I want to tell you about a man who has been assisting Mothers and their children his whole life.
Michel Odent is approaching the age of 95 and will be offering an online three-day course July 12-14 with Liliana Lammers. To register contact Kate +44 744 365 6855 or write to moonfeather7@gmail.com (Kate) or empoweredbirthgang@gmail.com (Sarah).
I met Michel personally in 2018 on my honeymoon! My husband asked me if I wanted to go to Rome for the presentation of his new book
Nascita -
Childbirth and the Evolution of Homo Sapiens
.
I had wanted to meet him since I first heard about his book
The Farmer and the Obstetrician where he argues that childbirth was industrialized, alongside farming, during the 20th century - “with dramatic and disturbing consequences.”
Michel first became involved in birth when, as a surgeon, he was put in charge of the hospital in Pithiviers, France. He soon realized that hospitals were not conducive to human labour. The environment worked against the basic needs of laboring women, as women were not protected from light nor were they given privacy, two very important requirements for an undisturbed labor where a special cocktail of hormones produce a reflex that is how a baby is naturally pushed out. He was then compelled to look into the environmental factor and the environment's effect on labor.
He adapted the environment of the hospital to be home-like, with low beds (easier to climb in and out of), dim lighting, beautiful spaces, and eventually offering large tubs of water as a form of pain relief (which eventually led to these tubs being called birthing pools, though he found that most women climbed out of the water before they felt the urge to push). As a surgeon, he was also offering the first cesarean births when this intervention was needed.
Michel ran this maternity experience from 1962 to 1985 and it was so successful that people came from all over to have their babies there. He worked with six midwives and oversaw approximately 1000 births per year. The hospital’s maternity section had excellent statistics with low rates of intervention. He moved to London in 1985 and founded The Primal Health Research Centre and shifted his focus to homebirth where he was able to make more observations about the effect of the environment on labor and birth.
In Montessori care giving and educational environments this concept is fundamental: the environment is the container that either promotes normalized behavior or creates obstacles to learning and spontaneous natural behavior for the children.
After more than half a century of overseeing around 15,000 births in both hospitals and at home Michel has come to the conclusion that a laboring woman needs are very specific and that these needs can be satisfied by an adapted environment that meets her basic needs for respect, freedom of choice and freedom of movement, individuality, concentration, independence and security, just like any child in a Montessori learning environment.
He has been working for many years with Liliana Lammers, a doula, and t
ogether they offer the Paramana Doula Course where they teach about all that they have observed in labor and birth that happens in an adapted environment promoting normalized birthing conditions.
Liliana has been observing birth and the effect of the birthing environment for many years as well. She has found that disturbing the concentration of the laboring woman and engaging her new brain (the neocortex) through sensorial stimulus, make labor longer and more difficult.
When I attended their course in London, I asked Michel about his mentors and he answered by talking about his mother and saying she was his greatest mentor. Five years before he was born she had attended a Montessori training for the Casa dei bambini, this would have been around 1925. She was part of the revolution in France transforming teaching methods to those Montessori was spreading around the world.
Five years later, Michel was born at home and raised by this first generation Montessorian. Only by chance did he come to the mission of changing birth culture. As a hospital director and surgeon, he found himself responsible for the maternity ward at Pithiviers, and he learned about what birthing women needed through a process not unlike how Maria Montessori learned what children needed: by setting up an environment that was conducive to their basic needs; giving them the
freedom to choose and the
freedom to move;
observing what they did, he saw that no two women birth in the same way; that they need to be free to move, not constrained on their backs; that some will be on their feet and some in positions you could have never have imagined them getting into; that some are silent through labour and some make noise. And that none of them need to be told how or when to breathe or push. He found that his role as a birth attendant was summed up in the core values that Montessori taught: do not intervene, wait and watch, let a woman find her own way to bring her child into the light, and most importantly, stand by Montessori's motto: “help me do it myself”.
He found that most women were capable of birthing their babies without birth preparation classes, without doctors examining their cervix for dilation, and without interventions. He witnessed the reality of birth as an involuntary process and like any involuntary process, “you cannot help it, but you can surely put obstacles in the way”. It is striking how much this is like Montessori’s vision of education. Don’t cross the intervention threshold without great consideration. Does this person need my help now? Or can she do this herself? If I intervene, how do I change what is happening? In most cases, when we think we are helping we are often just in the way of the person finding their own spontaneous expression of life. The less we control, the more we sit back and observe, the more nature can be the creator.
If you are planning to give birth, or attend a birth with a friend or family member, this course will teach you things you can put into practice, whether in a hospital setting or a home. It will give you a fundamental understanding of creating a prepared environment for birth and receiving a newborn. I can't recommend it highly enough. If you are a doula or a birth attendant, this course is never the same twice, like stepping into a river that is never the same water. Repeating it, you will hear new stories and some old stories. But you will never look at birth the same after three days with Michel and Liliana!
Happy Mother's Day!
Karin
On the occasion of Mother's Day I want to tell you about a man who has been assisting Mothers and their children his whole life.
Michel Odent is approaching the age of 95 and will be offering an online three-day course July 12-14 with Liliana Lammers. To register contact Kate +44 744 365 6855 or write to moonfeather7@gmail.com (Kate) or empoweredbirthgang@gmail.com (Sarah).
I met Michel personally in 2018 on my honeymoon! My husband asked me if I wanted to go to Rome for the presentation of his new book
Nascita -
Childbirth and the Evolution of Homo Sapiens
.
I had wanted to meet him since I first heard about his book
The Farmer and the Obstetrician where he argues that childbirth was industrialized, alongside farming, during the 20th century - “with dramatic and disturbing consequences.”
Michel first became involved in birth when, as a surgeon, he was put in charge of the hospital in Pithiviers, France. He soon realized that hospitals were not conducive to human labour. The environment worked against the basic needs of laboring women, as women were not protected from light nor were they given privacy, two very important requirements for an undisturbed labor where a special cocktail of hormones produce a reflex that is how a baby is naturally pushed out. He was then compelled to look into the environmental factor and the environment's effect on labor.
He adapted the environment of the hospital to be home-like, with low beds (easier to climb in and out of), dim lighting, beautiful spaces, and eventually offering large tubs of water as a form of pain relief (which eventually led to these tubs being called birthing pools, though he found that most women climbed out of the water before they felt the urge to push). As a surgeon, he was also offering the first cesarean births when this intervention was needed.
Michel ran this maternity experience from 1962 to 1985 and it was so successful that people came from all over to have their babies there. He worked with six midwives and oversaw approximately 1000 births per year. The hospital’s maternity section had excellent statistics with low rates of intervention. He moved to London in 1985 and founded The Primal Health Research Centre and shifted his focus to homebirth where he was able to make more observations about the effect of the environment on labor and birth.
In Montessori care giving and educational environments this concept is fundamental: the environment is the container that either promotes normalized behavior or creates obstacles to learning and spontaneous natural behavior for the children.
After more than half a century of overseeing around 15,000 births in both hospitals and at home Michel has come to the conclusion that a laboring woman needs are very specific and that these needs can be satisfied by an adapted environment that meets her basic needs for respect, freedom of choice and freedom of movement, individuality, concentration, independence and security, just like any child in a Montessori learning environment.
He has been working for many years with Liliana Lammers, a doula, and t
ogether they offer the Paramana Doula Course where they teach about all that they have observed in labor and birth that happens in an adapted environment promoting normalized birthing conditions.
Liliana has been observing birth and the effect of the birthing environment for many years as well. She has found that disturbing the concentration of the laboring woman and engaging her new brain (the neocortex) through sensorial stimulus, make labor longer and more difficult.
When I attended their course in London, I asked Michel about his mentors and he answered by talking about his mother and saying she was his greatest mentor. Five years before he was born she had attended a Montessori training for the Casa dei bambini, this would have been around 1925. She was part of the revolution in France transforming teaching methods to those Montessori was spreading around the world.
Five years later, Michel was born at home and raised by this first generation Montessorian. Only by chance did he come to the mission of changing birth culture. As a hospital director and surgeon, he found himself responsible for the maternity ward at Pithiviers, and he learned about what birthing women needed through a process not unlike how Maria Montessori learned what children needed: by setting up an environment that was conducive to their basic needs; giving them the
freedom to choose and the
freedom to move;
observing what they did, he saw that no two women birth in the same way; that they need to be free to move, not constrained on their backs; that some will be on their feet and some in positions you could have never have imagined them getting into; that some are silent through labour and some make noise. And that none of them need to be told how or when to breathe or push. He found that his role as a birth attendant was summed up in the core values that Montessori taught: do not intervene, wait and watch, let a woman find her own way to bring her child into the light, and most importantly, stand by Montessori's motto: “help me do it myself”.
He found that most women were capable of birthing their babies without birth preparation classes, without doctors examining their cervix for dilation, and without interventions. He witnessed the reality of birth as an involuntary process and like any involuntary process, “you cannot help it, but you can surely put obstacles in the way”. It is striking how much this is like Montessori’s vision of education. Don’t cross the intervention threshold without great consideration. Does this person need my help now? Or can she do this herself? If I intervene, how do I change what is happening? In most cases, when we think we are helping we are often just in the way of the person finding their own spontaneous expression of life. The less we control, the more we sit back and observe, the more nature can be the creator.
If you are planning to give birth, or attend a birth with a friend or family member, this course will teach you things you can put into practice, whether in a hospital setting or a home. It will give you a fundamental understanding of creating a prepared environment for birth and receiving a newborn. I can't recommend it highly enough. If you are a doula or a birth attendant, this course is never the same twice, like stepping into a river that is never the same water. Repeating it, you will hear new stories and some old stories. But you will never look at birth the same after three days with Michel and Liliana!
Happy Mother's Day!
Karin
