• Encourages mothers to reconnect with nature and spirit to heal old wounds and have deeply satisfying birth experiences.

• Provides convincing evidence that prenatal and birth experiences have a lifelong effect on emotional health.

• Fosters a close and abiding bond between mother and child.

Have you had a birthing experience that fell short of your expectations? What was your mother's experience when she had you? Do you long for a deeper bond with your loved ones? In Reclaiming the Spirituality of Birth, Benig Mauger suggests that our prenatal and birth experiences affect us for the rest of our lives. And because our modern approach to birth separates mothers from their primordial knowledge of natural delivery, many people suffer from lifelong birth wounds. Mauger invites women to reclaim the connection to their own instinctive, intuitive, and inherently spiritual creative powers.

The West's rational, mechanistic worldview wreaks havoc with the birth experience as it leads to ever increasing levels of high-tech medical intervention. Induced labor, fetal monitors, and pain-killing drugs alter the natural rhythms of delivery. This scientific approach puts medical personnel in control of the birth process, leaving mothers and their babies with a profound sense of loss. Drawing on her experience as a birth teacher, therapist, and mother, Benig Mauger suggests that by reconnecting with the natural and spiritual world an expectant mother can make the birth experience her own, thereby healing old wounds and allowing herself both a deeply satisfying delivery and an abiding spiritual connection to her child.

"Without abandoning the useful and sometimes lifesaving tools of Western medicine, Mauger suggests a natural approach to childbirth, one in which the creative, spiritual, and physical needs of mother and baby are honored."