Personal Accomplisment
For many women, giving birth is the most difficult and gratifying thing they will ever do. Giving birth is hard! It requires courage, strength and the ability to let go. It pushes a woman to her very limits and once there, draws on deep internal resources.
A macrocosm of paradoxes characterizes this process. Birth is the most physiologically intense process that the body can undergo, yet it is fully subject to the state of mind in which the woman finds herself. Birth is dazzlingly universal and exquisitely personal. Birth is blood and love, contraction and release. To do it requires hard work combined with a willingness to be swept along with the flow of life.
A birth professional who views birth as a woman’s personal accomplishment will take her lead from the woman in labor. She will recognize that the woman knows her own body, family and moment-to-moment experience better than anyone else. It is the doula’s role to make suggestions and provide information based on her own experience of birth. She is available to provide a cool head, a helpful hand and a supportive back – anything that will ease the process. She will be a steady and compassionate ally throughout the journey, ultimately recognizing that only one person “delivers” a child is the person is the mother – the same person who will raise, nurture and love that human for the rest of her life. 
Shamanic Doula 