Holistic Weddings & Commitment Ceremonies
Making a commitment to each other is a powerful and deepening process that enriches the relationship. Whether a heterosexual or an LGBTQ+ relationship, a commitment ceremony marks the promise we give to one another in the presence of those who…
Beginnings & Endings
Holistic ceremonies touch us on many levels and move us as spiritual beings no matter what age. Baby naming, house blessings, miscarriage memorials, funerals and woodland burials are some of the ceremonies Diane facilitates.
Transformations
Croning Ceremony (Menopause) These are also known as Change of Life Ceremonies. When a woman reaches a certain age, her value increases through the experience and wisdom she has gathered in life. In most western societies older women are often…
Blessingways
Blessingway is a Native American Indian tradition celebrating a variety of rites of passage, especially birth, womanhood (menarche) and marriage.
Ceremonies
There are watershed moments in our lives when we need to mark the occasion in a personally meaningful way. Ceremonies are delightful ways of integrating important changes that are happening, honoring those changes in a powerful and positive way. The…
Mothers and Other Birthing People
American Mother’s Day is coming up, and while reflecting on motherhood I considered a recent development in the ecosphere regarding all-inclusive language. There are those who are advocating for more diversified terms regarding people who have babies, and there are…
Postpartum Doulas: Filling a Gap in Much Needed Postpartum Care
The end of March marked World Doula Week 2024, and it reminded me of how important doula care can be in making the fourth trimester a positive experience for new parents. A doula is someone who mothers the mother, whether…
Empowering Our Health via Medical Consumerism
Recently, during a podcast with @mymommymentor, we discussed how to avoid a traumatic birth experience, which is a workshop that I offer. The subject of medical consumerism came up, and it inspired me to write this blog about how to…
Self-Love: Just in Time for Valentine’s Day
As a newly minted Somatic Attachment Therapist, I recently attended a Master Class on self-love as an embodied practice. What does that mean? Many of us find it hard to love ourselves, especially the ‘unlovable’ places within. Through our conditioning…
Fathers and Hormones Before and After Birth
Here’s a little nugget that I found in my upcoming book during the editing process. I thought it was important to share with fathers in the childbearing year. Fathers and Hormones* © Diane S Speier, PhD One of the most…
Postpartum Wellness Plan
This is an excerpt from my book – Life After Birth: A Parent’s Holistic Guide for Thriving in the Fourth Trimester now in press. It’s a bit long for a blog and I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please…
The Tyranny of Expectations
I recently received an email about dealing with disappointment, which often happens as the result of unmet expectations we have about how things should be or turn out. We can feel a range of emotions when we feel let down,…
Not All Vaginal Birth is ‘Natural Childbirth’
I recently came across a post on Facebook that included a clip of a news program talking about birth in which instrumental deliveries were described as ‘natural childbirth’. There seems to be some confusion as to what natural childbirth is,…
Postnatal Bodies
Maternal representations, body images, and mothers’ real life experience. Birthlight Womb to World 2015 At the 2015 Birthlight Womb to World conference I spoke about postnatal bodies and the disparity between what the media says and women’s real life experience…
Knowledge + Support = Empowerment
“I know why you call it Birth Empowerment! I felt so empowered, elated, wonderful – I was on such a high”, exclaimed one of my clients when we spoke on the phone after her birth. This woman was the last…
Mothering the Mother
Lately I’ve been thinking about my work as a doula and how important it is to support a woman making the transition to parenthood; it’s a time of unique vulnerability for a new mother who is moving through uncharted territory while also…
Seeds of Intimacy
Reflections on breastfeeding. These days more and more women are choosing to breastfeed, sometimes under pressure to do the right thing, but often for the pleasure and benefits that it provides. The vast majority of women born during the baby…
Transforming Scared Into Sacred Birth
In my last blog I suggested the importance of transforming the experience of birth from being scared to being sacred. The simple switching of letters in this anagram is a metaphor for how birth has been transmuted in the 20th…
Cultural vs. Biological Femininity
What is the distinction? I believe that one of the difficulties that women experience during breastfeeding is the pull between cultural femininity and biological femininity. This distinction was first brought to my attention in Karen Pryor’s book, Nursing Your Baby…
Sacred or Scared? How Do We Regard Birth?
Childbirth Education. Over the years as a certified childbirth educator I have had the privilege of teaching about childbirth and how to give birth in an informed, empowered and confident way. I taught classes for twenty years, first as a Bradley Method® teacher,…
The Four Questions
In the days when I was working as a childbirth educator, I always discussed with my clients the value of asking questions of clarification from healthcare providers. Though these questions were related to being pregnant and giving birth, they are…
Creating a Birth Plan
Planning Your Baby’s Birth. These days it seems that women are reluctant to create a plan for their baby’s birth. They don’t want to get too attached to an idea that may not play out on the day and then…
Finally… the birth of a gem, #4!
Happy Mother’s Day! Every so often the date of my fourth child’s birth falls on Mother’s Day, and this year is one of them! He was born on May 10th, 1988. This is the last installment of my children’s birth…
#3 – A Daughter is Born!
As the mother of two sons, when the time came that we were planning to expand our family, I wanted a daughter to add to the group. Back then (35 years ago) I was reading about sex selection, and spent…
And then along came…#2
2nd Pregnancy – Choices in Childbirth. Just three weeks after my first son Erik turned 2 years old, his younger brother Graham was born. In honor of Graham’s birthday I thought I’d share his birth story, to add to the…
40 Years a Mother
September 22, 2014 Today is a big day – it is 40 years since the birth of my first child Erik and the day I became a mother! It’s hard to believe that 40 years have passed. Today we spent…
#MHAW16 – Perinatal Relationships and Mental Health
As this Mental Health Awareness Week (16-22 May 2016) winds down, I felt compelled by this year’s emphasis on ‘relationships’ to write about the importance of strengthening partner relationships in the transition to parenthood. Although I have worked with couples…
Time to Talk About Mental Health – #timetotalk
Time to Change Campaign Today is Time to Talk Day 2016, part of the UK’s Time to Change campaign to end mental health discrimination and to raise awareness about mental illness. Most people are not aware that 1 in 4…
World Maternal Mental Health Day 2016
Today, 4 May 2016, is World Maternal Mental Health Day, and starts a month of focused attention on the challenges of perinatal mental health issues worldwide. With 1 in 7 women suffering from postnatal depression, and 1 in 10 fathers…
APPPAH Conference
“Fostering the Couple Connection in the Transition to Parenthood” Together with my colleague, Elly Taylor, author of Becoming Us, we will join forces to present a dynamic workshop that explores the relationship challenges that new parents face and the variety of ways…
BirthKeeper Summit – MotherBaby / MotherEarth
At the end of April an important event is happening in Berkeley, California – the BirthKeeper Summit, a conference that brings BirthKeepers from all over the world to heal birth, and therefore to heal the earth. I first became aware…