Dr. April Bolding, PT
Presentations
Wisdom from Birth & Psychedelics
I am drawn to the current psychedelic movement because of its proven effectiveness in helping people heal and move out of stuck patterns of trauma, pain, dysfunction. In addition to attending conferences for years and reading research, I’ve witnessed the tremendous help these plant allies and substances can provide.
The Portland Psychedelic Society kindly invited me to speak at their Fall 2019 conference as well as in May 2019 where I was able to share some of my insights from my perspective of transformation and birth.
In the first presentation, Birth and Psychedelics: Conscious Creation of the Future, I highlight the inherent revelatory and transformational experience that childbirth and psychedelic journeys can be. How we navigate these altered/alternative, non-ordinary states are comparable and translatable. I also emphasize that the way we birth and re-birth matters. No one does it the same. We must allow for a variety of set and settings/supportive frameworks to support these awakening, life-giving initiations.
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I am NOT advocating that we combine childbirth and psychedelics, nor do I speak on that. This presentation compares these types of journeys.
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Click the image to see the presentation.
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Artwork by Alex Grey
In my talk called Birth Wisdom for the Psychedelic Re-Birth, I explain how normal, physiologic birth has been caged in by the medical model and I share this as a cautionary tale to the psychedelic movement to not get caught in the same cage. There is not one way to birth or re-birth.
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Because of the well-documented success of utilizing these substances for healing, it has attracted the capitalistic and corporate model to get in on the “ground level” to make money from the wider offerings of these, as they become legal. This threatens to narrow the organic, heart- and consciousness-centered focus of this incredibly important movement.
In this panel discussion on Birth and Psychedelics with labor and delivery nurse Angela Ward and doula Meg Heather Ford, we invite the Divine Feminine to take the lead as we share our individual and collective wisdom of what awakened birth can be. What insights would you add?