Belly Dancing and Birth

January 10th, 2008 -- Posted in Health, Mel, birth, dance, exercise, feminism, society | 2 Comments »

As some of you may have read in other posts of mine, I love to dance.  I especially love belly dancing and did it for many years before I became pregnant.  There is just something so ancient and primal and very feminine about the movements and skills you develop with your body in performing this dance.

I love when synchronicities happen because I came across this website, The Goddess Dancing, and it has a few articles about  belly dancing and birth and their similarities.  I find this fascinating because I have been specifically trying to do this dance again to help my pelvic bones shift so that I may get pregnant one more time and have a natural birth like I want.

From my first birth experience I was told by my OB (and it was confirmed by my massage therapist) that my pelvis is sort of “funnel-shaped” meaning that the bones are not far enough apart to push a baby out and my baby could not drop down at all during labor (i.e. – we would have died without a c-section).  I want to change that and belly dancing seems to be the only real way to do it.

This one article on that site, The Dance of Birth,  was written by Anita-Cristina Calcaterra in 1992 and the first line reads, “It is important for women to reclaim birth as a natural and powerful process”.   It says that a dancer named Morocco in 1965 compared childbirth classes taught at a NY hospital and the Natural Childbirth book by Dr.  Frederick W. Goodrich to her dance movements as she performed them.

Other birth instructors in the 70’s compared the similarities in the muscle isolation of this dance with Lamaze and other dancers showed how the movements of this dance help in “moving the baby down” the birth canal.

Wendy Buonaventura published a book in ‘83 called Belly Dancing, where she outlined the role of the dance throughout history in many cultures.  She showed that the dance has always been a part of the birth process.

Another great article on this subject, In the Belly of the Goddess: Belly Dance and Birth, written by Cathy Moore, a certified nurse-midwife  goes into more detail and comparisons on this subject.  It does mention that in middle eastern cultures even today, the laboring woman will have other women (and even men) doing belly dance moves around her to remind her to do these movements to help her labor and stop the pain and to move the baby down.  I would totally LOVE that!!  A group of friends and relatives dancing to drum music and helping me bring my baby into the world with that kind of rhythm and vibe going on around us.  How cool is that??

I think it really is a shame that we are so far away from that kind of primal, movement filled type of labor in present times.  We need to incorporate more of this into our modern birthing ways, even for home births and especially for the hospital births.

I feel the Goddess energy move through me when I belly dance and I especially felt it when I was pregnant.  It is so powerful.  How wise that women combined it since ancient times to assist them in a gentle, powerful birth.