Reclaiming the Spirituality of Birth or Nature Guided Therapy

Reclaiming the Spirituality of Birth: Healing for Mothers and Babies

Author: Benig Mauger

A therapist and childbirth educator shows how connection to nature and the spiritual world can heal birth trauma and preserve the health and well-being of mothers and babies.

• 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.

Books about: The Healing Craft or Health in the Later Years

Nature-Guided Therapy

Author: George Burns

In this new paperback version of this popular title, Dr. Rosenbaum, a practicing psychotherapist, explores the challenges and joys of making our lives into coherent wholes. In the midst of our daily busy activity, we often feel fragmented. We experience conflicting demands from our work, personal relationships, families, and spiritual practices.

Psychotherapy addresses this sense of fragmentation in an effort to help us be uniquely ourselves. Zen Buddhist practice insists we find ourselves in every moment of our lives and speaks to the basic connectedness of all things. Zen and the Heart of Psychotherapy attempts to integrate these two basic tenets. Each chapter examines some aspect of sewing together the practice of Zen with the practice of psychotherapy, and the subsequent implications for daily life. Though there is a logical progression to the chapters, each can be read on its own if the reader is interested in how a particular text might inform their psychotherapy or life circumstance.

Through the stories of his clients' as well as through his own difficulties and discoveries, the author invites each reader to actualize the fundamental point: to realize the joy and compassion that comes when we touch the basic ground of life, and to put this joy into play in our everyday activity.

Booknews

Presents an alternative psychotherapy treatment which sees a person not as an independent psychic entity but rather as an interactive element of the environment. The author combines evidence from cross- cultural sources and experimental evidence of science to demonstrate how a direct nature-mind-body connection can be utilized both practically and therapeutically. Distributed by Taylor & Francis. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	Nature Heals	3
Ch. 2	Ecopsychotherapy	19
Ch. 3	Sensual Awareness	35
Ch. 4	The Sensual Awareness Inventory	57
Ch. 5	Inside Out	73
Ch. 6	Sensate Focusing	87
Ch. 7	Nature-Based Assignments	99
Ch. 8	Natural Ordeals	109
Ch. 9	Experiential Metaphors	119
Ch. 10	The Three R's of Nature-Guided Therapy	133
Ch. 11	Ecotherapy for Relaxation and Comfort	149
Ch. 12	Ecotherapy for Happiness and Pleasure	161
Ch. 13	Ecotherapy for Enhanced Relationships	171
Ch. 14	The Nature-Mind-Body Connection	189
Ch. 15	Nature-Guided Mind-Body Healing	201
Ch. 16	Being Well, Naturally	213
	A Story of Nature-Guided Healing	225
	References	227
	Author Index	241
	Subject Index	245