Transpersonal experiences among childbearing
women
” It was terrible that no one wanted to listen to my experience, neither the medical staff, nor my husband. I didn´t know if I was brain injured or what else had occurred to me. I only wish anyone had listened and told me if the same experience had happen earlier to any other women in childbed. It had been enough if anybody just had been sitting down beside me for a little while, listening and then said: `Yes, it was a remarkable feeling! ´But now they only waved aside my trial telling them, and said: `Pooh, you can have so strange dreams when you have narcoses`, and then rapidly disappeared. “(told by a women after delivering, 1984)
Aims with my research:
Drawing attention to transpersonal experiences among women in childbirth, especially to the medical staff, and contributing to consciousness research.
Abstract:
Together with dr Jan Pilotti I was co-editor of the first Swedish book on Near Death Experiences (NDE) in 1982. During 1981 - 92 I interviewed persons with NDE:s. Among them I also found women with similar experiences in connection with complicated childbirths. But women also told about transpersonal experiences at normal childbirths, a subject not earlier studied in psychology or psychiatry. I made an inventory of earlier described states of consciousness during pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum and described the structure of the experiences of the interviewed women, their reactions and feelings, how their stories were received by hospital staff and relatives, and how they actually want them to be received, after-effects and how they manage to integrate these experiences into ordinary life.
Investigating the literature, Winnicotts´ ”primary maternal preoccupation” was of interest. Research started in St Petersburg, Russia, conducted by the professors Leonid and Dmitri Spivak. Several projects were undertaken in 1992 - today. In the first 202 healthy delivering women were interviewed on day 2-4 after normal childbirth. The structure and frequencies of ASC were studied. 10% had a life-panorama and 9 % an out-of-body experience during childbirth. Russian research indicates that there exists a gender-specific altered state of consciousness related to giving birth, provided by a special brain mechanism. Winnicotts hypothesis of `primary maternal preoccupation´ has therewith been supported by experimental data for the first time.
To read more:
1. Journal of Transpersonal Research, 2012, Vol. 4 (2), 56 – 71 ISSN: 1989-6077 Near Death Experiences and other transpersonal experiences among women during childbirth
2. http://altstates.net/en/hbi/wistrand-swedish-russian-nde-2012
3. In the following article I write a little about deep experiences in childbirth – transpersonal after effects used in spiritual midwifery:
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