In my everyday work, I sometimes meet young families who have not had such a wonderful birth experience. And when I ask the mothers how they are doing with it, most of them start crying. The babies usually also cry more often than usual. When I tell them about the healing ritual, they are so happy that there is a way to solve this.

First I start with a healing talk: the mother takes her baby in skin-to-skin contact, that means the baby has only a diaper on and the mother has her upper body free. Most of the time, babies want to be breastfed anyway. The mother then tells me again the whole story of the birth of her child with the focus on the feelings. It is important that she cradles the upper body back and forth the whole time. Through this weighing she signals to her child, and also to herself, that this time everything is okay. I just listen and make sure that the mother does not interrupt this cradling movement. I also always make sure that there are tissues at hand, because it is a very emotional thing.

The second part is then the healing bath for the baby. Here I still need a third person, usually the father. The mother puts her baby in the small baby bath and holds it only under the back. The father stands by his baby’s feet and with his hands imitates the uterine fundus that pushes the baby down during labor. And I have the baby’s head in my hands and slide with a light pressure over the temples, imitating the pressure the baby would have experienced in the birth canal during a natural birth. I only do this with babies born by cesarean section. For all other births, I leave out the part with the pressure on the head.

Once the little head has slipped through the recreated birth canal, the mother takes her baby out of the tub and goes to lie down in bed with him and then enjoys that time afterwards. The point is to do the same as after a natural birth: the baby is born, is still very wet and is immediately put on the mother’s chest. This is then a rebonding after this second, natural birth.
The results of this healing ritual are always amazing to me. The women usually have much softer features again afterwards and can come to terms with this story. And the babies are afterwards in the truest sense of the word “like newborn” (original quote of a young mother). I could observe this very well with my neighbors who live below me. After the healing ritual I almost didn’t hear the baby crying anymore.

I put this healing ritual together from different sources. First, I had a training with Brigitte Meissner, a midwife from Switzerland years ago and have used the healing bath regularly since then. And the reproduction of the birth canal and the pressure on the head was shown to me by my osteopath. I then just combined the two things.

Below is the picture of little Amelia before and after the healing ritual, courtesy of her mother.