Sacred Birth & Conscious Parenting
"New Human Life as a continuum, to protect, so that a soul gets to arrive all the way."
from The Cord I Never Had
This pillar holds pregnancy, birth, and the earliest days of raising a child as the first ground where a person's Will of the Soul is honored or interrupted. It began as one story and grew into six, each one a doorway into the same continuum.
Before the first breath
If there is a baby coming into your life right now, you already know the feeling I mean, a heart gone wide open and a stomach that tightens every time somebody with a clipboard tells you how it is going to go. You lie awake with your hand on a belly that is moving to its own schedule and you wonder what, in all of this, is actually yours to decide. For me that question arrived twice, and the first time round the language for it came years later. That first birth was institutional, and the cord was cut the way cords get cut in that setting, by somebody else, before it had finished. I carried a feeling out of that room that waited years for its name, and when the name came it came as one line: you cannot cut an umbilical cord with grace.
Here is what I have come to know since. That placenta is the baby’s placenta. It is what formed the baby, the organ the child grew for themselves to breathe and eat through for nine months, and to cut that for whatever reason is actually not ours to cut. The closer we get to the moment of birth, the more impactful those formative imprints are, because the cells are at their most open then, taking in everything and filing it as the truth about how Life receives you. When we took our first breath, our cord got cut, and the body files a severing where it was expecting a completion. That is the pre-lingual wound so many of us carry, and this is the pillar where I write about it from the father’s side of the room, while the writings on what it takes to come back from a wound like that gather in Healing and the Return to Wholeness.
Letting the cord finish
Go and look at a seedling. The seed sends up its first two leaves, the cotyledons, fat little things that are the seed’s own stored food, and the plant lives off them until the true leaves open and the roots have found the soil, and then those first leaves yellow and drop in their own time, and a gardener with any sense leaves them on until they do. The plant finishes its arrival. Everything in that bed performs a function with purpose, and the day I stand there with a blade in my hand the question to ask is what function I am performing, and for whom.
The second time round we asked that question for real. The birth happened at home, on our bedroom floor, and I caught her, and for the days that followed her placenta sat beside her in a bowl of coarse salt and lavender while the cord dried from the navel outward and let go when it was ready. Ten days. That is the whole of a Lotus Birth, the cord left in place until it releases of its own accord, and it is the hinge of the short book that grew out of this pillar, All the Way Whole: Nine Months, Ten Days, and Seventeen Years. Seventeen, because the daughter born on that floor is seventeen now and her yay is still a yay and her nay is still a nay, and that is the evidence I hold, one household’s worth, which is the kind I trust. A cord that is let finish, finishes.
She is a creatrix
Woman, she is a creatrix. I say that as a man who stood at two births and knew, both times, that the one doing the creating was her, and that my work was to hold the threshold so that the clock stayed outside. In the Maori wananga I was given, that holding begins long before labour, and I wrote down what I received of it in Souvereign on the Wananga of Hapuutanga, which is still the fullest piece on this site for the pregnancy itself. As men we don’t know that we don’t know, we don’t even know how to breastfeed, and the honest answer is, well, I’ll build you a cubby house. So I made a place for the fathers, For Men Expecting, with the birth podcast conversations and what I would say to a brother who has nine months ahead of him and no idea what his hands are for. Your hands are for the salt and the cloth and the food and the door. That is plenty.
Following the younglings
Then the child is here and the imprinting carries on in the ordinary hours. A human being arrives with the original Syntropic human blueprint, wired for love and for connection, and anything that isn’t of love imprints. I grew up speaking Dutch, and in Dutch a child says wil je pap, do you will porridge, I will to play outside, that is literally what a child says, the Will right there in the mouth before anyone has taught them wanting and needing. Children feel before they speak. Children dance, they sing, they hum, they dream before they speak, and a child in the middle of a meltdown is saying, hey, I’m having an experience, look at me, and that is her whole message. So when a youngling comes off a bike I get down on one knee, put a hand on the shoulder and say, hey buddy, I see that there’s something going on for you, do you feel willing to share what’s occurring for you? I wrote that out at length in Relating With Younglings, and it sits under everything else in this pillar. Not the younglings that I own, because I don’t own any younglings, but I call them my. So follow the younglings. They know.
All the Way Whole
Nine Months, Ten Days, and Seventeen Years
What if our very first transition in life shapes our capacity for inner trust, agency, and peace?
After the sterile, severed disconnection of an institutionalized first birth, one father felt a profound call to protect the threshold of life differently the second time around. In All the Way Whole, a family embarks on an extraordinary journey into conscious pregnancy, home birth, and the sacred practice of Lotus Birth, leaving the umbilical cord in place until it releases naturally.
Moving beyond mainstream medicalized norms, this intimate memoir and insightful guide bridges ancient birth wisdom with modern developmental psychology. It examines the profound physical and energetic role of the placenta, showing how a child allowed to separate on their own terms arrives with their intrinsic sovereignty intact, ahead of the pre-lingual wound most of us carry.
From practical advice on caring for the intact cord with natural salts and herbs to navigating toddlerhood with compassionate boundary-holding, this book offers expectant parents, particularly fathers and guardians, the tools to stand courageously at the birthing portal.
Heartfelt, challenging, and deeply transformative, All the Way Whole is a gentle manifesto for anyone who believes that true world peace begins in the nursery.
The book runs in three chapters, Hapuutanga: We Are Pregnant, Letting the Cord Finish, and Keeping Out of the Way of Her Will, twenty-nine pages built from the six pieces of writing already standing in this pillar. You can download All the Way Whole for free and pass it on wherever it may be of benefit, and the piece it grew out of, The Cord I Never Had, tells the story behind it.
At the threshold
Practical ground for a Lotus Birth
Leaving the cord to finish
A Lotus Birth keeps the cord and the placenta joined to the baby after the birth, whole, until the cord dries and releases of its own accord. The placenta travels with the child through those first days, wrapped in cloth and dressed with salt and dried herbs, and the separation arrives at the body’s own timing. The name traces to Clair Lotus Day, who carried the practice into Western birth culture in 1974, and the practice itself is older than any name for it.
Three to ten days
Three to ten days is the range families describe, with the fourth or fifth day a common middle. The cord dries from the navel outward, turning firm and dark, and it lets go the moment it is ready. Warmth, airflow around the placenta and the daily salting all shape the pace, and a household that lets those days go slowly meets that timing with ease, since a placenta carried in cloth asks the whole household to move gently. Ours took ten.
What the placenta gives
One part of it stands on measured ground: the baby receives the whole of the placental blood, and with it the iron stores that carry through the first months, the same transfer that the research on delayed cord clamping already records. The rest is what families who choose it keep describing, a quiet first week, a baby who settles readily, a home that moves at the child’s pace. Underneath both sits the teaching this pillar holds, that a child who separates on their own timing arrives with their own Will intact.
Salt, cloth and open air
The placenta carries a scent, and salt is what keeps it mild. Rinsed, patted dry and packed each day with coarse sea salt and dried herbs, rosemary, lavender or thyme, it cures the way meat cures, and a room holding one smells faintly herbal. Fresh cloth daily and open air around it hold that. A sour or strong odour is the signal to look closer, and it is the moment to call your midwife.
A midwife who watches alongside you
Infection is the concern clinicians raise, since the placenta is tissue that has finished its work while it stays joined to a newborn. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists advises families choosing a Lotus Birth to watch closely for fever, poor feeding and irritability, and that watching is sound practice. The evidence sits at the level of case reports and family accounts, with trials still to come. The care itself is daily salting, clean cloth, airflow, and a midwife or doctor who knows this is happening and agrees to watch alongside you. Everything here stands as one family’s experience and reading, and your own care team holds the medical call.
So that a soul arrives all the way
If a birth is coming and something in you has been tightening at the clipboard, question the function of every cut that gets offered, and ask who it serves. If a birth is long behind you and your own first breath came with a severing, that part of you is still there, small and waiting, and sitting beside people while a part like that comes home is the work I do on the Journey, which you can read about on Walk With Me. Do you feel willing to look at your own arrival? Then do it so that the child in front of you gets to arrive all the way, so that her placenta stays hers, so that the Will she came in with is still hers at seventeen. In grace and loving-kindness.