I'm not sure when or how I first came to hear of lotus birthing - leaving the umbilical cord uncut so that the child and its placenta remain attached until the cord drops away naturally. It would have been at sometime during my years of avid reading about all things birth-related that eventually led to me becoming a doula. I do know that my feelings about it had remained consistent for some time: I considered it a perfectly valid choice, but one that, when I did eventually have a child, wasn't going to be for me. I could see the physiological benefits of not cutting the cord until it had stopped pulsating, and possibly even until the placenta had been delivered, but after that couldn't see how leaving it attached would be beneficial. If anything, I imagined the extra work involved in keeping the placenta clean and doing whatever else needed to be done to prevent it from becoming a smelly, rotting mess would be an extra burden in those joyous first few days. I simply couldn't see why anyone would choose to do it.

But then I became pregnant, and discovered what a magical experience it was to listen to my unborn child and to be open to her wisdom. This is the story of how she chose to be lotus born.

I have a very close relationship with my cousin, Kd, and she offered to come over to the UK from Australia for a few weeks to help out towards the end of my pregnancy. I think we both harboured a secret hope that she'd be here for the birth too, but as she could only come for three weeks we knew that that would be in fate's hands. The week before she was due to fly over she was leaving her yoga class in a suburban town hall in Melbourne when she heard voices from down the hallway and felt called to investigate. There was a "Women's Mystery" workshop in progress, and one of the women caught her eye and invited her to join the circle. After some enlightening conversation and sharing, the circle came to a close and a raffle was drawn for a copy of the book "Lotus Birth" by Shivam Rachana, who happened to be one of the women leading the session. Kd won it, and had it signed by Shivam as a gift to me.

The following night, two days before she was due to fly out to the UK, I started having contractions. As my partner Rae started blowing up the pool, transforming our lounge into a birthing room and calling my sister, Alice, to head over, I moaned down the phone and round the world to Kd. She told me about the women's workshop, and the book, and within a few hours my contractions had come to a stop. They didn't come back. We deflated the pool, my sister went home, and before long Kd was with us and had given me the book. Something about the serendipitous circumstances that had led me to be given it made me feel as though I�d been given it for a reason, as though our child had chosen not to be born until I'd read it, so read it I did.

Through the book I learned a lot about the physiology of the baby and placenta, about the changes in the baby's blood flow before and after birth as the source of oxygen and routes for waste disposal shift from the placenta to the baby's own organs and about how uncut cords heal nearly three times faster than those cut immediately at birth. It was all fascinating, but what the book did more than anything else was to awaken me to the deep connection that my unborn child, that any unborn child, has to their placenta.

Some nine months previously my precious child had been one tiny, miraculous cell. This cell had split into more cells, some of which had gone on to become her body, her organs, her skin and her hair, and others had become her life support system, her cord and her placenta, but they all came from the same place, the same one cell. They were all her. Her placenta was as much a part of her as her heart or her hands.

Equally, for her entire existence so far she'd shared her world with one thing: her placenta. She'd snuggled against it, stroked it and enjoyed its companionship. Its sounds had lulled her to sleep. The cord connecting her to it had been her friend and plaything. Birth was going to take her from that world and into a new one, a transition that no matter how peaceful her birth was bound to be an overwhelming experience. If we were to cut her cord, we'd be severing her one last connection to her pre-birth world, to her sole friend and companion in her life so far. If we left her cord uncut, she could let go of her placenta when she was ready and her transition to the outside world would be more gentle, and as much as we could make it, on her terms. Once I'd begun to look at the placenta and our child's relationship to it in these ways I couldn't help but question why we thought we had a right to cut her cord, to dictate when she should be ready to let go of her placenta. Our journey towards lotus birth had begun.

Healing time for the navel

http://www.womenofspirit.asn.au/LotusBirthText.htm

I still wasn't ready to go all out and say "Yes, we're having a lotus birth." This was in part down to the trepidation I still had about how to care for the placenta and also due to the late pregnancy aversion I had to making any kind of definite plan. Rae was equally unsure, but having had me ramble at her about much of the content of the book was equally willing to keep an open mind about it. We decided we would simply not cut the cord until it felt like it was the right time to do so. Over the next week or two I casually collected together a few extra items "just in case": a colander, a bag of sea salt, and a bottle of lavender essential oil. I also found a use for the beautiful yarn made of recycled sari silk I'd picked up in Australia the year before -I began to crochet a placenta bag.

The days rolled by and the time for Kd's departure began to get closer. One evening, she cooked us up a feast of vegetarian sushi and we then stayed up late, talking until the wee hours, whilst I crocheted away. I finished the bag at 1:30am and we finally went to bed. At 3am I was woken by a contraction, followed by a trickle. My waters had broken. Our baby had decided it was time to be born.

Some 27 hours later our daughter, Ember, was born at home into the waiting hands of her other mother, Rae, and our independent midwife, Olivia. She was a little limp initially, but due to her continued connection to her placenta and the oxygen it was providing her, she soon perked up. Her cord wasn't very long, but it was long enough for her to reach the breast, and we settled in for a cuddle and a feed and waited for the placenta to arrive. Five hours later we were still waiting, after having tried various positions, a bath and a selection of homeopathic remedies. Olivia was getting a little concerned as she couldn't responsibly leave us until it had arrived, despite the fact that I'd had very little blood loss, and the prospect of a trip to hospital for a manual extraction was beginning to loom. By this time, all the blood vessels in the cord had completely closed off - it was like a tube of white jelly -so we decided to give syntometrine and cord traction a go. Fortunately this worked and out popped Ember's placenta, all warm and soft and beautiful.

After it had been checked over, we placed it next to Ember in a colander over a bowl to drain and settled down to cuddle together. It felt like a completely natural thing to do, and even the GP that came round to do the new baby check that afternoon was quite accepting of it, at least to our faces. But by the time evening came we were beginning to wonder what to do next as we tried to work out how were going to manage our new baby as well as her placenta (still currently in the bowl) in the bed with us. We talked it through, ummed and aahed a bit, then decided we would cut the cord. The moment the decision left our lips, Ember, who had been completely calm and contented up to that point, let out her first real cry. Rae and I just looked at each other, knowing without needing to speak that Ember had just made her own decision. Her cord would remain intact.

So we washed her placenta under running water in the bathroom sink, removing the excess blood and clots, then we patted it dry and coated it in sea salt to help to preserve it over the coming days. We then wrapped it in a bamboo nappy, and then wrapped Ember and it up together. As it turned out, the ongoing placenta care was incredibly simple. Every morning and evening we removed the old nappy and replaced it with a fresh one, adding some more salt and a few drops of lavender oil. There was no unpleasant smell at all and it very quickly felt completely normal.

The day after she was born, Rae's parents came over to meet their new grandchild. We weren't sure how well the idea of a lotus birth would go down with them, so we just put Ember and her nappy-wrapped placenta into a gro-bag together and neglected to mention that there was more than just a baby in there. We nodded in agreement when they commented on her "healthy weight" (she was 4kg without her placenta anyway) but to this day they have no idea they were cuddling her placenta too.

After a day or so Ember's cord began to go brittle and turn a dark brown colour. Then, two and a half days after she was born, she was in my sister's arms when she began to become quite fractious - something that was unusual for her up to that point. Alice looked inside her blankets and saw her cord had come away, neatly and completely. She was lotus born.

Throughout the days that Ember and her placenta remained joined she was calm and content, and seemed quietly aware of all that was going on around her. On an energetic level, it felt as though her placenta was acting as a shield between her and everything else, allowing her to transition from unborn to born slowly and gently. She has remained a very relaxed and happy baby. Maybe she was always going to be that way, but I can't help but feel that the fact that she was able to transition gently and that she knew from the start that she would be heard and her choices would be respected have played a part. Having a lotus birth was, for us, a beautiful, spiritual and deeply loving way to welcome our child into the world. We may or may not have more children, but if we do, my wish would most definitely be to let them be lotus born too.

By Gina Cox-Roberts

Doula and Natal Hypnotherapy Practitioner