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Cher Frederick,
Your provocative and wonderful intervention at the Birthlight conference last July invites a response. In the stream of the last four years of correspondence between us, which I have valued and enjoyed a great deal, I have chosen the mode of an open letter to address you.
Emulating Gurdjieff, you relished dumping us in a frightful mess by withdrawing yourself from our midst. You did this with an endearing ‘mauvais garçon’s twinkle and expressive body talk, that seduced as much as infuriated your audience. As you told me repeatedly on the phone, you came in a spirit of ‘polemos’, the Greek word that gave us ‘polemics’. I tried to explain that this conference was organised in a spirit of celebration, most particularly of your life work. Indeed this had been my pledge to you in 2002, when you came to Cambridge. Since then, a renewed interest in your books has been noticeable in England; I rejoiced to honour you with a larger, enthusiastic audience. We understood that you had issues with Michel Odent and that that this might be a difficult encounter, but Michel’s part in this Birthlight conference was not negotiable. An extraordinary care was deployed, in Greek fashion, to reduce all the perceived sources of aggravation that might arise during your stay in Cambridge. Alas, I underestimated your Asian martial artist’s talents at displacing combat. Suddenly, out of the blue, your wrath was directed at me.
Organising this conference was a juggling act for me in many ways. Every time we talked on the phone, I dropped balls in anticipation of a slinging match I would not be able to handle between you and Michel. The programme kept changing on the website and we did not go to print until the last minute to save costs. The dear family figuring on our little programme are just having a peaceful time together. To put your mind at rest, Alison laboured and gave birth three times beautifully upright, though twice in the water, which you do not approve of, in the comfort of her home. Her babies were born, as you say it so elegantly, ‘like a whisper, like a smile, like the deep sigh that comes with the rapture of love’s ecstasy’. Alison’s husband’s Charlie was both respectful of her immersion in the boundless sea of life, love and light, but also there to share the welcoming of new life. Their family has played an important part in the development of Birthlight, with an involvement from early pregnancy to the third year of each baby; it’s a joy to celebrate their enduring happiness.
Your provocation caused shock, surprise, irritation mixed with disappointment. But as the true master that you are, you drew up your space from this initial engagement with such artful body and hand movements that we could not but admire you. Surrounded by a golden circle of women, on the floor, with your soft but energetic voice you bounced off the questions thrown at you. ‘But, Monsieur Leboyer…’ Each added to your energy until finally you were on stage, demonstrating the art of breathing and chanting towards the tide of birth. For me, your chosen antagonist of the day, it was a pleasure to watch your Socratic way from the nether land of the ostracised, banished beyond the city walls. Thank you for breaking the confines of the logical and rational mind that rules over conferences and, as Margaret in the chair said so well, be ‘yourself’ in your unique poetic uprightness. Thank you for making everyone rethink their assumptions, talk to each other and engage with each other in the glorious mess you created. Your contribution was invaluable. The void created by the absence of recording is indeed a creative vortex that we can all explore and draw from.
Never mind the glitches about whether fathers should be inside or outside the birth experience and nursing babes in arms or not, or whether there is a place for male consorts in the loving embrace of mother and newborn, we humans create many cultures. As I told you, I had the privilege to live among Amazonian people who practice an ancient ritual of ‘couvade’ in which fathers play an intimate part in growing their children’s souls from conception, together with the mother, in both a physical and spiritual way. A few days after the conference, a visit to our local Cambridge zoo, which takes pride in successful breeding, reminded me that captive animals may change their habits and perhaps moods: we watched a beautiful young lion watching tenderly over his lady while she fed her lively cubs, something which might not have occurred in the wild.
The world still needs to hear that Birth without Violence is worth devoting all our human attention, skills and resources. Championing the cause of the baby journeying to be born, you laid bare the emotions and the craving for gentle welcoming ways for this most aware new being. Many people round the world and most of us gathered at the Cambridge conference heed your exhortations in creating a gentler and more sensitive welcoming of newborns. We all do it in our different ways, working in diverse contexts and circumstances, with greater or lesser readiness to work in the margins of society or compromise with mainstream care. Every time I open ‘Birth without Violence’ I get re-inspired and so do many others. However much we have moved on in the art of ‘hands off midwifery’ and we let mothers and infants find their mutual way without interference, the awesome bliss of a truly welcomed baby continues to come through the pages of your books in its history making mode. Half a century later and foetal scans in each family photo album, we sure know that life does not begin at birth. But this still needs to translate into mainstream sensitive handling. We honour you as a path breaker; please also honour us who have chosen this path as the most worthwhile of all. United and in harmony we create the Wind that blows the gentle passion you write about in the Art of Breathing.
From Birth without Violence, you turned to ‘woman’ and you challenged the Judeo-Christian curse of pain and suffering in childbirth, ‘a mountain of sorrow… since the beginning of time’. Love, knowledge, relaxation, sound and breath can be women’s best allies in the crossing of labour, resulting in harmonised contractions and breathing in an aware flow of energy. An adept of Yoga long before today’s popularised practices, you flew to Poona in 1977 to photograph Vanita Iyengar, BKS’s daughter, two weeks before her due date. What a daring feat! You do use technology and PR to convey your message when it suits you! We are so grateful to have your images of women, babies, buddhas and nativities. You prize yourself as a poet but your aesthetics in matching images, emotions and words are those of a visual artist. Indeed, your books do not age because you ‘took the photographs like a painter, trying to capture the elusive secret of beauty’.
As I caught sight of you on the conference stage, demonstrating the gestures you teach pregnant women to help them find their deeper sound, the perfection of your timing and your effortless concentration erased all the previous vibrations of paradox and controversy. Had these been necessary prolegomena, barriers before your mastery of touching the essential beyond technique could express itself? Necessary for you, for your audience, for both? Perhaps your paradoxes and polemics are but the gates you keep to the Tao, Yoga or Zen towards which you guide your audience.
You vanished so skilfully that we were left perplexed.
No one was left unconcerned; everyone talked to one another about you and themselves in the corridors, in the gardens, on the river, in the pub. What a great achievement! Some people said you were ‘unbelievably rude’ which as you know, does not go down well in England. You were rude, inconsiderate and insulting. But it really does not matter. You gave us your presence. Banning us from recording it, was the best invitation to move beyond words into the rhythm of the blacksmith making his wheels in the Chuang Tzu’s parable that you narrate in conclusion to Loving Hands. Like this blacksmith, despite your years that you carry so elegantly, you came to remind us of these rhythms that ‘the Ancients have been able to pass in ways other than words’. It is this very intimate awareness of such rhythms that made you not only spot Shantala massaging her baby son in Calcutta, but offer the grace of her daily gestures to new mothers outside Mother India, inspiring millions to massage their babies.
You came to remind us that each Asana ideally contains the whole of Yoga; that childbirth is an invitation for each woman to merge with the cosmic dance and, in the words of a mother you quote, to ‘fall into the exultation of life as it lives itself’. These two realisations have motivated me to set up Birthlight and uphold the physical spirituality that springs forth in pregnancy, birth and the handling of babies. Merci, cher Frederick, for renewing this aesthetic, spiritual and profoundly practical inspiration in true Socratic fashion at the Birthlight conference.
Yours ever,
Françoise
Francoise Barbira Freedman
Birthlight Trust
P.O. Box 148
Cambridge CB4 2GB
