Thirteen Angles on Postpartum Power
For the past few months, my teaching partner Leo Lok and I have been burying ourselves in the topic of postpartum care in Chinese medicine. In preparation for the intensive course that we will be offering during June, we have both been combing through classical texts, modern secondary scholarship, popular interpretations of ancient practices, and our own personal experiences, in search of useful perspectives.
What have we learned? What aspects of our discoveries are most useful to our communities, local and international? And how can we transmit this potent cocktail most authentically, most honestly, and most effectively?
Here are just thirteen of my insights:
Postpartum care is a powerful personal trigger, linked to so many layers of physical, emotional, socioeconomic, and spiritual trauma, extending forward and backward over generations of family and community.
The wisdom from the Chinese classics, while created and transmitted primarily and originally to assist women in recovering from childbirth, can be applied to countless other contexts of extreme exhaustion and depletion of blood and Qi.
Because medical knowledge in China, as elsewhere, was transmitted primarily by elite men reluctant to get their hands dirty in this female-dominated sphere, there are gaps that we must and can fill creatively by learning from living practices elsewhere.
Giving birth is one of the most physically challenging assaults on the human system, comparable to major surgery. Why do we not treat it as such and give it the attention and resources it requires and deserves?
In mainstream dominant global culture these days, all the attention is directed at the welfare of the baby instead of the mom. This makes no sense since the two are an energetic and physical unit, linked through Qi and mom’s breastmilk, and mom’s health is the cornerstone of family health.
Improving postpartum maternal care, far beyond the treatment of medical emergencies, is one of the most effective ways for improving public health because it extends from the mom’s body to the baby, the family, siblings and elders, future generations, and the community.
The text-based transmission of Chinese medicine privileges medicinal treatments (decoctions, powders, pills, suppositories, etc.) but we can apply the etiological insights and principles used for these treatments to acupuncture and moxibustion, qigong and daoyin, massages, and countless other modern modalities that might be a better fit in the modern clinic.
Community education is as potent and effective and appropriate a role for a true practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine as the clinical treatment of individual bodies.
We can support postpartum recovery from all five of the zàng organs (kidney, liver, heart, lung, and spleen) but the heart stands out as the ruler, holder of the shén, and the organ in charge of the blood flow.
Conditions like postpartum depression, lower abdominal or back pain, urinary incontinence, excessive fatigue, etc. are pathologies that we can and should treat, instead of accepting them as a “normal” part of childbirth.
No woman should have to bear a child on her own.
Loving care for new mothers has a tremendous ripple effect on society as a whole far into the future.
Postpartum pampering is a beautiful expression of respect for life, for creation, for motherhood, and for the power of Yin.
