04/24/2026
It’s a really important part of my practice to create as much space and encouragement as I can for parents to be the first hands to touch their baby.
In the sacred valley of Peru, traditional Andean midwives believe that as a baby is crowing and being born all of their chakras are open. They have so much reverence for this process that they intentionally do not touch vulvas or baby’s heads.
Intuitively I’ve always desired not to touch, but being given language and meaning for what I was feeling was so grounding.
One of the many benefits to creating a relationship with your midwife, and knowing who will be at your birth, is that if a baby is asking for help to be born a midwife’s hands are far from strangers hands. And I hold deeply the honor and sacred responsibility to receive a families baby. This is part of the work that’s called upon sometimes.
But the work is also creating space within myself to know the difference, and offer every possibility for babies first touch in this world to be skin on skin, because it does matter.
Not just for the baby but for the mother and the father. My mentor and teacher, Whapio, talks about the spiritual and transformational significance of fathers catching their babies or as she calls it “receiving their light” and how she has watched that act make them better more attentive and loving fathers.
I whole heartedly believe this to be true. We have turned catching babies into this unobtainable medical procedure, qualified by only a select few. When truly there is nobody more qualified, in a healthy and normal birth, than the parents to receive their own creation.
This an entire rite of passage that at the very least deserves enough reverence to be offered and then protected as much as possible. For many of us birth workers that protection includes our own inner work to constantly reevaluate is this touch necessary?
There simply, for myself, is so no greater joy than to witness two beings come together in love, step up, and choose to receive their own light ✨💜
📸:
Incredible mother:
