Book Review by Sarah Buckley, MD
Pediatrician in Australia

Prenatal Yoga and Natural Birth
Silver Anniversary Edition
Jeannine Parvati Baker
(Freestone Publishing, Utah/ North Atlantic Books, CA 2001)


As a long-time fan of Jeannine Parvati Baker, I was excited to receive this book- the revision of her classic 1974 book on prenatal yoga, which was the first pregnancy yoga book ever published, and a personal favourite.

Jeannine (or JPB) writes as a true healer. She has a generation’s experience in traditional midwifery - although she tells us that she has only delivered her own six babies - as well as being a herbalist (and author of the classic, Hygieia: A Woman’s Herbal). With her partner Rico, she co-authored the fertile and magical Conscious Conception- Elementary Journey through the Labyrinth of Sexuality. She is also a skilled astrologer, yogini and teacher of ‘womancraft’ through her mystery school, Hygieia College. She is a home-schooling mother of six, and now grandmother, and has been described as a ‘change-agent for evolution’, writing and lecturing to audiences world wide about her vision of the possible family.

This book gives us a distillation of her wisdom on birthing and yoga. From the gorgeous peach cover, through the original yoga postures (“truth needs no update”, as she reminds us) to the expanded and inspiring natural birth stories of her six children and her grand daughter, we are privileged to share Jeannine’s unique vision of birth as a path to family soul-making and to ecstasy. (As wordsmith she tells us that the original meaning of ‘ecstasy’ is to move from a small space to a big space)

Her message comes during dark times for birthing women. Almost one-quarter of babies are now surgically removed, and an increasing number of women in the western world are losing their birthing power and passion to the deadening effect of epidurals. As she notes, “Spontaneous birth has become almost a vestigial remain from our more savage fore-mothers…”

Although proposing unassisted birth, or ‘freebirth’, as she calls it, as a radical (‘deeply rooted’) solution to this over-medicalisation of birth, Jeannine never ear-bashes us as readers. Instead her gentle yoga instructions invite us to “delight in being alive right now” and her extraordinary stories speak of the potential of birth as “an opportunity for higher consciousness, for enlightenment…”

Rewriting this book as grandmother and crone, Jeannine’s agenda has palpably widened. She notes the sad lack of responsibility and self-sufficiency in our society - instead we enrol, from our first breath, in the ‘cult of the expert’. (Jeannine’s analysis is that “X is a has-been, and ‘spert’ is a drip under pressure.”) Freebirth, she says, “ecstatically delivers birth …back into the hands of the family”, imprinting self-sufficiency to the next generation and beyond.

Personally, I can attest to her wisdom on both yoga and birthing. I have practised yoga for more than 20 years, and my pregnancy yoga has been particularly rich and rewarding. With my first baby Emma’s birth, 11 years ago, I reaped the relaxation that I had sown in my body through yoga, and birthed easily and quickly. Through the births of Zoe, and then Jacob, yoga kept me grounded in my body, giving me the core skills of breath and movement as allies in what Jeannine describes as “…pulling the universe through the eye of a needle.

I used yoga at a deeper level in my fourth pregnancy, exploring pain and discovering, as JPB did, that “.….moving through the pain brought me to the other side- ecstasy.”. This somatic knowing was my cornerstone at Maia’s birth- an ecstatic 1 1Ž2 hour labour with an unexpectedly breech baby.

The second strong connection that I share with (and thanks to) JPB, and with this book, is my experience of ‘freebirth’ as she calls unassisted birth.

Maia’s birth, attended only by her father and loving brother and sisters, has, as JPB promises, certainly matured our souls individually and as a family, in ways that are rich, unexpected and, even with time, filled with joy. The love and ecstasy that flowed between Nicholas and I at Maia’s birth - the original parents, receiving the new soul that our love created - has been a gift, and work, for a lifetime.

Birthing Maia completely on my own instinct has deepened my trust in my body and in birth, bringing my medical training into balance, (both my husband and I are medical doctors/MDs) and teaching me, experientially, the accuracy of our intuitive knowing of our babies, both at birth and beyond. (You can read more about Maia’s birth at www.birthlove.com/pages/sarah/maia )

In our technological and secular age, Jeannine Parvati Baker shines as a modern Mother-Goddess, as natural birth pioneer Michel Odent describes her. Her words, like ancient fertility totems, carry the birthing wisdom of our foremothers, and give us a rich alternative to today’s how-to-birth manuals.

I recommend this book to mothers, babies and their carers everywhere; whatever your personal ideas are about birth, this book is guaranteed to gently expand them.