There is a moment in a birthing room that everyone in it recognizes and almost no one names. The woman who was speaking a moment ago has stopped. Her eyes have gone somewhere the rest of us cannot follow, unfocused and turned inward, fixed on a horizon that isn’t in the room. The people who love her lean closer and whisper her name, and she does not answer, because in some real sense she is no longer only here. She has gone under, the way a diver goes under, the way the sun goes under the rim of the sea. And when she surfaces, hours later, with a child on her chest and that long unhurried gaze still lingering in her, she has the face of someone who has been a great distance and come back. This is birth as initiation.
We have been taught to call this labor, and to think of it as a medical event, a thing that happens to the body while the mind endures it. But older peoples in older times would have looked at that faraway gaze and known exactly what they were seeing. They would have recognized the woman as one who walks between the worlds. In nearly every tradition that ever tried to name the human beings who cross into the unseen and return carrying something the community needs, we find a word we translate, imperfectly, as shaman. What I want to offer you here is a simple and, I think, ancient recognition. Even before there were shamans with drums and smoke and journeys to the underworld, there were birthing women. The birthing woman was the first one to go to the threshold between the worlds, and she did not go with a drum or a vision. She went with her own body, and she came back carrying a soul.
What a shaman actually is
We have flattened the word almost beyond use. In popular language a shaman is a costume, a wellness aesthetic, something exotic and far away. But underneath the caricature is a precise and serious human role worth recovering. Because once you see it clearly, you cannot un-see it in the face of a woman who has just given birth.
The scholar Mircea Eliade spent his life studying these figures across cultures, and he gave his great book the subtitle that says the most: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. The word ecstasy comes from the Greek ekstasis, which means to stand outside oneself, to be displaced from the ordinary self and the ordinary world. A shaman, in Eliade’s reading, is precisely the person a community entrusts to leave the ordinary world on its behalf, to cross into the realm of spirits and the dead, and to return. The shaman is the one who goes to the edge of death and comes back with something, a healing, a vision, a lost soul carried home.
And here is the part that matters for us. In tradition after tradition, no one simply decides to become such a person. They are initiated, and the initiation is almost always a death. Eliade describes the pattern across Siberia and beyond, the way the initiate is taken apart by the spirits, dismembered, their flesh torn, their bones counted and then reassembled, their old organs replaced with new ones. The one who returns is not the one who left. They have died the small death, the surrender of the ordinary self, and they have been remade. It is only through that undoing that they gain the power to walk between the worlds and be trusted with the crossing. The shaman is not someone who avoided the descent. The shaman is someone who survived it, and now carries its authority in the body.
Hold that image in your mind, the going under, the coming apart, the being remade, the returning with a soul. Then look again at a woman in labor.
The oldest crossing there is, birth as initiation
We call birth a metaphor for transformation so often that we have stopped hearing what we are saying. But I want to be plain here, because this is the heart of it. The birthing woman is not performing a symbol of the shamanic journey. She is doing the literal thing the journey was always a symbol of.
Consider what she actually does. She goes to the exact place where the unborn cross over into the living, the veil between not-yet and here, and she does not send her spirit there while her body stays safe in the room. She takes her whole body to that threshold. She opens herself at the boundary between existence and non-existence, and through the narrow gate of her own flesh she brings a soul across from wherever souls wait into this world of breath, and light, and time. No shaman with a drum ever did anything more literal than this. The others journeyed in spirit to retrieve a soul. She retrieves one in the body, and she does it at the cost of real risk to her own life, because the threshold she stands on has always had death standing on the other side of it. To go where she goes is to go where women have died going. Every laboring woman knows this in some wordless place, even now, even with all our safety. She is not pretending to risk the crossing. She is risking it.
Pam England, a midwife who spent decades helping women meet this truth, gathered a striking piece of birthing lore from the old Mexican parteras. In that tradition, the midwives told the pregnant woman that when her labor came she would have to travel to the underworld, where the spirits and ancestors held all the unborn babies, and that she would have to find her own child there and do battle to free it and carry it home. I love this teaching because it is not soft. It does not tell her birth will be beautiful and gentle. It tells her the truth, that she is about to make a dangerous journey to the land of the not-yet-born and bring back a life, and that the bringing back will ask everything of her. That is a shaman’s job description. It has simply been given, since the beginning, to mothers.
The three thresholds of the rite
At the turn of the last century, an ethnographer named Arnold van Gennep noticed that human cultures everywhere mark their great life passages with a single recurring shape. He saw that these rites of passage nearly always move through three phases. First there is separation, the leaving of the old life and the old self. Then there is the liminal phase, from the Latin limen, meaning threshold, the strange in-between where you are no longer who you were and not yet who you will be. And finally there is incorporation, the return, the reentry into the community wearing a new identity that everyone now recognizes as yours.
Decades later, the anthropologist Victor Turner took up that middle phase and gave it the attention it deserved. The liminal, he showed, is the potent and dangerous heart of any true passage, the place where the old order dissolves, where the person stands betwixt and between, stripped of their former name and not yet clothed in the new one. It is uncomfortable precisely because it is where the transformation actually happens. You cannot become someone new without first, for a while, being no one at all.
Lay that shape over the year of becoming a mother, and it fits like a hand in a glove. Pregnancy is the separation, the slow leaving of the woman you were, the long ripening of a body and a life reorganizing around someone who is not yet here. Labor is the liminal, the threshold itself, the hours in which she is no longer the maiden she was and not yet the mother she is becoming, suspended in the between where the veil is thin. And then comes the long incorporation, the months and years after, when she walks back into her life remade and the whole community must learn to see her differently. I have written elsewhere about that returning, about the seismic identity shift the researchers call matrescence, the becoming that no one warned her would cost so much. Birth is the crossing at the center of it. It is the liminal night from which she comes back a mother.
The little death at the center
Every woman who has given birth without pain relief knows the moment I am about to describe, and every one who has attended births has watched it arrive. There comes a point, usually near the end, when the woman who has been laboring with courage says some version of the same four words that women have said in every language across all of time. I can’t do this. She wants to leave her own body. She is certain she has reached the end of what she can bear and that she cannot possibly go further, and she is often frightened in a way that has nothing to do with the pain and everything to do with the sense that she is disappearing.
Birth keepers have a clinical name for this. They call it transition, the shift between the opening and the pushing, and they will tell you, gently, that when a woman says she can’t do it she is usually almost there. But I want to give it its older name. This is the dismemberment. This is the little death at the center of the initiation, the exact place where Eliade’s shaman is taken apart by the spirits, the necessary undoing of the old self before the new one can be born. Pam England has taught this with great tenderness through the image of the labyrinth, where the long path to the center is a letting go and a kind of dying, and only the walk back out is the birth. The woman you were before has to be allowed to fall away so that the mother can be born. The woman at transition is not failing. She is standing at the threshold of her own remaking, and the terror she feels is the accurate emotional signature of an ego meeting its death.
This is the same descent I traced through the old myths in the descent to the Dark Mother, where Inanna must pass through seven gates and be stripped of everything and hung on a hook in the underworld before she can rise. The story was never only a metaphor. Women have always known the underworld because women have always gone there to give birth. The myth is the map of the birthing room. She descends, she is stripped, she meets the place where she is undone, and only from that undoing does she return carrying new life, both the child’s and her own.
The body already knows the technology of ecstasy
Here is where the science becomes, to me, almost unbearably moving, because it turns out the birthing body was engineered for exactly this crossing, and it asks for exactly the conditions that every shamanic culture in the world independently discovered.
The obstetrician Michel Odent spent his career studying the physiology of undisturbed birth, and what he found is that labor at its most powerful requires the thinking brain to go quiet. He describes how, when birth is allowed to unfold without interruption, the neocortex, the rational, verbal, self-conscious part of the mind, powers down, and an older and deeper part takes over. In that state, a woman can enter what he called the fetus ejection reflex, a wave of involuntary power that can bring a baby into the world in moments, but only if her rational mind has been allowed to recede. The whole cascade runs on oxytocin, the hormone of love and trust and ecstasy, the same molecule that flows through us in deep connection and at the height of pleasure. Odent noticed that the surest way to stop this process is to stimulate the neocortex, to flood the room with bright light, and questions, and language, and the sense of being watched and assessed. To birth in her full power, a woman needs darkness, quiet, privacy, warmth, and the freedom to stop being rational.
Read that list again and tell me it is not the recipe for every ecstatic rite humans have ever built. The drum and the dark of the shaman’s tent, the fasting and the firelight, the chanting that drowns the chattering mind, the removal of the ordinary self so that the deeper current can move through, every culture reaching for the same door. Odent was describing, in the language of hormones and reflexes, the archaic technique of ecstasy that Eliade described in the language of spirits. The birthing woman does not need to learn to leave herself and cross over. Her body already holds the technology. When we say she has gone somewhere, that her eyes have turned to a horizon we cannot see, we are watching the neocortex step aside and the primal self take the helm for the crossing. It is not a woman losing control. It is a woman entering the oldest altered state there is, the one all the others were reaching toward.
What we mislaid, and what it cost
I want to be careful and honest here, because this is tender ground and I have no interest in shaming anyone or romanticizing danger. Modern medicine has saved the lives of countless mothers and babies who would once have died at that threshold, mine among the people it has protected, and any woman who wants or needs its interventions deserves them without a shred of guilt. Both things are true at once, and I will not pretend otherwise.
And still. The anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd, in her landmark study of American birth, showed how thoroughly we came to treat the birthing woman as a machine and her body as a faulty one, how the routines of the hospital function as rituals of their own, ones that teach her she is a patient to be managed rather than an initiate crossing a threshold. What strikes me, reading her alongside Odent, is that the very things our birth culture does by reflex, the bright lights, the constant talk, the interruptions, the assessing eyes, the demand that she stay rational and reachable, are the exact conditions Odent identified as the ones that shut the primal brain down. We did not only make birth safer in the ways it needed to be safer. We also, without meaning to, forgot that it was holy. We built a room designed to keep the neocortex switched on, and then we wondered why so many women felt that something essential had been taken from them even when the outcome was good. What was taken was the initiation. She crossed the threshold, but no one in the room knew that was what she was doing, and so no one witnessed her as one returning transformed. She was sent home with a baby and a discharge form, and the rite went unmarked.
Shamanic midwifery, named plainly
I am not the first to say any of this, and I want to honor the woman who said it most directly. Jeannine Parvati Baker was a midwife, herbalist, and mother who, out of her own difficult birth and her long study, gave this understanding its truest name. She called her work shamanic midwifery, and in 1992 she published a piece titled The Shamanic Dimensions of Childbirth. To her, birth was a spiritual rite of passage as much as a physical one, and the midwife’s real work was to tend the threshold, to protect the crossing, to use her hands for both physical support and the honoring of something sacred moving through the room.
She understood the midwife the way older cultures understood the elder who sits at the mouth of the initiation, the one who has made the crossing herself and now holds the space for another to make it. That, to me, is what a midwife has always been beneath the clinical role, and what a doula reaches toward, and what any of us can offer a birthing woman when we stop trying to manage her and simply guard the door of her descent. We cannot make the crossing for her. No one can. But we can keep the light low and the room quiet and our own fear out of her way. And we can know, even when she does not, that she is doing the most ancient and consequential work a human body can do.
You were initiated, whichever door you came through
If you are reading this as a mother, some part of you may be doing the painful arithmetic, measuring your own birth against some ideal of the candlelit undisturbed crossing and finding it wanting. Your labor was induced, or it was surgical, or it was medicated, or it was frightening, or it was a loss. I want to reach through these words and be very clear with you. The initiation is not the aesthetic. The initiation is the threshold, and you went to the threshold.
A woman who labors for a day and then is carried into an operating room has still gone under. A woman who takes the epidural so she can find her way back to herself has still crossed. A woman whose baby did not come home in her arms went all the way to the veil and stood in the hardest place a human can stand, and she of all women knows the underworld is real. The shaman is defined by the crossing and the return, not by the beauty of the passage. Every one of you went to the edge of your own life and came back carrying something, a child, or a grief, or a knowing that will not leave you. You came back remade. That faraway look I described at the beginning, the one that lingers in a woman’s eyes for days after she gives birth, is not exhaustion. It is the look of someone who has been initiated and has not yet been told what she now is.
This is the same return I keep circling in my writing about the wild woman, the self who goes down into the dark and comes back knowing something the ordinary world cannot teach. Birth is one of the great doorways to her. The woman who has given birth has, whether anyone named it or not, done the wild woman’s work. She descended, she was undone, and she rose carrying life. She is not less than she was before. She is an initiate, and she is carrying the authority of the crossing in her body whether or not she has been given the words for it.
Why I make these photographs
I document women at these thresholds because someone has to witness the crossing and call it by its true name. When I make an image of a mother in the raw, sleepless newness of her first days at home with a baby, or a woman stepping back into her own wildness after years of pouring herself out, I am not trying to make her look pretty. I am trying to show her what I saw. I am trying to hand her the evidence that she went somewhere vast and came back changed, so that on the ordinary mornings that follow she can look at the photograph and remember that she is not only tired, not only stretched thin, not only the one who holds everyone. She is one who has walked between worlds.
The first shamans did not have a word for what they were, either. They only had the crossing, and the return, and a community wise enough to look at the faraway gaze and understand that this person had been somewhere on their behalf and deserved to be met as such. That wisdom is still available to us. We can look at the birthing women among us, at the mothers, at ourselves, and remember what we are looking at. She went to the threshold between the worlds. She came back carrying a soul. There has never been anything more sacred than that, and there never will be.
If you are standing at this threshold
If you are pregnant as you read this, or newly delivered and still carrying that faraway gaze, I want you to know that this passage does not have to go unwitnessed. So much of a woman’s initiation into motherhood happens exactly where no one thinks to raise a camera, in the last ripe weeks of carrying and in the tender, sleepless first days at home, and those are the very thresholds I love most to photograph. A maternity session honors the woman at the height of her crossing, still holding the whole mystery inside her. An in-home newborn and early postpartum session meets her on the other side, in the soft, ordinary rooms where she is learning the shape of who she has just become.
I keep these sessions quiet and unhurried on purpose, because the same conditions that let a woman labor in her power, the low light, the privacy, the freedom to stop performing, are the ones that let her real tenderness, and her power, rise in front of the lens. I am not there to arrange you into someone else’s idea of a mother. I am there to hand you the evidence of your own crossing, so that on the long ordinary mornings ahead you can look and remember what you are. If you feel the quiet pull to be seen at this threshold, I would be honored to hear from you. You can reach out here to talk about a maternity or in-home newborn session, and we will dream up something that feels like yours.
This piece touches on birth, initiation, and pregnancy loss, which are tender for many. If any of it stirred something that needs more than words on a page, please be gentle with yourself and reach toward the people and support you trust.
Sources & further reading
If you want to follow this thread deeper, these are the works that shaped it, and each one is worth your time.
- Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, on shamanic initiation as death, dismemberment, and return, and on ecstasy as the state of standing outside the ordinary self.
- Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909), the origin of the three-phase structure of separation, liminality, and incorporation.
- Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, on liminality and the potent, dissolving “betwixt and between” of any true passage.
- Michel Odent, The Fetus Ejection Reflex and his wider work on birth physiology, the quieting of the neocortex, and the role of oxytocin in undisturbed birth.
- Robbie Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage (1992), on the technocratic model of birth and how routine intervention functions as ritual.
- Pam England, Birthing from Within and Labyrinth of Birth, on birth as a heroine’s journey, the Mexican partera teaching of the descent to retrieve the child, and the death of the old self before rebirth as a mother.
- Jeannine Parvati Baker, The Shamanic Dimensions of Childbirth (Pre- and Peri-Natal Psychology Journal, 1992) and her practice of shamanic midwifery.
- Ina May Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery, a foundational reclaiming of birth as sacred passage.
