Disrupting the status quo to create the mindful birth space – spaces that ‘sing’!

Abstract

Using an integration of knowledge from neuroscience, epigenetics, architecture, midwifery, and phenomenology, this chapter challenges us to reinvent our understandings of birth spaces. Foureur points to the importance of optimal birth environments for avoiding disruption to physiological birth with potential epigenetic consequences for the infant. Such disruption occurs as a result of the fast-acting neural networks, hardwired in our brain, that underpin our behaviour, providing moment-to-moment environmental scans of our surrounding environment; constantly assessing “Am I in a safe space?” Our senses are on alert, assessing, judging, reacting. Balabanoff brings awareness of the mind-body-environment connectivity that is at the heart of sensory/spatial experience. The authors develop awareness and evidence that inform creation of sensitive, optimal birth space, and contend that this requires focus on phenomenological and hermeneutical aspects of birth, including the surrounding environment. Authors posit that embodied affect and effect of spatial settings enhance capacity for attunement to self, others, and world. Mindfulness, as an understanding of ‘being present’ – reaching and remaining in a consciousness of ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’ – can provide a meaningful lens for considering how the design of physical attributes and atmospheric qualities of birth settings can contribute profoundly to the lived experience of birth.