From Whapio:
It has been my great honor to have been involved in the realms of birth for the past 28 years. For 20 years I worked in numerous cities in rural Georgia and in Asheville, NC, serving women having large families (up to 10 children). I learned from these women how to nurture, how to trust and how to sit back and let birth proceed without interference.
My midwifery often took me to the poor and the indigent in the "toxemia belt" in Georgia, yet toxemia/pre-eclampsia was never experienced in my practice. I think it was because the women taught me how to nurture them and nurturing made the difference.
In 2001, I retired from active practice of midwifery and began teaching what women have passed on to me. The Matrona was created as a repository of this birth wisdom and our programs have been educating women as midwives and doulas since then. I still attend births occasionally but mostly now I offer Placenta Readings to the community.
For many years, I have studied mediation and conflict resolution and I have been a community mediator for 15 years. I find that the skill of peacekeeping is a valuable midwifery tool. When conflict is minimized within the relationship of the mom and dad, complications are minimized as well.
I have honored and studied homeopathy. As a mother of two, I raised my children on homeopathy and I believe it is a medicine of our future. I used homeopathy in my midwifery practice and in my life. I value its scope of healing and teach homeopathy wherever I go.
I have the greatest respect for herbs and other forms of Energetic Healing and have pursued, all my life, information and teachings on Qigong, Reiki and other quantum healing techniques. In my quest for greater knowledge I have found myself pushing the boundaries of our knowable reality and journeying to the jungles of Peru, the mountains of Cusco, China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Mexico...in search of shared knowledge and wisdom.
These days I read a lot of quantum physics and quantum biology. I feel that the principles being discovered and written about by cutting-edge and on-the-edge physicists and punk scientists are absolutely applicable to our evolution and to the evolution of childbirth and midwifery. These discoveries uphold what we already know about birth and life...that we are sacred, that life is sacred, that there is a field in which we are all connected and that the way we bring forth life on this earth is evolving us to understand the authentic nature of our reality.
The Matrona - our Quantum Midwifery Program, our Holistic Doula Program, all of our teaching programs - serve to share and expand this knowledge of life and consciousness.
Whapio Diane Bartlett
Teaching at the 2010 MANA Conference in Chiapas
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