What Does It Mean to Be a Vision Midwife?
“The most holy one created the world like an embryo, as an embryo grows from the navel, so she began to create the world by the navel, and from there it spread, grew, multiplied in all directions…she was both seed and flower, both primordial and final. The first vibration of the egg of the world which unfold to the edges of the universe are both expanding and contracting, emerging rom the source and pulsing outward to disappear into a spherical vortex. The still center (the heart) is the axis of creation.”
— from Female Cosmology: The Creation of the Universe, an essay in The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor
The Call to Vision Midwifery
You may have stumbled this article because you felt a pull toward the phrase vision midwife or vision midwifery. Maybe it evoked a resonance in you, a curiosity, or a before-this-life memory you can’t fully recall.
You might be asking, What does it mean to be a Vision Midwife?
And this question is not meant to be answered quickly. It is an invitation to pause, to listen and to observe your own curiosities and intuition. Because midwifery, in its essence, is not about knowing for certain. It is about being with a process.
To midwife is to walk alongside of something that is not yet fully formed or complete. It is to stay with the unfolding. To hold, witness, and respond to what is coming into being. This is true in birth. This is true in death. And it is true in the visionary process.
Claiming the Role of the Midwife for the Context of Vision
Here in Storywork Studio, we use the word midwife in an emergent capacity as a way to queer our remembrance of the Midwife as not only a role for supporting the experience of birth, but also to describe the role of a member of community who feels called in their work to “stand in the gap” between has been and what will be and tend to our human experience of cellular and soul-level creative process.
We recognize that the word midwife has a long, long pre-cognitive history. And like many terms, it’s definition has had to expand and evolve to be able to hold the spiritual and physical metamorphosis of what it means to be human in modern culture.
The word midwife carries a long history.
Across time and cultures, it has meant many things, but at its root, the etymology is simple.
To midwife means to be with “woman” or to be with “womb”.
Regardless of physiology, sex / gender, or whether the midwifery process were happening for birth or death, midwifery has always been a practice of presencing the creative imaginal void (the proverbial womb) in this way.
Historically, the role of the midwife was never just about assisting in the act of birth it was about walking with the mother through the entire rite of passage of bringing a human into physical form. It was about celebrating the conception, nurturing gestation, witnessing labor, and supporting the post-birth unfolding of both child, mother, and the rest of the family as well. Sometimes, it was also about navigating loss, change, depression, new identities and expanding into new capacities within a family structure.
Midwifery was and still is just as much about the event of threshold crossing as it was about supporting all involved to integrate the impact of the event into day-to-day reality as well. Usually this support came as the midwife assuming the role of someone who can stay present, attuned to the needs of the family, and nourishing the day-to-day events and rituals required to help the family step into a new story, identity, and experience of life on the otherside of a thresholding event (birth, death).
Its in this way that Midwives are caretakers of transition, holding space not only for the arrival (or death) of a child but also for the rebirth of the mother—of her identity, her body, and her role in the world and the reconstruction of the family unit’s norms.
Midwives exist in the space between what is and what is becoming, bearing witness to the mysteries of birth, death, rebirth, and creation.
The practice of midwifery stretches back at least to 30,000 BC and beyond, where indigenous traditions across the globe honored those who tended the sacred cycles of birth, loss, and regeneration.
From our histories, we learn that midwifery is not just about the moment of birth. It is about holding space for initiation, for death and life intertwined, for the unraveling and the remaking of a person.
Midwives was not only walked with woman, they walked with womb. And not just the physical womb, but the greater, cosmic womb: the space where all things are held in the imagination, the void, and the not-yet formed before they begin to take shape in the physical realm.
This is why the meaning of midwifery has had to change and expand over time.
Because Midwifery has never truly been confined to the physical experience of birth or death. Midwifery speaks to the act of being with each other in a multitude of liminal states, in every process of becoming and unbecoming—whether it is birth, psychospiritual transformation, death, or the quiet unraveling of the known that precedes any new beginning.
To see the role of the midwife as a mythocultural one where one is called to hold space for the emergence or transition of something that cannot be rushed or forced, this is how we reclaim the role of the midwife in the context of vision development in our modern world.
