Spiritual Midwifery: A Conversation with Ashira Gross & Shalva Waldman

What do a midwife and a therapist possibly have in common?

As it turns out - quite a lot!

In this engaging and heartfelt conversation, I sat down with my friend Ashira Gross, a home birth midwife in Jerusalem, to explore the deep parallels between birth and healing. We discovered that many of the principles that guide a midwife in the birthing room are the same truths that guide a therapist in the therapy room.

🌊 Riding the Waves of Life

Birth teaches us to surrender to waves: contractions, intensity, and release. Therapy and healing invite us to do the same: to face life’s challenges with presence, trust, and the courage to let go.

🤲 Attunement and Alignment

When a baby aligns in the mother’s body, birth flows more smoothly. In therapy, when attunement is present between client and therapist, growth and change unfold naturally. Both processes ask us to listen deeply and honor what is emerging.

⚖️ Intervention vs. Trust

Both midwives and therapists carry tools for intervention. But often the deepest wisdom is knowing when not to use them, when to trust the natural process and simply hold space with steadiness and care.

🌸 Finding Balance

Healing and birth both hold paradoxes: tension and release, fear and trust, contraction and expansion. The work is not to avoid these opposites, but to find balance in the dance that immerges when we trust the unfolding, and understand the value of both sides of the paradoxes of life.

✨ This was an exciting, dynamic, and meaningful conversation, sometimes even interrupting each other in our enthusiasm, but always returning to this truth:

We are all, in our own ways, spiritual midwives, supporting each other’s emergence into fuller life.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/5089c6_c6c8fd2394204e72944aad33e2f3fa42/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

With Gratitude to Midwife Ashira Gross - 054-463-8758

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💡 If what we shared here resonates with you…

And you’d like to bring these principles into your own therapy work, I’d love to invite you to learn more about Attuned Integrative Reconsolidation (AIR). It’s a training designed to help therapists stay attuned and grounded in core principles, while also gaining a toolkit of practical methods for trauma healing.

Click here to find out more.