This episode is not to be missed! Elena would have to be one of my most inspiring people that have come into my life path and I feel so honoured deep in my heart to spend this hour listening to her incredible journey of birth, life, birth into being and dolphins!
We begin this story with Elena with her journey from 1982 as a political activist and involved with many movements in Russia trying to make life better. She stumbled across Igor Charkovsky who was pioneering, birth and water birth in the very difficult Russian birthing system. Elena spent 4 hours with with Igor who explained in detail how we are born affects our lives. Igor expressed to Elena that ‘If we want to change the way we live in this planet we need to change the way we make people’. This scales it right back to baby being in the womb and the perceptions, stresses, and emotional state that the mother has at the time of building the baby and how baby will absorb everything from the mother. I guess you could call this Epigenetic’s, new concept yet very old knowledge…
Elena stopped everything with this new information and she dedicated most of her time and energy into helping women give birth well. Her own birth in the 50’s was in state institution where the practice was described by Elena as ‘brutal’ and ‘bizarre’. In her mothers generation the rate of abortions was 23 PER PERSON.. Life was strange and very hard in Russia during this time… Elena describes that, during this time babies were taken away from their mothers for 5 days post birth, no reason, it was done, because thats how it was done. Elena further talks about our basic setting from in utero and birth and how we are ‘programmed’. This part of the interview is worth pondering on or looking for further research. Elena offers a great understanding into how birth trauma is affecting us and our life that is resulted by the ‘thinking’ brain. The effectiveness of any healing modality is when you activate evenly all three parts of the brain including the cortex, limbic and reptilian part this being responsible for mental, emotional and physiological connections. Elena describes birth a an ‘reptilian’ function, the link that Elena describes is that getting pregnant is difficult if the woman’s body is still in shock from her own birth experience. We need to make peace with the body and allow it to do what it does to conceive and birth.
Elena and I continue to talk about her journey in Russia and the birth camps set up in 1986 in the Black Sea. This then bought on the film Birth as We Know It. Western traditions was only just seeping though Russia, and during this time it was actually quite easy to set up something like the birth camps as there were no regulations to stop it.  So dolphins? In Russia dolphins were just considered as standard fish, however there was a obvious correlation with pregnant woman and dolphins when news was coming to Elena about this connection. During this period in the 90’s things were very difficult for Russia as Elena describes the last birth camp finishing in 1992. This to Elena was not long enough. Russia caught up and regulated birth further where home birth would now be known as illegal. There was no footage taken at the camps or admin work to track the births, however luckily there was an American midwife who left her camera at the camp and this contains the only footage they recorded at the birth camps in the span of 6 years.
Elena goes on to talk about her absolute incredible journey during her pregnancy. Elena was pregnant when she arrived in California, not long after she landed in America the whole soviet exploded with civil war and life as Elena knew it...