Echoes from the Village

When We Fear Birth and Death, We Forget How to Live

Author

Jennifer Jeffcoat
July 07, 2025

We live in a culture that fears both birth and death.
And when a people fear the beginning and the end…
They begin to fear everything in between.

We are taught to manage life, not trust it.
To survive, not to surrender.
To parent, not from soul, but from stress, schedules, and control.

This week, we explore what happens when birth is taken out of the hands of the village and how that fear reshapes not just our entry into life, but our entire relationship with it.

Village Curations

Wisdom We’re Tuning Into

Podcast Highlight | The Parenting Ashram – The Village Effects Series
In this week’s episode, we explore how technocratic birth culture has conditioned us to fear the natural unfolding of life and how that fear silently shapes our parenting. What happens when we no longer trust the process of becoming? And what would it take to reclaim birth, not as a medical event, but as a sacred threshold for both parent and child?
🔗 Listen on Spotify

📖 From My Practice | Holding the Field: A Grandmother’s Witness to Sacred Birth
Birth is never just physical. It’s where soul, story, and spirit converge. When I was called to support my daughter in the freebirth of my second grandchild, I wasn’t just witnessing labor I was witnessing lineage. This piece shares how holding space for a sovereign, undisturbed birth created an imprint of trust that will ripple through our family for generations.
🔗 Read the full article on Mighty Networks

🎥 A Moment to Witness | Rachelle Garcia Seliga on Sacred Birth
In this powerful clip, Rachelle speaks to the collective forgetting that happened when birth was removed from the village—and how that loss seeded fear across generations. She reminds us that fear in birth is not natural, but learned. And that through reclamation, we can bring the sacred back into the room.
🔗 Watch the Clip

The feeling of freedom!

This Week’s Invitation – Awaken With Us

SOUL Talks with Jennifer is now live.

What does it mean to become fully human again?
To reclaim the parts of us that have been silenced, systematized, and severed from soul?

This question is at the heart of SOUL Talks—Stories Of Unlearning & Liberation.
A space to remember who we were before the world told us who to be.
Before birth was medicalized.
Before parenting became a performance.
Before culture convinced us that being human meant being productive.

In these episodes, we sit in the fire of story and sacred truth-telling.
We explore the imprints of birth, the weight of generational silence, the soul lessons hidden in everyday life, and the radical act of slowing down long enough to hear what’s already inside.

Because becoming fully human again isn't about achieving more.
It's about remembering more.
More presence.
More soul.
More trust in our inner knowing.

If you’re feeling the ache of modern life...
If you’ve sensed something is missing beneath the noise…
If you're craving a space that honors the mess, the mystery, and the medicine, this is your circle.

🎙️ Listen to the first episode of SOUL Talks with Jennifer now.

Story from the Fire Circle

When Fear Took Over Birth, It Took Over Parenting

We are a culture that fears the beginning and fears the end.
We medicalize birth. We sterilize death.
And in between? We call it “life”—but it’s often survival masked as living.

When birth was taken out of the village and placed behind sterile curtains, something primal was lost.
Birth stopped being a threshold of transformation and became a procedure to manage.
And in that moment, fear became the first imprint.
Not love. Not safety.
Fear.

And when a culture fears birth, it will inevitably fear death—because both are doorways we cannot control.
So we build systems to manage them, to numb them, to avoid the wild mystery of being human.
And we pass that avoidance down through our parenting.

We try to control our children instead of trusting them.
We fear their big feelings, their failures, their freedom.
We parent not from presence, but from pressure—pressure to do it “right,” to keep them safe, to hold it all together.

But underneath it all, we are terrified.
Terrified of getting it wrong.
Terrified of not being enough.
Terrified of letting go.

We are not truly living—we are managing.
Because the soul cannot fully land in a life that’s afraid to feel.

But what if we remembered that birth was never meant to be feared?
That death is not a failure, but a passage?
That parenting is not a performance, but a relationship?

When we reclaim the sacredness of beginnings and endings, we make room for life to happen in between.
Messy. Beautiful. Soulful. Real.

This is the village effect…..
Not just a return to community, but a return to living fully in a culture that taught us to fear the very essence of existence.

Until Next Time
Parenting is not about mastering the middle.
It’s about trusting what bookends it all, birth and death.
Let us walk gently, bravely, back toward the sacred.

Together,
Jennifer
@awakenedparentashram | www.awakenedparentashram.com | Parenting Ashram Podcast – Spotify