Pam England
Homebirth midwife, nurse, author, teacher, birth story mentor
Pam England has a unique talent for inventing thought-provoking methods to guide women during their childbearing years by synthesizing mythology, philosophy, art, archetypal psychology, rituals, and research. Her writing, teaching, and paintings are inspired by her Muse, as well as her experiences as a midwife and as a mother giving birth once by cesarean and then at home, and her work as a birth story-listener.
Pam is the author and founder of the original Birthing From Within (1999-2016) and is still teaching these principles and processes in The Story You Bring To Birth and the Birth Story School. During the past 40 years, she developed the principles and Process of Birth Story Medicine®. In addition, Pam founded The Birth Story School (2013) to teach aspiring birth story mentors and birth professionals how to lead this inspiring and healing process for others.
The popularity of her groundbreaking first book, Birthing From Within (1998) created a demand for a mentor and doula training and certification program which she founded in 1999. For many years Pam traveled across the United States and abroad teaching Birthing From Within philosophy and processes.
Formerly a certified nurse-midwife (trained at Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky), Pam worked in hospitals, birth centers, and home birth settings for eighteen years. Her interest in preventing and resolving emotional birth trauma led her to earn a master’s degree in psychological counseling. Presently she is teaching courses on birth as a heroic journey, the healing power of telling Great Stories, and her Birth Story Medicine® process, which she is currently developing into a book.
Topic: The Evolution of a Birth Story: Our Guiding Work in the First Six Weeks Postpartum and the First Three Story Gates
In the first six weeks a mother’s birth story is often floating fragments of memories in search of chronological order. Because the medical story is the dominant birth story of the West, we are entrained to speak to moms about their experience, and ask questions that shape her memories as a medical story even when birth is normal. When this happens, an unspoken story recedes to the background, and may get lost or forgotten for a very long time. As a birth story mentor, Pam will introduce by way of stories another way of talking with moms and dads about their birth experience in the first six weeks that invokes unexpected insights.