(RNS) — A few months into her second pregnancy, Melissa Ambrosini realized she didn’t want to have another baby shower. The type of party that features gift exchanges, gender reveals and motherhood-themed games felt out of touch, she said.
However, Ambrosini, who lives in Brisbane, Australia, said she wanted to feel encouraged as she navigated having her second child. So she gathered her female friends for a mother’s blessing ceremony, a ritual of Navajo origins to honor women’s transition to motherhood.
“A mother’s blessing is not about that (gifts),” she said. “It’s about the mother, and it’s about supporting and loving that mother, making sure she feels really held, safe, seen and supported.”
According to practitioners, the ritual sacralizes birth and celebrates both the physical and spiritual changes mothers experience. For some spiritually curious women drawn to New Age practices, a mother’s blessing offers a more sacred approach to giving birth.
During the ceremony, participants, sometimes referred to as “sisters,” show support to the expectant mother through prayers, chants, and offerings.
Melissa Ambrosini in 2021. (Photo by Chloe Horder)
For those drawn to mother’s blessing ceremonies, pregnancy is a life milestone — like marriage or death — that calls for specific spiritual support, said Ambrosini.
“I have a very spiritual perspective on pregnancy as well, and I think everything is a spiritual journey, our whole life,” she said. “I feel like we are spiritual beings.”
Recalling her 2021 ceremony, she said it began with palo santo (“holy wood”) burning to cleanse the space of negative energies. Her best friend, the ceremony facilitator, then recited a “mother’s prayer” before guiding the guests sitting in a circle for meditation, Ambrosini said.
Then, a crystal ceremony was held, during which guests threaded crystals while offering good wishes for Ambrosini and her baby and reminiscing on their relationship. A red rope ritual, involving tying red wool threads around their left wrists, asked guests to bless the host and her baby.
The ceremony ended with a ritualistic sound bath, after which guests were given beeswax candles to light when Ambrosini entered labor.
For Ambrosini, the mother’s blessing marked the culmination of a yearslong spiritual journey. In her everyday life, she meditates and does breath work to feel grounded. She also believes in a “higher divine power” and regularly attends church services, declining to specify which church denomination she’s affiliated with.
Though no mother’s blessing ceremonies look exactly alike, most seem to feature a moment dedicated to setting intentions and cleansing energies. For the core of the ceremony, many websites offer ritual ideas and tips.
“Mother Rising: The Blessingway Journey into Motherhood” (Courtesy image)
In 2004, when less information on the practice was available, Barbara Lucke co-authored “Mother Rising – The Blessingway Journey into Motherhood” with Yana Cortlund and Donna Miller Watelet. An obstetric nurse from upstate New York, Lucke used her interest in midwifery and indigenous spirituality to write the guide.
Birth, she said, is a “highly spiritual moment,” akin to a “death to who you were, and a rebirth to something new.”
After learning of mother’s blessing ceremonies through a friend, Lucke started researching childbirth rituals in Indigenous, Egyptian, African, Greek, Celtic and Hindu traditions. The various rituals she discovered left her reflecting on the lack of spiritual ceremonies surrounding the arrival of a baby in American culture, she said.
“The idea of marking that with a big party seemed to miss the mark, and it seemed to me to be such a big transition that warranted more than that,” she said.
She compared the companionship offered by guests in a mother’s blessing to that of church attendees praying together at a Sunday service. Since the ceremonies draw from various spiritual traditions, they usually attract religiously unaffiliated mothers who look to connect with the divine, Lucke said.
Soon after the book’s publication, Lucke said representatives of the upstate New York Native American community contested the use of the word “Blessingway,” as well as practices of Navajo origin described in the book. In Navajo or Diné culture, a Blessingway is a sacred ceremony marking important life events. The ritual is linked to the fundamental concept of Hózhó, representing balance, beauty and harmony in Diné culture.
According to People of One Fire’s website, Blessingway features prayers and songs invoking ancestors, recounting Navajo tales, and sandpainting representing the spiritual journey of participants to restore Hózhó in their lives.
“The Native Americans have made it very clear to us as authors that they’re not too thrilled with the idea of us utilizing the word Blessingway, or the sacred rights,” Lucke said.
Ten members of the Diné Writers’ Collective, a group of Navajo writers that previously wrote about cultural appropriation of Diné beliefs, and the Navajo Nation Museum did not respond or declined to comment when contacted by RNS for an interview.
In a 2021 blog post recounting her mother’s blessing ceremony, Ambrosini justified using “mother’s blessing” or “mama’s blessing” to refer to the ceremonies, distancing it from traditional Navajo Blessingway.
Sarah Sokolofsky with her family. (Photo courtesy Sarah Sokolofsky)
For Sarah Sokolofsky, who had a mother’s blessing ceremony to mark the arrival of her second child eight years ago, the ceremonies took on an even deeper meaning years later when she organized one for a friend.
“It felt so nice doing a Blessingway for another person after I fully understood what it was about and had learned so much more about them,” she said.
Sokolofsky, a Lima, New York resident, was raised Catholic and confirmed at age 13. After attending several Wesleyan churches, a Protestant denomination founded by John Wesley in the late 19th century, she parted ways with Christianity because of religious trauma, she said.
Now, Sokolofsky avoids using labels to describe her spirituality, but she is interested in traditions ranging from herbalism to shamanism. On full moons, she participates in moon circles with 10 friends, during which they set intentions for the coming month. She also marks the sun’s solstice.
Her ceremony helped her feel supported through the different stages of her pregnancy, she said. The day of, her host had prepared a bucket of warm water for her feet. Her guests also spent time drawing henna motifs on her hands. During the ceremony, they gifted her pieces of fabric on which they wrote good wishes for the family and the baby.
A year ago, Sokolofsky sewed them together in a quilt when her daughter, Hannah, was diagnosed with cancer.
A quilt made from pieces of fabric Sarah Sokolofsky received during her mother’s blessing ceremony. (Photo courtesy Sarah Sokolofsky)
“I just felt such warmth and support from looking through these and reading them again, and I just wanted to do something more with them,” she said. “All these things that they had said or wished for us when I was pregnant with her just kind of describes her and our past year, too, which was amazing that we had that.”
Recently, her daughter asked to attend one of her friends’ mother’s blessings. Though she thought attending wasn’t appropriate, Sokolofsky said seeing her daughter displaying such curiosity about a spiritual practice felt like a full-circle moment.