Fields of Presence
A training in field consciousness, pre and perinatal awareness, and somatic presence for midwives and birth professionals.
Birth has always been held by those who know how to tend a field. Long before protocols, before clinical training, before the language of evidence-based practice, there were those who understood that the most important thing they brought to a birth was not technique but presence — a quality of attunement so complete that the field around mother and child could settle into its own intelligence and do what it already knew how to do.
That understanding has not disappeared. It lives in the hands of a midwife who knows when to be still. In the quality of a room when the right person enters it. In the way a labouring woman’s body responds not to what is said but to the actual state of the practitioner beside her.
Fields of Presence is a training for midwives and birth professionals who want to develop that quality deliberately — not as a mystical gift but as a cultivated capacity. Grounded in pre and perinatal psychology, biodynamic craniosacral philosophy, field consciousness, and the oral transmission traditions that have always carried the deepest knowing from practitioner to practitioner, this programme develops presence itself as the primary clinical instrument.
The work sits closer to the oldest arts of birth tending than to conventional professional development. It asks the practitioner to turn toward their own field, to meet what they carry from their own beginning, and to discover that the quality of their own nervous system is the most powerful thing they bring into any birth room.
“The practitioner’s presence is the first field the baby meets. Before the hands. Before the words. Before anything clinical arrives — the field is already speaking.”
What this training tends
Fields of Presence tends the ground beneath the information — the quality of presence from which genuinely responsive practice emerges.
PRE AND PERINATAL PSYCHOLOGY FOUNDATIONS
The sentient embryo and foetus — what the research tells us about consciousness before birth. The imprinting of the birth experience in the developing nervous system. The long reach of the prenatal and perinatal field into adult life and into clinical encounter. Understanding what mother and baby are each carrying into the birth room, below the level of words.
FIELD CONSCIOUSNESS AND RELATIONAL PRESENCE
What a field is and how to sense it. The relational field between practitioner, mother, baby, whānau, and the wider environment. How the practitioner’s own nervous system state shapes the field — and what becomes possible when that state is genuinely settled. Coherence recognises coherence: the neuroscience and somatic reality of co-regulation in birth.
SOMATIC AWARENESS IN CLINICAL PRACTICE
Developing sensitivity to what is happening in the body — the practitioner’s own, and the subtle information available from the field around mother and child. Working with nervous system activation and settling. Tracking the difference between managing and being genuinely present. The body as instrument of perception.
THE PRACTITIONER’S OWN FIELD
Every practitioner brings their own beginning into every birth they attend. Their own prenatal and birth experience. Their own early relational imprints. Their own relationship to threshold and emergence. This training creates space for the practitioner to tend their own field — not as personal therapy, but as clinical formation. What is unmet in the practitioner becomes an unconscious presence in the birth room. What has been tended becomes a resource.