Sue Chandler Offering: Sue will hold a meditation and follow with a talk on the vagus nerve and how it affects us spirituality, sexually and birthingly
My name is Sue Chandler and I have been working for the NHS as a community midwife for 17 years. Following a degree in sociology and social anthropology I trained as a midwife, qualifying in 2001. In 2012 I worked with the Normalising Birth Project which aimed to and was successful in, reducing Caesarean section rates across the South East. I am currently providing a debriefing support service to women who have experienced a traumatic birth. This year I completed a diploma in Practical Spirituality and Wellbeing which is based on the evidence that having a sense of spiritual connection improves our physical and mental health. As an anthropologist I have always been interested in the idea of how we ‘should’ birth our babies as a species. Our culture may be changing all the time but our physiology and psychology are basically the same as they have been for tens of thousands of years. It is this relationship between culture, physiology, psychology and spirituality that informs my practice as a midwife. Drawing on a long history of women standing alongside one another in times of vulnerability and change I feel the core of my practice is around empowering women in their own both universal and unique experience of pregnancy and birth.