Wellness pastoral care and women with new babies

Abstract

As participants, we agreed that women's silenced voices need to be heard, more specific to this participatory action research, the voices of women with new babies.

Through wellness pastoral care, we co-laboured in finding ways of standing up to prescribed religious and cultural ideas regarding womaness and motherhood. Pastoral care in partnership with feminist theology and mutuality in community opened a safe place to renegotiate our own preferred ways of seeing our bodies, selves, sexuality, and womaness.

The pastoral care, counselling, and mutuality experienced as a research group became the prevalent characteristic of our wellness that we wished to extend beyond the group and into families, churches, community cohorts, and the planet.

This research is one platform on which the participating women shared hurts, found a place to be heard, and having come to know our Self more deeply, offer this Self as a gift to the reader.