Liminal Space: spiritual abortion accompaniment  

A Six-Week Rouge Doula Intensive

Liminal Abortion Counseling Skills for More Profound Sessions

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Abortion can be physical, emotional, practical—and deeply spiritual. For some people, abortion raises questions about life, death, soul, pregnancy, intuition, grief, ritual and meaning. For others, it doesn't. Our role as doulas is not to decide what an abortion means, but to know how to hold space when these questions arise.

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Deep Space is a six-week training for abortion doulas and others supporting abortion seekers who want to develop the skills to accompany the deeper, embodied and spiritual dimensions of abortion.

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Participants will have the opportunity to practice and construct their own meditations, spaces and counseling role plays, working closely with other participants. This is a co-constructed space, and the group will go as far and as deeply as the container allows. 

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From this course, you will have tangible skills you can take into counseling sessions, in which the level of woo can be increased or cut completely depending on the needs of the client. 

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This is a small and intimate container in which a video will be available each week to support your learning, and Sunday online meetings will be recorded. 

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LIMINAL SPACE CURRICULUM: 

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Week 1 — Entering Deep Space: From Mind to Body

• ​Learn how to create and facilitate guided meditations that help abortion seekers move beyond analytical thinking and into the body.

• Participants learn to work with sensation, emotion, intuition, imagery, silence, and different parts of the self.

• We explore body scans, grounding, parts-based inquiry, meditation construction, and the difference between deepening an inquiry and leading someone toward an answer.​

 

Practice: Build and facilitate your own guided meditation.

 

Week 2 — Holding Many Spiritual Worlds

How do we hold spiritual space for someone whose beliefs are completely different from our own?

 

• We explore Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Indigenous and ancestral, pagan and earth-based, Buddhist, mystical, atheist, agnostic, and personally constructed understandings of pregnancy and abortion.

• Participants learn spiritual neutrality: how to enter the seeker's worldview without confirming, challenging, appropriating, or replacing it with our own.

• We also address religious trauma, spiritual ambivalence, fear, shame, and conflicting beliefs.

 

Week 3 — Abortion, Soul & Spirit

A deeper theoretical and historical exploration of abortion and spirituality.

We examine how different cultures, religions, philosophical traditions, and historical periods have understood pregnancy, fetal life, personhood, ensoulment, quickening, death, abortion, and reproductive agency.

Week 4 — Is Someone Here? Baby Spirit & the Pregnancy Relationship

Some people experience a pregnancy as profoundly relational. Others don't. Some experience a baby, spirit, soul, ancestor, presence, energy, potential person—or something they cannot name. Others experience pregnancy primarily as a physical state.

• Participants learn how to facilitate guided inquiry into the presence or absence of a perceived baby spirit without suggesting that either should exist.

• We explore intuition, attachment, projection, imagination, religious conditioning, communication, uncertainty, and the ethics of working with experiences that cannot—and do not need to—be objectively verified.

 

Practice: Construct a non-leading meditation for exploring the pregnancy relationship.

Week 5 — Abortion, Ritual & Release

How do we create ritual without prescribing meaning?

• Participants learn to help abortion seekers develop rituals from their own beliefs, relationships, culture, and experience.

• Ritual may surround taking the pills, bleeding, seeing the pregnancy, burial or disposal, saying goodbye, gratitude, anger, grief, relief, transition, remembrance, release—or simply marking that something significant happened.

• For someone who experiences no spiritual relationship with the pregnancy, we learn how to hold an equally meaningful ritual centered on their own transition without manufacturing spirituality.

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Week 6 — Making Meaning

The final week moves from experience into integration.

 

• How does someone incorporate an abortion into the larger story of their life?

• We work with relief, grief, love, certainty, sadness, regret, liberation, transformation, ambivalence, and apparently contradictory feelings without treating emotional complexity as evidence that an abortion was wrong.

 

The course ends where Deep Space begins: the meaning belongs to the person who had the abortion.