LIMINAL SPACE:
SPIRITUAL & ANCESTRAL INTENSIVE FOR ABORTION DOULAS

MOVING ABORTION SEEKERS THROUGH LIMINAL SPACE​: doula Skills for deeper counseling sessions

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​​Abortion can be physical, emotional, practical—and deeply spiritual.

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For some people, abortion raises questions about life, death, soul, pregnancy, intuition, ancestry, grief, blood, ritual and meaning. It can bring us into a liminal space: somewhere between what was and what comes next.

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Our role as doulas is to know how to go there with someone.

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Liminal Space is a six-week live online intensive created by Rouge Doulas × Mujer de la Tierra for abortion doulas and others supporting abortion seekers who want to develop skills for accompanying the deeper, embodied, spiritual and ancestral dimensions of abortion.

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The course brings together Rouge Doulas’ work in embodied counseling, guided meditation, spiritual neutrality, reproductive liminality and meaning-making with Mujer de la Tierra’s ancestral and Mesoamerican teachings around body, psyche, life, death, ritual and reproductive cycles.

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Participants will practice guided meditation, embodied and parts-based inquiry, spiritual mapping, archetypal work, baby-spirit inquiry, ritual construction and post-abortion integration.

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This is a small and intimate container. Participants will practice and construct their own meditations, spaces and counseling role plays while working closely with one another. The group will go as far and as deeply as the container allows.

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You will leave with tangible skills that can be brought directly into counseling sessions and adapted to the beliefs, needs and experience of each abortion seeker.

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​LIMINAL SPACE CURRICULUM: 

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WEEK 1 — HOLDING MANY SPIRITUAL WORLDS

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

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

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

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We explore Indigenous and Mesoamerican perspectives on life, death and soul alongside religious trauma, spiritual ambivalence, fear, shame and conflicting beliefs.

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Practice: Spiritual mapping and counseling role play.

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WEEK 2 — THE FOUR ARCHETYPES OF THE FEMININE PSYCHE

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We move into the Four Archetypes of the Feminine Psyche and their Mesoamerican equivalents, drawing connections between archetype, herbalism, astrology, menstrual cycles and reproductive experience.

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We explore the different energies, tensions and transitions that can emerge through pregnancy, abortion, sexuality, creation, destruction and change, and how archetypal frameworks can open new pathways for inquiry.

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Practice: Archetypal mapping and facilitated inquiry.

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WEEK 3 — ENTERING LIMINAL SPACE: FROM MIND TO BODY

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We learn how to create and facilitate guided meditations that help abortion seekers move beyond analytical thinking and into the body.

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Participants 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.

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We work with the sometimes contradictory voices of the mind, heart, body, womb and sexual self, creating space for each to speak.

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Practice: Build and facilitate your own guided meditation.

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WEEK 4 — SOUL, SPIRIT & “IS SOMEONE HERE?”

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Some people experience pregnancy as profoundly relational. Some experience a baby, spirit, soul, ancestor, presence, energy, potential person—or something they cannot name.

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We explore Indigenous and cross-cultural understandings of the soul, unborn life, ensoulment, quickening and the pregnancy relationship.

Participants learn how to facilitate inquiry into the presence or absence of a perceived baby spirit, working with intuition, attachment, imagination, projection, religious conditioning, communication and uncertainty.

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The question remains with the abortion seeker: Is someone here? And if so, what is the relationship?

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

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WEEK 5 — THE UNDERWORLD: RITUAL, BLOOD, DEATH & RELEASE

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Abortion can bring us into the underworld: blood, creation, destruction, death, grief, relief, surrender, transformation and release.

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We explore reproductive transitions through liminality, descent and ancestral frameworks, including Tezcatlipoca and Indigenous psychology, ritual, herbalism and relationships with blood and the body.

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Participants learn to construct rituals around taking the pills, bleeding, seeing the pregnancy, burial or disposal, saying goodbye, gratitude, anger, grief, relief, remembrance, transition and release.

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Ritual emerges from the abortion seeker’s own beliefs, relationships, culture and experience.

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Practice: Construct an individualized ritual or threshold experience.

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WEEK 6 — MAKING MEANING: INTEGRATION & RETURN

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The final week moves from experience into integration.

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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 contradictory feelings. Through embodied counseling, parts-based inquiry and integration practices, participants learn how to accompany someone as they make meaning from their own experience.

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