Nine Golden Months: A Book Review
Nourishing the mother-to-be.
How often have you heard of this concept?
How often do you see it played out?
My guess to the answer to both of those questions is at best - not enough.
This book, Nine Golden Months - The Essential Art of Nourishing the Mother-To-Be, and pretty much all that Heng Ou and her team put out into the world, aims to change that in such a gentle, poetic, profoundly moving way. Think of this book as your step-by-step guide on how to really honor your pregnancy and how amazing your body is for creating, growing, and eventually birthing new life. With beautifully intentional self-care practices to vitamin-dense recipes, the book pulls from Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda, and showcases immense wisdom, calling attention to all aspects of a woman’s pregnancy experience: the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
Books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting have not been and probably never will be on my recommendation list. They’re too cookie-cutter and cheesy for my style. As a society we don’t do a good job of really preparing a pregnant person for what their body will go through during the months of gestation, nor do we revere that body for the magnificence that it brings forth. I don’t want to fill the minds of my clients with anything less than text that makes them stop in their tracks and realize just how INCREDIBLE they are. Pregnancy isn’t something to be taken lightly, nor is it to be taken for granted. Books like Nine Golden Months provide what a pregnant person so often needs to feel a connection and be grounded in the power that countless others have done this pregnancy and birth thing before. Why not spend time with a book that nourishes the body, calms and quiets the mind, and builds up the strong spirit while waiting on a baby to be born?
In an article for Mother Mag, the author of this book shared the following which is, in my opinion, a wonderful way to sum up this piece of her work.
“The care that a mother-to-be needs during this time exceeds what the average clinical checkup can deliver. Being supported while carrying a baby is not only about eating off a prescribed list, cutting out alcohol, or editing harsh chemicals from her cleaning supplies—though these things matter. It’s so much richer, more layered, and textured than this. And it starts by turning inward.”
