Jill Reena Benson's Page

What issues are most important to you?

Promoting healthy, humanized births!
Living life as living ceremony
Loving
Laughing and making others laugh
Dancing and making others dance
Contributing to the healing of the planet
Clean water

What kind of social activism do you engage in?

Humanizing childbirth

What organizations do you love or work with?

The Red Tent (wink wink), Omega Institute, Doulas of North America, Doulas of Brazil

What books, music, films, etc. do you think educate and empower women?

Birth as an American Rite of Passage;
Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers;
The Water House (Anthony Olinto)

Career: what do you do or want to do?

Share the gift of self realization

What skills and interests to do you have to offer to others in the Red Tent Women's Project communty? This is your chance, so sell yourself!

I give Polarity Sessions and am a low-cost birth doula!

I also make great caipirinhas =)

What would you like other members of this community to know? About yourself, about the world...anything (try not to be profane, though)!

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

What was your "women really matter and I'm going to do something about it" moment?

Hm, I think i was sitting on a bus. In Brazil. Watching strangers fawn over a small child who was being adorably fussy. And I thought, gee, that's nice. They don't even know that child. It led me to this: We humans, we are totally imperfect beings. We are impossibly, deliciously wild creatures. We mess up all the time. We hurt the ones we love, we hurt ourselves all the time! I have no clue why we do this. But we just keep on tryin', we keep getting up in the morning even though we cant seem to remember what the point of it is! We go searching for that point. But sitting there - on that city bus, it was so obvious - the love we give to our human children, whether or not they are our own flash and blood, that love - that gorgeous instinct - is completely and utterly perfect. To be able to give love so unconditionally, accepting other wild and flawed beings in their imperfect radiance, that is what makes women (and men!) matter! We are such incredible channels of divine love. So, how can we keep those loving channels flowing in ourselves? That is why I am here - to find out how YOU do it!