Flashback Download: Giving Birth on LSD (1967)

 Disclaimer: These blogs are simply a sharing of my personal experiences and are not meant as recommendations for anyone else to follow. Please do not use me as a role model. Consult your own Teacher Within.

[Continuing from previous posts] It was the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend, September 3, my due date, and I was awakened about 9 a.m. by a contraction. Labor was starting, right on schedule! I waited for a couple more contractions to be sure this was for real. When I was convinced that I was really in labor, I ate the purple wedge with a simple prayer for a holy delivery.

Then Richard-the-drummer stopped by, knowing it was my due date. When I told him I was in labor, he offered to take Todd to the park for a while. I told him to give it to bring him back home in a couple of hours so he could watch his sister be born.

Yes, his sister. I knew the baby was a girl. These were the days before ultrasound. How did I know? I just knew she was a girl, and I had already picked out her name. It would be “Gentle” – eldest daughter of the I Ching family of trigrams. The eldest son in that family was “Chen” – Thunder – and I figured I had already done that one with Todd, who could be very thunderous at times.

Richard and Todd left for the park. Josh and Ellie, the two family members I felt closest to, sat with me in my bedroom, smoking joints, as my labor progressed. Things were moving along fine. The contractions were pretty regular and getting stronger and more frequent, and Ellie had gone to the laundromat across the street and done laundry the night before, so we had plenty of clean sheets and towels.

Pat, the landlord upstairs who had bailed me out of jail, had been a medic in the army and had once delivered a baby. A few days before the birth he had told me how to tie off and cut the umbilical cord. I felt ready. The acid was coming on, and I was starting to feel loose and groovy.
The contractions were getting stronger, however, and my style of baby-having is to make a lot of noise in the process. It just feels good to yell. So I yelled with a couple of contractions, and this freaked Josh out. He was nervous about this unattended home birth anyhow, and after my second hearty yell, he rushed off to the Haight Street Free Clinic to get a doctor.


The contractions keep coming—same sensation as with Todd’s birth—but this time, on LSD, I did not interpret the sensations as negative—“labor pains.” They were just what my body had to do to move the baby along. Everything flows.

Now the second stage of labor starts—time to push with the contractions—so I move over onto the bed. Pushing, yelling, grunting, groaning. Yet rejoicing in each contraction that brings my baby closer
to being born.

Rock music on the radio, frankincense smoke curling in the air, ancient Egyptians on the ceiling welcome in this New Age child. (Were we together before—this baby and I—in Egypt?)

Ellie leaves the bedroom. Another contraction surges through my body. I push. The baby’s head is crowning. I’m alone.

Peggy, seventeen and from Seattle, walks past the open bedroom door. “Peggy,” I say, “come on in here for a minute. The baby’s coming.”

Peggy darts in, followed by Kathy and Ellie. Then, in synch with Great Perfection, Todd and Richard return.

One-twenty p.m. I push. Richard is holding my hand. Peggy, Kathy and Ellie, (teenagers, and inexperienced in birth) catch the baby girl. Todd, with wide eyes and open mouth, is at the foot of the bed, watches his sister enter the world.

I sit up, tie and cut the cord, as Pat, my landlord, had taught me. Then deliver the placenta with one final, mighty contraction.

I direct as the girls clean up the baby and flush the placenta, after placing newborn Gentle Mary in my arms.

Sheer ecstasy! Home, in my own bed. Home, in my own Higher Consciousness. Just where I most love to be. Beautiful, healthy baby in at my breast. No glass boxes, no rude doctors, no commissioned anesthetists. Just me and my family, at home, welcoming new life into this world.

The Dance of Life swirls around us, through us, with us. Great Perfection rules!

Heart chakras, mother’s and baby’s, are open wide, and Love unites old friends in the bliss of Here and Now.

Friends stop by. Richard’s band, “Triple A—Anonymous Artists of America.” They bring Scotch to toast the baby.

Then Josh returns, still worried, with two good-hearted doctors from the Haight Street Free Clinic. Antiseptic vibes, shiny metal instruments. Stiff, cold, mechanical, unnatural.

But I appreciate the wonderfully selfless service they are offering us. They examine Gentle Mary, say she’s fine. They retie the cord with their own, more professional supplies, and want to see the placenta. Flushed. Too late. Oh, well.

“Where do you keep it?” one asks, holding Gentle Mary.

“We keep her here in bed beside her mother, where she belongs,” I tell them. They hand me the baby, pack their shiny metal tools, and leave.

We go on celebrating the Birth of Gentle.

Josh, joyously shouting “We just had a baby up here!”, tosses joints out the second-story bedroom window to passing strangers on Waller Street,

One young couple—strangers who happened to be passing just in time to catch a falling j—come up off the street to smoke it with us and see the newborn babe.

After a while everyone else leaves the room, and I’m alone with my new baby. I feel so blessed. I silently thank Spirit for the gift of this precious new being who nuzzles gently at my breast. And my heart swells with love and joy and gratitude.

The next day I took Gentle up to the Safeway supermarket on the corner of Haight and Shrader Streets and weighed her on the produce scale. Seven-and-a-half pounds, and priceless.

My friend Mary, and her son Christopher had left the city by then, but I later learned that Mary did a large painting, from her imagination, entitled Birth of Gentle, and sold it in a Marin art gallery.

Gentle Mary was a sweet, alert baby. Skip, who had given me the purple wedge, also gave me a rocking chair in which I sat to feed and cuddle my beautiful new daughter. I was much more relaxed with her than I was with infant Todd. My extended crash-pad family was now in the habit of doing most of the housework and helping out with Todd, so I could sit back and enjoy being the mother of a newborn.

Gentle was a month old when we decided it was time to leave San Francisco. The scene at home was more together—more cooperative—than it had been before I created the vacuum with my vacation, and the vacuum was extended by the fact that I now had to spend several hours a day sitting and nursing the new baby. More people were pitching in and helping out with the cooking and cleaning, and we had a couple of somewhat older and more experienced guys in the family now, so that helped out.

The Haight Street scene was changing for the worse – heroin brought in by the CIA – and we all agreed that it was definitely time to get out of San Francisco.

I was never at all interested in hard drugs. Psychedelics were plenty for me – they were mind-expanding, Spirit-affirming, non-addictive substances, unlike the speed and smack I saw some very kind, sensitive using to escape their pain. Psychedelics were not an escape – they brought you face to face with your inner issues, presenting you with the opportunity to understand and heal them. Meth just put folks on a hard-edged ego trip, to bolster their low self-esteem, and heroin just put people beyond their personal pain, whatever it was, without even looking at it.

Not for me. Cannabis and other psychedelics put you into your deepest stuff, and if you could handle it, you could break on through to Higher Consciousness and a fuller understanding of Life itself. Of course psychedelics are tricky. Set and setting—as Leary pointed out—are very important, as are one’s intention in using the substance and how much inner work a person had done – how well one knew one’s self. If you don’t know yourself very well and have a subconscious full of things you felt guilty about when you take a psychedelic, you might run into (i.e., create) “monsters” as your mind expands into previously subconscious areas. And you might project those monsters onto the people around you, thinking everyone is evil and out to get you, or some paranoid trip like that. But if you’ve done some inner work and are relatively at peace with yourself, you can move right through the subconscious realm and into the Jung’s “collective unconscious” and embody your archetype. And this Earth Mother knew it was time to get her family out of the city.

~~



Peace and Love
Sylvia