THE MARKS OF THE BEGINNING OF LIFE

We are born only once, and that moment stays with us for the rest of our lives. In this book, Marisa Couto — Specialist Nurse in Maternal and Obstetric Health and Systemic Therapist of the beginning of life — invites you to look at birth again: not as a medical event to be survived, but as a passage that can heal. Drawing on years of accompanying women, couples and newborns, and on the Healing Birth in Water® Method she created, she shows what happens when a woman enters warm water in labour. Pain softens. Fear loosens its grip. The body remembers what it already knows how to do. And often something older begins to move as well — the birth stories we inherit from our mothers and grandmothers. This is a book about physiology and about memory. It brings together clinical knowledge, systemic therapy and the lived voices of women who have given birth in water, offering practical guidance to those preparing for birth and a new lens for the professionals who accompany them. Because the way we come into the world matters. And it is never too late to heal it.