birthing-awareness-3step

Open-source legacy handbook for the Birthing Awareness 3-Step Process.

🌾 Birthing Awareness 3-Step Process

A Living Handbook — Open Edition

🧭 Purpose

This project preserves the Birthing Awareness 3-Step Process (BA3Step) — a simple, language-based structure for supporting people who perceive their birth or perinatal experience as traumatic.
It exists here as an open-source legacy so that others who resonate with its principles can study, practice, and pass it on.

🌾 Birthing Awareness 3-Step Process

A Living Handbook — Open Edition

🧭 Purpose

The Birthing Awareness 3-Step Process (BA3Step) is a simple yet precise framework that supports people who perceive their birth or perinatal experience as traumatic.
Developed by Mark Mann-Harris, a midwife and educator with over three decades of clinical practice, the Process bridges midwifery, linguistics, and neuro-symbolic understanding.

This living edition exists to preserve and transmit the essence of the 3-Step Process as an open, relational language model — one that honours both practitioner neutrality and the self-organising intelligence of the human nervous system.

It is offered freely for those who feel called to study, practise, and evolve the work in their own context.

🌿 Overview: The Three Steps

Step 1 — Open Listening

The first step is presence without preference.
The practitioner enters a state of open sensory awareness — perceiving tone, breath, rhythm, and movement without analysis or interpretation.
This stage is non-therapeutic and non-directive.
Through gentle scaling questions (for example, “On a scale of 0–10…”), the practitioner invites the person to describe their current state.

The aim is to listen to the field, not the story — to offer a quality of attention that itself is regulating.

This step restores a baseline of safety and trust in perception.
When awareness is seen and heard precisely, the system begins to reorganise itself.

Step 2 — Re-Encoding

The second step facilitates a natural shift in the structure of experience, not its content.
Drawing from NLP and general semantics, the practitioner helps the person move from association (being inside the memory) to dissociation (observing it).
This structural shift changes how the event is encoded in the nervous system.

Colour, distance, and sensory texture often transform spontaneously — sometimes becoming less vivid or emotionally charged.
The practitioner maintains a posture of curiosity and calm, offering no interpretation or correction.

The transformation arises not from meaning, but from perceptual reorganisation.

Step 3 — Future Orientation

In the third step, the practitioner invites the person to imagine moving forward — into the natural unfolding of life, where this new perception remains stable and accessible.
This is not “positive thinking” or “goal-setting,” but an orientation toward flexibility and choice.

The nervous system rehearses new responses while the practitioner listens for congruence.
The future is not programmed; it is allowed to appear as possibility.

The work ends where autonomy begins.

🧩 Philosophical and Scientific Foundations

The BA3Step Process draws upon:

General Semantics (Korzybski) — The map is not the territory; language creates filters of perception.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (Bandler & Grinder) — modelling of structure over story; dissociation and re-encoding patterns.
Cybernetics (Bateson, von Foerster) — systems regulate themselves through feedback.
Embodied Neuroscience — awareness of mirror neurons, vagal tone, and interoceptive coherence.
Phenomenology and Symbolic Language — the practitioner learns to sense meaning before meaning-making.

Within this synthesis, trauma is not treated as a fixed event or identity but as a looping structure of representation — one that can be gently recalibrated through attention and linguistic precision.

🪞 The Practitioner’s Posture

The practitioner’s stance is both technical and devotional — grounded, neutral, and attuned to the field.

Key principles:

Attend, don’t interpret.
Invite, don’t fix.
Notice structure, not story.
Return always to sensory calibration — tone, breath, colour, rhythm.

The practitioner serves as a mirror of coherence.
Their neutrality allows the client’s neurology to complete its own unfinished loops of regulation.

💠 Practice Context and Application

The 3-Step Process is not therapy.
It is a linguistic and sensory education — a structured conversation that helps the client reorganise internal representation and restore choice.
It can be taught within midwifery, doula work, birth preparation, or other helping professions where practitioners wish to hold space without absorbing distress.

The Process complements — but does not replace — medical or psychotherapeutic care.
It is ideally delivered in a single session, with respect for the client’s capacity and timing.

🔮 Legacy and Continuity

This open-source edition ensures the principles of the 3-Step Process remain discoverable for future generations.
Mark Mann-Harris no longer actively delivers this training; it is preserved here so that those who recognise its value may continue the lineage freely.

If this work finds you, it is already yours to explore.

You are invited to fork, adapt, and share this content under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence —
credit “Mark Mann-Harris, Midwife and Educator,” and preserve the spirit of openness, care, and linguistic precision that defines the work.

🔗 Resources and Further Reading

The Power of Open Listening (practitioner handbook excerpts)
The Rewind Transcript (demonstration dialogue)
Appendix: The Physiology of Safety and Resonance
Worksheet Reflections (training theory and language notes)
SoundCloud – Birthing Awareness (voice-based materials forthcoming)

🕊️ Closing Reflection

“The 3-Step Process teaches us that attention itself is an act of creation.
When we listen openly, structure reorganises, and new life begins to speak.”
— Mark Mann-Harris