Biography
Born in North Hollywood, California, to a Jewish mother and Native American father, Jeannine Parvati Baker migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area and Sebastopol areas in the late 1960s. She attended Sonoma State University. She was an early contributor to the fields of natural health and healing, studying yoga asana and meditation. Parvati Baker chose to give birth to all of her children without the use of drugs, which she discusses in her early writings.
Parvati Baker's first book, Prenatal Yoga & Natural Childbirth, was the first text in the Western world on the subject, written during her studies with ashtanga yogi Baba Hari Dass from whom she received the name Parvati. In the Hindu myth, Parvati invented her baby from the simple gifts of nature – flowers, herbs, the soil, her saliva, sweat, and some other things. In the following years, other authors such as yogini Geeta Iyengar and Janet Balaskas expanded the Prenatal Yoga realm with texts which further asserted benefits of yoga for healthy pregnancy and childbirth preparation, eventually resulting in one of the most popularized trends for modern women.
Parvati Baker followed this work with Hygieia: A Woman's Herbal as her master's thesis in psychology at San Francisco State University, and later Conscious Conception: Elemental Journey through the Labyrinth of Sexuality.
Parvati Baker practiced as a spiritual midwife in Sonoma County, California for over ten years, before moving to rural southern Utah where she continued her practice and taught Prenatal Yoga while raising a family. She founded Hygieia College, a mentorship program, through which she matriculated over 500 students both locally and internationally.
A keynote speaker at many professional herbalism and midwifery conferences, and a newborn rights activist working to eradicate infant/child circumcision (both male and female), Parvati Baker was awarded a Lifetime Achievement recognition by the International Symposium on Genital Integrity.
A self-described "wordsmith", she coined the popular word freebirth to describe unassisted chilbirth in a positive mode, and the lesser known, phenomenological Birthkeeper to describe the spiritual midwife in a traditional shamanic or yogini role.
Parvati Baker died December 1, 2005, aged 56, after a two-year battle with Hepatitis C in Utah.
Read more about this topic: Jeannine Parvati Baker
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)