Week 6 - Kenrick Chiang

I thought that the reading of "Spiritual Healing Practices among Rural Postpartum Thai Woman" was a very insightful reading because of the fact how the reading dives into greater detail of how first time mothers are experiencing with the notion of postpartum family practices. I honestly had little to on idea what these practices were and I thought that the reading did a pretty solid job explaining these practices and how they are significant to these Thai women. I thought it was really interesting seeing how the author describes these ideas based off of elements that the human body is composed on. By being able to see how childbirth throws off the balance of all of these elements of water, fire, earth, and air, it shows the audience how big of a process this really is. I thought that through this basic description, it really tied in with the themes of Week 5 in the sense of how we can see the comparison with Thai medicine and practices versus Western medicine and practices. This reading also shed into light on Week 6's theme which is Giving Life and Life Giving. We see this notion of childbirth which highlights the idea of a beginning of a new life. This in turn is seen as a life that was newly given to a person. We see this idea of Life Giving because it is mentioned in the reading how the mother's spirit is essentially "torn" because of how this imbalance of elements is throwing everything off. Because of this, there is a higher need of spiritual healing which is something that Western medicine cannot really provide.