Holistic Birth Planning - An overview
The encouragement to plan for the birth is huge.
You will get prompts at midwife appointments and NCT classes. Birth planning will come up at any pregnancy classes you take. Birth planning will even come up with friends and family as you progress through your pregnancy.
This is a wonderful thing, empowering yourself with knowledge about what to expect from the process gives you the best possible chance at having a wonderful experience. You are so very important. This is going to be one of the biggest experiences (if not the very biggest) of your life. You deserve to give it lots of thought, planning and energy.
What I find very frustrating is that many women, including close friends and clients have gone into birth with the expectation that it can be controlled, planned, organised.
It can’t.
Every birth is different.
You are only part of the equation. This is a powerful first lesson of motherhood. Fighting for total control is, sadly, a waste of energy. Plans are great but you will have to go with the flow. The position of your baby, the time at which you go into labour, the health professionals you come into contact with, any special circumstances that need consideration, all will have an impact on your experience and cannot be planned for.
It will be painful.
Hypnobirthing is an amazing tool. Something I used for both births, very successfully with my second birth. However I often speak to women who feel that if they correctly use the techniques they won’t experience pain, just pressure.
This drives me crazy, as when speaking with these same women after birth, the tools and techniques they had developed and practised went out the window very early into the birth experience as the shock of the pain meant they felt they were ‘doing it wrong’.
The pain you feel will be different based on a number of factors. Some of these you will have control over.
Factors that you can influence are;
Your environment
The position you give birth in
Your breathing
Your mindset
Your stress levels
We will cover these factors in detail (in later posts). This is where you should be spending your time and energy researching, decision making and talking with your birth partner.
There are lots of amazing books out there to read while planning for your birth. My top three are;
Over the years, preparing for my own births and researching the holistic birthing course I developed in partnership with my dear friend and sometimes collaborator Sian Quipp, I have read (and continue to read) a lot of books on birth.
So far, this is the most useful book I’ve read. If you are only going to read one, read this one.
Good explanation of how the techniques work, very sensible, practical and easy to understand and implement.
Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
This was a helpful read to normalise birth.
This book also has lots of information about birth as a sexual act. That it is something that will flow when you are relaxed, or even aroused and in a very private and intimate setting was helpful.
Ina May also shares how the vagina is designed to expand and contract. Ina May compared this to the penis that will grow and shrink in size. This idea of that expansion that will take place as part of birth being totally normal, natural and would not forever damage it, was a change in mindset for me that I found really transformative.
Your Baby, Your Birth: Hypnobirthing Skills for Every Birth by Hollie de Cruz
This book is a practical and useful guide to hypnobirthing. A great place to start. There are prompts for conversations to have with your birth partner. Affirmations and a good overview of the tools and techniques you might wish to use.
I interviewed Lisa from Mindful Births for the upcoming podcast. If you are looking for a course she runs an evening course that you might find helpful.
