Pregnancy can be an emotional and challenging time for many women. My main fear when pregnant with my first child was of the pain of labour. I got to thinking how millions of women have birthed before, are doing it now and will birth in the future. How do they feel about the process? How do they cope with the pain of labour?

 

I spoke to many pregnant women and new mothers to try and understand how other women thought about, felt about, and approached the process of birthing. What I found was that the pain was not the primary concern for some women. Some of women’s fears and concerns included:

 

• how they would recover physically after giving birth

• how they were going to look after a newborn baby, especially if it was their first-born

• fear of not carrying their baby to term

• not wanting to get a caesarean section

• what would happen to their body

• how would they cope mentally and emotionally after the birth as a new mother

 

Some women chose not to think about the birth. Some educated themselves and did courses to prepare for birth. There were differences in the thoughts and fears women had about birthing and motherhood as well as strong similarities. We each come with our own specific combination of past experiences, expectations, traumas, visuals in our mind, feelings, beliefs, perceptions, education, environmental and cultural influences; all of this brings us to where we are right now.

 

What I found in my own experience was that I first and foremost had to take responsibility to help myself. This was going to be my birthing experience and no one else could do this for me. I was going to feel all of it. Once I realised this, I could seek the support network that I believed in to help me process my fears and strengthen my belief in myself and nature’s process. I learnt to trust in the life force. My body was going to do this and my responsibility was to be prepared mentally and emotionally.

 

I engaged a number of therapeutic techniques and support people as I worked through my process. I couldn’t say that any one thing helped me in particular, it really was a process. Some of the modalities that I worked with to address fears and stress included Neuro Emotional Technique (NET), hypnotherapy and psych-k. During my experiential healing process I felt the changes physically as I processed the pain in my mind-body. I felt that the pain of the contractions was directly addressed and I felt this in my womb (and so did my baby). I also did the Hypno-Birthing course. For me, all of this preparation worked. I felt much stronger and confident in my second home-birthing experience.

 

The experience of being pregnant and birthing twice has been life changing for me. Pregnancy and birthing is a vulnerable and spiritual time in a woman’s life, it can tear you open, confront you with your deepest emotions, overwhelm you and empower you. There may be feelings of helplessness and not knowing what to do, fear, the deepest love you have ever felt, and the moment when you meet your baby, new life itself. Now I feel my calling is to support women during this time in their lives.

 

I want you to feel supported, listened to, understood, connected and empowered. I don’t want you to feel lost. It is ok to feel your true emotions, to listen to your body, to allow your truth to be there and find out how strong you really are. You can do this. What resonates for you? What feels right to you? Trust that deep inner knowing, that is your next step. Some of us need and want individualised care and support in processing what our unique fears or experience. This can be difficult to do effectively in a group setting, and is often not addressed in standard care. This is when working one on one with a practitioner especially focused on how you feel in preparation for birth and beyond can help to uncover and shift your personal fears, concerns and even to strengthen your confidence in yourself.

 

The way I support you during this magical and challenging time is to hold the space to hear your concerns, experience and what you want. We then begin a safe muscle testing process with curiosity and trust in your mind-body wisdom to find what is going on for your body on a subconscious level, and then guide you to heal those unresolved parts of you that are being triggered.