Your Birth Experience
10 Steps to an Empowering Birth Experience
1. Believe in your truth that you were born with the knowledge about how to give birth. Birth is instinctive and doesn’t need to be taught. Have more trust and faith in your body’s ability to give birth.
2. Become familiar with the primary human values of truth, right action, peace, love, and nonviolence, and begin putting them into practice. This provides an emotional preparation for birth that increases confidence and decreases fear.
3. Seek a Childbirth Preparation class that encourages expression of feelings, provides information about the physiology of birth (physical and behavioral aspects of hormones), explores functions of the neo-cortex, explores human values, and gives opportunities for grieving and healing.
4. Understanding the five principles of Pelvic Bodywork and exploring birth positions that help to open the birth passageway, you will discover that babies come “out the back,” posteriorly. This is the reason to keep moving and stay off your back while in labor.”
5. View your uterus as a magnificent muscle that can contract strongly enough to birth your baby. Realize the power within cells and atoms of your body and feel empowered in labor.
6. Have patience – your body knows how to give birth. Avoid inductions and other medical interventions unless there is a good medical reason. Your body will go into labor when it is ready.
7. Give birth where you feel safe. Surround yourself with only positive energy. Bring a loved one, friend, or Doula to be with you who will provide continuous support.
8. Quiet your mind in labor so you can go deeply into your primal, instinctive brain, that already knows how to give birth.
9. Insist on time alone with your baby at the moment of birth so primal behaviors can be expressed. The Primal Period (time from conception to the end of the first year of life) influences the health of your baby as an adult, so wise decisions about birth are essential during this time.
10. Realize the importance of the Primal Period (conception to the end of the first year of life). Suckling and breastfeeding fulfill an innate fetal agenda, and help to develop a healthy limbic (emotional) brain that strengthens mother-baby bonding and attachment, promoting healthier social interactions into adulthood.
Copyright BirthWorks International 2014