by Sophie Fletcher

I wrote this a few years ago after I attended a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, a well known Buddhist monk. He’s written a very beautiful pebble meditation which I do sometimes with my children, but which I’ve adapted for pregnancy. I just thought that it fitted perfectly.  We give it out as an additional meditation or a slightly different way to do your affirmations in our class, it’s not for everyone but give it a chance as it can be a very peaceful thing to do.

You can either do this on its own,  just read it out loud somewhere quiet to yourself on a daily basis, or actually do a pebble mediation with it. To do this go for a quiet walk and collect 4 pebbles on your way. Each time you do the meditation, for each element take a pebble in your hand, a round one can be reflective or pregnancy, and turn it over in your hand observing the pebble closely, it’s weight, how it feels in your hand, what you can see on it then read the affirmation with that pebble before moving onto the next pebble and next affirmation.

You can continue to do this with you baby, then toddler after they are born. It’s a very simple but lovely exercise as it does connect you unconsciously with the true depths and heights of your being during pregnancy.

Mindful Mamma Birth Meditation

I am like a flower.

“I am beautiful like a flower, aware of this tiny baby blossoming like a flower within me. I am unique, my baby is unique. I promise to nourish and love myself, thereby nourishing and loving my baby growing within. By watering the flower within me, we both grow strong and healthy. At birth I unfold like a flower unfurling in the warmth of the sun.”

Strong like a mountain

“I am strong like a mountain. I touch the earth and sky, at one with nature and with my baby. In my strength and my solidity I support my baby. With this strength I empower myself and prepare for my incredible birth”

Moon birth reflection lake

“I am like a lake. Crystal clear, calm and tranquil. Still – as if you could take the perfect picture. In my tranquility and peace, peace and tranquility in others are reflected. My baby benefits from this calm and their development and birth is also reflected in my tranquility. When I smile, others see this peace deeply within me and I reflect on my love for my baby developing within his or her calm and peaceful waters”

Space around and within me.

“I am like space. I have movement all around and feel my baby moving freely within. My mind is free and still. My focus is clear in this space and I have freedom and a deep sense of peace and of who I am and how I communicate with my baby growing within me. Space gives me clarity and comfort both while I am pregnant and during my baby’s birth”

Adapted from the pebble meditation by Thich Nhat Hanh

Copyright Sophie Fletcher 2009.

This month we’ve had a chat with Claire Mockridge, Health Columnist for the Nottingham Evening Post and Ante/Postnatal Fitness Expert who has worked with over 900 pregnant and postnatal women (and their babies!) in Nottingham. 

Keeping fit and active during pregnancy is really important and Claire tells you how and why. 

 Why should pregnant women be encouraged to exercise?

Exercising during pregnancy has many benefits, to both mum-to-be and her unborn baby.  Here’s a short list of how exercise can help you as an expectant mum:

-combat excessive weight gain

-maintain your fitness level

-keep your heart and lungs strong to withstand labour

-increase your chances of speedy postnatal recovery

-re-align your posture

-tone your abdominals

-strengthen your pelvic floor

-decrease back pain

-improve your circulation

-get relief from indigestion, heartburn and constipation

-relieve tension in tight muscles

-give your unborn baby the best start in life

-and, helps you sleep better after a long, stressful day…

 How much exercise should pregnant women do?

It’s vital that pregnant women perform some form of regular cardiovascular exercise which gets you a bit warm and sweaty, lasting between 20-30 minutes, 3-5 days a week.  Claire suggests expectant mums find an aqua natal class, swim regularly (avoiding breaststroke), take a walk at lunchtime, or join a gym.

 Can pregnant women attend a normal exercise class/the gym whilst pregnant?

For the first 12 weeks, Claire Mockridge suggests that pregnant woman continue with their current gym/exercise regime (morning sickness and fatigue pending).  From 13 weeks onwards though, modifications need to be made to your program.  Claire would suggest that pregnant mums find an Instructor who’s Antenatal-trained, or better still find a pregnancy exercise class like Bump to Babe, to help you stay active within a group, and meet other mums-to-be just like you.

 Can exercise cause miscarriage?

There is no evidence to suggest that exercise causes miscarriage.  If, however, your pregnancy is classed as “high-risk”, then some forms of physical activity may not be suitable for you.  Your Doctor or Consultant will be best to answer this question for you, so if in doubt, ask them first.  If however, you were fit and healthy before you got pregnant, and are having no complications during your pregnancy, then exercise should be at the forefront of your mind.

Can exercise help my baby?

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has realised some new evidence that suggests that: “Foetuses of exercising women are in a better position at the start of labour, and also tolerate labour better than those of non-exercisers.”  When you undertake exercise, your breathing and heart goes up and down, and if you do this on a habitual basis, your baby will be used to this scenario too.  Dr James F Clapp, a leading expert on exercise studies during pregnancy, concluded that:  “Babies have a better growth and development pattern in utero than babies whose mothers did not exercise.” And goes on to say that: “Babies are more likely to be healthier, calmer and more intelligent than babies of non-exercising mothers.”  He also states that: “The newborns of women who exercise don’t have trouble with the transition to life outside the uterus, and tend to be alert and easy to care for.”, so there you go.  Exercise doesn’t just help you, it helps your baby too.

Is it harder to lose weight if I don’t exercise throughout pregnancy?

If you stay active during pregnancy and take an interest in returning to fitness after birth, you’ll certainly notice that their postnatal recovery is much, much easier.  The first thing Claire observes when a pregnant mum returns to her postnatally, is a rise in that client’s fitness level in comparison to someone who did no exercise during pregnancy.  Claire works with newly postnatal clients (and their babies too!) in her corebaby pilates and mummies buggies and fitness classes who admit to doing no structured exercise during their pregnancy.  Put simply, if you do no exercise during pregnancy, chances are you’ll feel less fit throughout it, you’ll suffer with more aches and pains, your chances of suffering with stress incontinence can be higher, your abdominals will be less toned, and it makes your postnatal recovery ie your body’s ability to lose weight after birth, much, much harder.

 Does regular exercise during pregnancy help me with labour?

Regular exercise during pregnancy can help really help: a) prepare your body for labour, and b) reduce your need for painkillers during birth itself.  It’s not called “labour” for a reason is it?  So, it’s vital that you stay as active as you can by keeping your strength up for what could be one of the potentially physical events of your life.  Popping your feet up for a good solid 9 months is not going to do yourself any favours.  Labour is physically demanding, no question about it, and the more efficient your heart and lungs are, and the stronger your arms and legs are, the better chance you have of dealing with childbirth itself.

When can women stop/start exercising during pregnancy?

Most pregnant women enrol on Claire’s antenatal fitness classes and pregnancy pilates courses from somewhere between 12-20 weeks, and the vast majority of these women continue exercising right up to 40 weeks (and beyond!).  When you chose to start and stop exercising will depend on you as an individual, as every pregnancy is different.

To buy a copy of Claire’s Pregnancy Fitness DVD “Don’t let your bump get in the way”, or to enrol on one of Claire’s pregnancy or postnatal classes from week commencing 15 April 2013, connect with her here:

Website:  www.clairemockridge.com

Blog: www.clairemockridge.com/blog

Twitter: @ClaireMockridge

Facebook:  Claire Mockridge Fitness

This is a picture of my back garden this morning.

What do you see, a shamefully messy back garden or an intergalactic battleground?

I woke up looked outside, and thought “what must the neighbours think?”.  Every garden around us is tended beautifully and ours looks like a junk yard. This morning I went to tidy up, said to the children “right, it’s time  for a spring clear out and a skip”.  ”Nooooo’, they chorused, “it’s important to us”.

So I asked them about it, I sat down and spoke to them, I got into my child mind. Look closely, the waterbutt is a dalek, loving painted, without adult help. The little tike turtle, is no longer a sandpit true, but is now a vital dalek grounding device. The red bench is a floating walkway connecting two worlds. The piece of old guttering  attached to the climbing frame is a water transformerfall and the debris scattered around the remains of an intergalactic battle.

The old trampoline, tired now and without a net, is actually a thinking place where my 9 year old says he come up with his most creative ideas.  The old plastic little tikes house has been carefully positioned behind the bird stand, making the perfect hide for a 7 year old.

I have always encouraged my children to play independently with toys the way they wanted to, not the way it says on the box. I want them to think outside it, every day in every way.   It doesn’t make for the tidiest house or the best cared for toys but it makes them creative. I want them to explore and be happy, to wake up their imagination in a way that awakens them to the possibilities around them for the rest of their life.

Be mindful of the fact that your children are, well children.  The world around them is an adventure playground, one that they construct, one that is constantly evolving and which if we look closely and find the time in our lives and the space in our minds they are happy to invite us into.

Touch, says more than words.

We’ve just had a really interesting discussion about limbic imprinting on our practitioners forum.  There has been quite a lot of research, more than you would think that examines long term impact of experiences in the womb and just after birth. This form of work is called pre and perinatal psychology.

Amongst many other things the research explores such things as how stress in the womb impacts on brain development, the impact of painful procedures at birth on pain thresholds, even how the type of drugs given during labour correlate with drug abuse later on. If you want to learn more have a look at Janus’s The Enduring effect of Prenatal Experience or Kelly and Verny’s ‘The Secret Life of the Unborn Child’.

While I think that this sort of research is very important, and we should be aware of it, it shouldn’t cause fear, worry or guilt.  Sometimes mothers do not learn about their different options until they have had a baby and look back wishing that they could change it; sometimes babies do have life saving interventions, and we should focus not on how damaging that can be psychologically, but how we as loving, mindful mothers can tune into our babies and reduce the impact of any such interventions.  Which we definitely can.

Sometimes we can’t change the path but we change how we respond to it

Some of you may assume that I had a tranquil waterbirth at home, but in fact my first son was born before I knew anything apart from how to say “yes, I consent” and he was born by caesarean, on Christmas day, as a footling breech into a theatre with bright lights and midwifes wearing tinsel. I worried for months that the reason my wound was taking so long to heal was because some tinsel had dropped into me.

The second time I did it differently. I’d been using  hypnosis mp3s from about week 15 and I was very very relaxed during pregnancy, not blinking an eye when my waters broke at 32 weeks.   No amount of leg crossing stopped my second son being born as a VBAC, a great birth in itself, but he was welcomed by a hoard of paediatricians, who waved him in front of me like a trophy, dumped him on my chest for a token minute or two, then whisked him off to NICU.

But it was ok, I was prepared, I had been using hypnosis from very early on and I was not stressed or panicky; my head was clear and I knew what I had to do, I tuned into my instincts. But at night he was on his own in an incubator, while I was somewhere else upstairs. I now believe we are connected at a much deeper level and experiences since then that have happened, ones that I cannot explain away, give rise to that view; my mother actually refers to the invisible umbilical cord as a lifelong communication system.

The danger of misrepresenting research

In the debates around limbic imprinting, there are some people who I deeply respect but can be zealots around how a poor experience in utero or at birth can affect people for the rest of their lives.  This morning I read this

“If our first impressions of being in the body are anything less than loving (for example, painful, frightening or lonely), then those impressions will imprint as our valid experience of love. It will be immediately coded into our nervous system as a comfort zone, acting as a surrogate for love and nurturing, regardless of how undesirable the experience actually was”

It disturbed me because the intent is that if this happens we can’t change it, that our children are less somehow because of their experience at birth.  What statements like this neglect to address is the remarkable plasticity of our brains, which is at its most potent between 0-3 years of age.

So how can we see it differently and more positively?

One of our practitioners, Guin a clinical psychologist who has done additional training around this area, described these changes to me in this way “One suggestion I found helpful was the idea that with difficult early experiences it’s not so much an instant effect that is permanently wired into the brain, but a bit like a rivulet running down a mountain, it will tend to follow the same path – ie. the more the baby experiences responsive parenting, the more this will strengthen the neural pathways that are connected up in response to that. “

Natalie, a midwife who teaches our class,  “ One of the things I like about  ”The Inner World of the Unborn Child’ is that it gives suggestions of how to change the unborn baby’s experience. For example, stress during pregnancy. He is very practical that even with the best will in the world women will experience stress during pregnancy but states if the mother communicates love and acceptance to her child she will protect the baby from the effects of stress. This really helped me during my own pregnancy. I was mindful of how I was feeling and empowered by having the knowledge to do something about it. I had a complex visualisation of transferring love from me and my husband to Noah. I believe, that is how we should be using the research.”

How psychological preparation can help

Psychological preparation that helps you understand how you can help your baby in the womb and after they are born, by learning how to relax, connect with them and to be loving and compassionate can really help reduce any other effects that you are concerned about. We are human after all, we do our best, but sometimes things happen that we don’t expect or can’t prepare for.  Learning the value of mindfulness and being in each moment enables you to be open to the experience and to be able to respond compassionately.

A birth with intervention, can make it harder than a straightforward normal birth, but as a mother you become a vessel for that child physically and emotionally, good preparation helps free up the emotional space for you to do that – however, the birth is.

Kangaroo Care, the beat of a mothers heart calms, and her breasts change their temperature to act as natural incubator

My 7 year old who was separated at birth, enjoyed kangaroo care, supported by wonderful midwives, I made sure that something with my smell on was in the incubator, and that I pumped my boobs like there was no tomorrow in my own private pumping room until my milk flowed so that I could breastfeed him.

Then I strapped a tube to my breast, while he was tube fed, right by my nipple in those first couple of days and dropped my breastmilk through it before his sucking reflex kicked in. We were home with breastfeeding established within 6 days.

I have no doubt it was because I was a calm ship for him amidst it all, and that this calm ship, his steady anchor in all of that unfamiliarity, was the thing that carried him home and nurtured him from then onwards.

He is now an incredibly sociable, secure and loving child. People warm to him immediately, he exudes joy and happiness. I have absolutely no worries about him as a mother.

When I read about limbic imprinting, I became aware that there is much we can do as human beings, that we are not passive journeyers but active participants who are evolving and changing all the time.  We are imprinting, throughout our lives. Phobias, for example, can happen at anytime, and are a form of imprinting, but can be reduced or even completely eliminated in a couple of hours with hypnosis. For me this says everything about how our brain is receptive to changes.  It can get slower as we get older; working with hypnosis on people before the age of 30 sees much quicker results, but even up to our 90’s, as demonstrated in research in book, Sharon Begley’s The Plastic Mind we can change our automatic responses, effectively rewiring our brain.

What can you do now?

The best things to do for your baby during your pregnancy are to spend time relaxing and connecting with your baby, let go of panic, worry or distress.  If you have a stressful job, don’t beat yourself up, but find ways of reducing that stress – employers should have a responsibility to ensure a stress free or stress reduced environment for you and your baby.  If, after baby is born, you are still concerned, be that responsive mindful parent, responding to your babies cues and needs. Perhaps consider a class like, BabyCalm or even visit someone trained in early parenting, perhaps have a birth review (this can help you see things more objectively and help you move on) or even rebirthing.

Most of all be aware that a baby with a compassionate and loving parent cannot fail to thrive however their birth was, my son is evidence of that.