by Sophie Fletcher at Mindful Mamma UK

I wrote this birth meditation 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 birth 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 birth meditation 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 birth 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 birth mediation 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.

by Sophie Fletcher

Our bodies get on with the task of quietly and painlessly growing an intricate human being.

I never really thought much about how I’d get the baby out; to be frank I’m a genuinely in the moment person, I tackle things as they happen and I don’t get scared of much, expect for missing my train and being late. It often bemuses me that women get so frightened about the birth, and that the main worry is ‘how is that going to get out of there’.  This seems especially perplexing when women aren’t often frightened by thoughts of, ‘how is that baby going to grow in me?’, ‘how is that tiny small fist sized womb going to grow and expand so my baby is going to fit in it?’. The body expanding and growing to accommodate baby is something we are largely accepting of and don’t spend too much time focusing on.

While pregnant women generally just carry on with their lives, complaining of tweaks and pressure here and there,  the more unfortunate ones may have more physical challenges such as SPD, or bad reflux as the baby grows and the stomach is pushed upwards.   However, women don’t fear these, they accept them, find ways of managing and just carry on with the pregnancy.

So why do we trust and accept that our bodies are going to expand and stretch enormousl?That our womb will grow from the size of small fist to the size of a large basketball and that all our internal organs will reorganise themselves, but we don’t accept that our body is designed to actually birth our baby?  WE GROW A BABY, with tiny hands, ears, eyes, arms, legs and a heart.  How incredibly amazing is that?  And you know what, we generally don’t think about it at all, our body just does it and we just accept it.  We don’t question that our heart gets larger, that our organs are pushed upwards and that our lung capacity gets smaller. Do we think, “oh no, I won’t be able to breath properly, I need help to expand my chest and get more oxygen in me”, no we don’t. This video shows how your internal organs are designed to reorganise themselves during pregnancy.

Grantly Dick-Reid, the man whose ideas underpin many other modern approaches to undisturbed physiological birth, understood that fear can slow labour down. He spent a good amount of time in his antenatal classes reassuring women and teaching them how their bodies were designed to birth by telling them exactly what happens as they go into labour.  His book Childbirth Without Fear is still a great book to read if you want to know more about what your body is designed to do.

Nowadays some antenatal teachers will demonstrate how our vaginas expand by pushing a doll through the neck of polo neck jumper, explaining how the muscles of your vagina relax and stretch. Others might use the example of an erection to help women understand that soft tissue in their body is designed to expand and that it’s soft tissue for a reason. When a man has an erection his penis always stretches very easily and very comfortably!  Then it always goes back to its normal size.

One midwife I know made me laugh when she said to me once, “I wish I could say in a class that your vagina is like a bucket, because it is during labour”. Many mums I know describe that second stage when baby is being born as the easiest as that’s the moment they realise that they’ve nearly done it and it’s ok.

Here are some facts about the birth that may help you understand how incredible your body is during labour as well as during pregnancy.

Relaxin:

 The hormone relaxin relaxes the body’s muscles, joints, and ligaments. Not surprisingly, the effect centers on the joints of the pelvis, allowing them to stretch during birth. It also softens and lengthens the cervix and helps relax and smooth muscles in the uterus and elsewhere throughout the body.  The vagina is like an accordion; it can stretch and return to its normal shape with the help of relaxin.

Baby’s head shape and a stretchy vagina

The baby’s head must be small and flexible to fit through the birth canal. The bones of a baby’s skull are soft and are able to mold into different positions. This is why babies that have been resting low in the pelvis waiting for delivery sometimes have pointy heads. The pieces of the skull are like a jigsaw, and can move easily to allow baby to move through the birth canal and then grow and expand over the first years of life to accommodate baby’s quickly growing brain.

To allow it to do what it’s meant to do, mum should be as relaxed as possible, this is something else we teach on our classes. Like any other tissues or muscles in our body, tension can make the job harder than it’s meant to be.

This great article explains the history of how our heads changed in utero to accommodate evolutionary changes in humans.

This one also explains the changes in your baby’s head from birth to ex-utero .

If you are worried about sex and the shape of your vagina this great little article talks about how incredible that soft tissue is.

A flexible coccyx

Your coccyx is designed to move out of the way as your baby’s head descends. This is why not lying on your back is important; if you have freedom of movement, it allows the coccyx freedom to move. The sacrococcygeal joint, the joint between the sacrum and the coccyx or tailbone, also softens in pregnancy; it is designed to swivel backwards to widen the outlet of the pelvis as the baby emerges.

If you can get your hands on an artificial pelvis you can see how a woman’s coccyx moves but a man’s doesn’t.

Increased discharge/amniotic fluid

As you near labour your body might be producing more discharge and it may be thicker, this is due to hormonal changes as you near labour, but also helps baby to slip out. Equally amniotic fluid can help moisten the vagina and assist baby’s descent.  Babies can sometimes be born very quickly once the head has been birthed and the midwife catches a slippery baby!

Oxytocin

Oxytocin is our best friend during labour and an incredible hormone. When we go into labour oxytocin levels go up, which increases beta-endorphins (feel good hormones) which help you body naturally manage any strong sensations in your body by producing your body’s own natural relief.

At Mindful Mamma we love oxytocin and on our classes we focus on how to make sure that you give birth in an an environment favourable to oxytocin.

Read more about oxytocin here http://bringbirthhome.com/birth-experience/role-of-oxytocin-during-childbirth/

 Baby helps itself out

Just as you know instinctively how to birth and to get into the correct positions during labour to help your baby out,  your baby knows how to help itself out. Often this is a good reason not to take drugs that can cross the placenta and make baby drowsy. An alert, unmedicated baby will help itself out by  wriggling, and moving about to help its way into the world. This little video shows how this is, and I love the little kicks the baby gives as if it were diving into the world.

 If you’re a practitioner or a mum who knows of a particularly interesting description of how birth works that may have be a lightbulb moment for you or for the people you teach, please share your descriptions. 

Social Media is interfering your baby bonding moment.

by Sophie Fletcher

Roll up roll up, we’ve just had a baby, yep, just a couple of minutes ago. Let’s get our baby onto our social networks, Facebook/tweet/pinterest our birth, hell why not go the whole hog and broadcast the birth, live?  The moments after birth are so important but that important baby bonding time is now usurped by Facebook and twitter.

We live in age of instant communication, we become immersed in it, hooked on it and we begin to forget what experience really is. I’ve started reading a great book called “You are not a Gadget” by Jaron Lanier, he writes “Giving yourself time and space to think and feel is crucial to your existence.  You have to find a way to be yourself before you can share yourself”.

Important words, especially to a new mum or dad whose baby’s tiny visual digital imprint may have begun after their first scan and extends into those precious moments after the birth. Surely being at the birth is one of the most important times to really experience that rare moment when you become a mum or a dad, to get to look at and absorb the wonder of this tiny little being you have waited so patiently for. Baby bonding is about this magical moment, when the oxytocin is sky high and your baby is in your arms for the first time. By tweeting, facebooking or blogging about it instantaneously you lose the experience of being in that moment and of your baby bonding with you.

I was inspired to write this blog after talking to a midwife who coordinates breastfeeding training and she asked me how we can make women understand just how important that first hour is after birth for baby bonding.  She said women are taking photos on their phones tweeting, facebooking and are not present with the baby or engaged in the experience. Her worry is that this will affect the baby bonding and will have an impact on breastfeeding.  I had often considered the consequences to the birth or postnatal period of exposure, through films, photos or other media on the birth itself, as well as after the birth, and here was a midwife who was seeing it happening in labour rooms everywhere.  Since I spoke to her  midwives say this is one of the most irritating things after the birth, and have gone as far to admit they just want to confiscate the phones, when they see a new baby left on the bed while mum is texting.

We underestimate what experience really means, to be mindful of that moment in time, to absorb the feelings, the environment and to be really aware.  If we are clicking away behind a camera lens mindlessly in those precious moments we are losing that experience.  Of course we can be mindful photographers, but we are not mindfully present in the experience of observing, holding, smelling and bonding with the new baby.

The second thing that strikes me about the endemic use of recording equipment and online narratives of a birth is the affect it can have on the birth itself.  Birth is all about oxytocin, and what we always teach in our Mindful Mamma classes is that it’s a shy hormone, it doesn’t want to be watched and observed. Filming a birth may be perfectly fine for some people, but we underestimate the unconscious processes unfolding during a birth and knowing you are being filmed may consciously feel fine, but may actually slow things down if at some level you are aware of it and feel uncomfortable.

When I originally taught hypnobirthing I was asked if the people on my classes would be interested in filming their births, it seemed completely incongruent to me that we were asking women to be filmed while at the same teaching about the role of oxytocin and reducing interruptions or people in the room. I have never asked and never will even suggest this to my clients.  If someone wants to film their birth, it should come from them, not because of the expectations of others or because everyone else is doing it but for reasons that are embedded in their own values and beliefs.   It’s worth stopping and thinking about why you want to film, record, facebook or tweet your birth. Why do you need to do it in that moment?

But importantly after baby is born, put away the camera or ask the midwife/doula/other birth partner to take a photo, mum don’t go near a phone at least in the first hour.  Enjoy that baby bonding experience, have your baby on your chest, smell your baby’s skin, explore your baby’s face, experience that love you feel without interruption, you’ll only get a limited opportunities to do this in your life. And it’s pretty amazing.