Mindful Birth
Did you know that you can change a painful birth to a mindful birth, just by managing your thoughts?
It’s true. Let’s take a look at your brain for a second.
Your lower and higher brain
You have two parts to your brain, a lower brain and a higher brain. The lower brain is similar to a monkey brain, irrational and juvenile and throws a fit when it doesn’t get it’s way. It’s job is to watch out for danger and keep you safe, physically and emotionally. Your higher brain is similar to an adult brain, it sees the big picture and can calmly handle situations.
The part of your brain that requires some managing is your lower brain or your monkey brain. Because it’s job is to keep you safe, it will warn you of ANYTHING it perceives as dangerous, physically or emotionally. But sometimes it tells you there is danger when there isn’t any, that’s what you’ve got to watch out for.
Your lower brain and your higher brain both have a lot of thoughts. One part of your brain is not good or bad in comparison to the other, you need both, the goal is to have them work together. The trick is, knowing what thoughts serve you and what thoughts don’t.
We choose our thoughts
The other thing to know is that we choose our thoughts. Every thought. One hundred percent. Now...some thoughts come from driving on autopilot. Some thoughts we deliberately choose to think. Other thoughts come from when we feel things, physically and/or emotionally. But it’s our thoughts about what we feel or what happened that creates our experience and feelings going forward.
And if it’s true that we choose our thoughts, we can change them any time. Every thought is optional and every thought is available. Beliefs are just recurring thoughts about ourselves, others, and how the world works.
So let’s talk about your brain in labor and how to use it to create a mindful birth.
Your brain in labor
Physical sensations are road signs in birth, they give you clues about where mom is and where the baby is. Some sensations are productive and let you know that mom and baby are A-okay and birth is progressing, and some sensations tell you that mom and/or baby are not okay and something needs to change. Both kinds of sensations are productive to respond to.
When you experience sensations in labor, you have thoughts about it. The uterus contracts and you may think, “Ouch, that hurts! Stop the pain.” But if every thought is optional and available, there are many thoughts you could think about the sensation of your uterus contracting. The first thing to recognize is, the sensation is neutral. It’s your thought about the sensation that changes how you experience it. You can choose thoughts to create a painful birth and you can choose thoughts to create a mindful birth, both are available.
A mindful thought about your uterus contracting could be, “that’s what it feels like when my uterus contracts”, or “I’m okay, my uterus is working to get my baby out.”
Preparing your brain for natural childbirth
An important part of preparing for natural birth is conditioning your brain for mindful thoughts because thoughts like, “I can’t do this. This is scary. It’s really painful” won’t get you very far down that road.
However, the moment to manage your brain about your birth is not in active labor. You probably wouldn’t show up to run a marathon without previously training and preparing, so why would you for birth which is equally, if not more, physically and emotionally intense. Conditioning your body and mind well in advance of labor is key for successfully navigating the course of natural childbirth.
It’s never too early (or late) to start examining your thoughts about your birth. NOW is the time to sort through your thoughts, dump any thoughts that aren’t serving you, keep the ones that are and maybe create some new ones for a mindful birth experience, then practice, practice, practice them.
Sometimes creating new thoughts takes baby steps. To go from, “I am scared to give birth, I can’t wait for it to be over, I don’t want to feel any pain” thoughts to, “birth is beautiful and natural, I am excited to give birth, I accept my body and all the sensations I experience in labor” could be a stretch. So...take baby steps, try on a few different thoughts to see what resonates with you. Every thought is optional and every thought is available.
If you’re thought is, “I am really scared to give birth”, a baby step thought could be, “I don’t have to be scared to give birth’, or “it’s okay to give birth”.
Just like building your muscles or training for a race, it takes practice. A little bit each day and you will find that you can shift your thoughts from painful to mindful and change the outcome of your birth experience.