10 Days To Birth With Confidence

Did you know that during pregnancy, you create an organ as well as a baby? Your placenta begins to form right after the fertilized egg implants into the wall of your uterus (about 6-7 days after conception) and continues to grow with your baby to supply its growing needs.  This amazing organ acts as your baby’s lungs to supply oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. It also acts as your baby’s kidneys to filter waste products out of the bloodstream.  In this lesson, you will be guided to tune into your placenta as the point of connection between you and your baby, expanding your awareness of the exchange of oxygen, nutrients, and loving attention and using guided imagery to locate it in your belly.  We end this lesson with a peaceful mantra meditation based on the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. Breathing in - I nourish the Tree of Life Breathing out - my baby is nourished

Another one of nature's safety nets is the amniotic fluid - the liquid that acts as a cushion around your baby, protecting them from any bumps to your belly. It creates a watery environment allowing your baby to move and flip around freely. This movement helps your baby’s muscles and bones develop. In fact, it’s vital for the healthy development of skills that your baby needs to survive outside of your womb. In this lesson, you will be guided to visualize your baby's watery world and understand the vital role that the amniotic fluid plays during pregnancy We end this lesson with a peaceful visualization. You will be guided to find the color that represents calm, comfort, and confidence and how to use this powerful anchor during pregnancy, labor, and birth. I encourage you to listen to this meditation frequently during pregnancy, noticing how much easier it gets to achieve a deep level of relaxation each time you listen. Write your favorite birth affirmations on small pieces of colored cards and paste them in your birthing space or make them your screen saver. These relaxations are the essence of hypnobirthing.

By now, you have a clear image of your baby floating freely within the amniotic sac supported by the placenta which draws oxygen and nutrients from your bloodstream. In this lesson, you will focus on the miraculous exchange of oxygen and nutrients with every beat of your heart, every inhalation, and every exhalation. You will envision the lifeline that connects you and your baby and direct your attention to this precious portal.  The golden thread breath promotes relaxed awareness and acceptance while easing you into a deep state of healing stillness. It's a beautiful practice for early labor, connecting you with women around the globe and feeling your connection to every woman who has birthed before you, every woman birthing with you, and every woman who will birth after you. Each one of you connected by this fine golden thread.

Nature has ensured that your baby is very protected. The muscles of your belly protect your uterus and your baby while your pelvis protects your uterus. In this lesson, you will explore the hard bony structures of your pelvis. Using your hands you will map the curves of your hip bones, the bridge of your pubic bone, and the triangular sacrum and tailbone. Together, these form a beautiful bowl shape supporting your muscular uterus and your baby within it. You will be guided to make gentle movements and rotations as you expand your awareness into the spaciousness of your pelvis while envisioning the journey your baby will take as they move through your pelvis on the day of their birth.  In the guided relaxation, you will explore the connections seen and unseen, known and unknown. Deep connections between thoughts and feelings, between confidence and trust, autonomy and birth, and between birth and your baby. You will become aware of the effortless connection between your face and your pelvis and learn how you can create softness and space, relaxing gently and naturally just as it will when you birth your baby.

You're almost at the end of this course where you have learned to connect with the safety nets that nature has in place to nurture and protect you and your baby during pregnancy labor and birth. Mother Nature's superb design is hard-wired into our female bodies, providing an elaborate cascade of hormones to enhance pleasure and safety in labor, birth, and after your baby is born. From the first weeks of pregnancy, your body has been producing hormones at levels quite unlike any other time in your life. In this lesson, you will learn about oxytocin and endorphins - the hormones that both cause and counteract pain. Understanding how they work will allow you to optimize levels and ensure a powerful and rewarding birth experience.

Your breath is the gateway to our unconscious body. It is the only function of the body that is both part of the Autonomic Nervous System, responsible for unconscious body functions (such as digestion, elimination, heart rate, breathing rate, and sexual function); and the Voluntary Nervous System, responsible for our senses and conscious movement.  That is, if we don’t think about our breathing, our body will do it for us. But we can also consciously control our breathing muscles if we choose. Most importantly, when we control our breath, we can consciously put our bodies in either the sympathetic (fight, flight, or freeze) state, or the parasympathetic (feed and breed/rest and digest) state. We can use the breath to access the unconscious functions of the body, including childbirth. There are plenty of stories of women who have birthed without pushing, there are even cases of women giving birth vaginally while in a coma, and women with spinal cord injuries delivering vaginally – in both situations there is no conscious pushing. Women’s bodies have the power and intelligence to birth without pushing. We all indicate our level of relaxation or stress by the rate and depth of breathing. In the same way that athletes develop ways to breathe that improve their performance, you can learn ways to breathe that fit the very specific requirements of labor and birth. Even though giving birth is a normal life event, it is also an athletic event, a one-off experience, a peak moment, and it requires very good breathing skills. Knowing how to use your breath effectively will radically impact your birth experience. Knowing how to breathe effectively will be invaluable even if you are having an elective cesarean or if things don't go as planned and you have an emergency cesarean. Just as in a vaginal birth, you’ll breathe anyway. You’ll breathe on the way to the hospital, while being prepped, during surgery, and in recovery, so you might as well make both your inhalation and exhalation a consciously focused skill. This changes your attitude from reactive to proactively participating in your baby's efforts to be born.

The Rainbow Relaxation is from Marie Mongan Hypnobirthing. The more you listen to the lesson, the more you will condition your mind and body to relax down easily and quickly and quieten the chatter in your mind. I encourage you to use the rainbow relaxation to enhance your ability to visualize the hormones of birth and how they will help you in labor and birth. There is also a symbolic meaning of the rainbow, and how you can access your inner energy source for complete balance. The colors of the rainbow are the same colors as our chakras. Listening to the relaxation allows you to symbolically access the subtle energy body of the chakras.  The chakras work specifically with our endocrine system of hormonal balance. We know that our hormones connect us to our feeling states and our feelings connect us to our spirit. All levels of our existence, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and ethereal can be balanced in preparation for birth so that this right of passage from maiden to mother can be a calm, beautiful experience to be treasured for all involved.

In the final lesson of this course, you will combine the techniques, imagery, and visualization to go into a state of  conscious relaxation. You will use your own unique form of preverbal communication to connect with your unborn baby and settle into the feeling of trust that your baby knows exactly how and when to be born and that your body knows exactly how and when to give birth. In this deep state of awareness, you will be guided by your subconscious to visualize going into labor and birthing your baby. You will engage all your senses, allowing the images and feelings to unfold and flow like a movie in your mind. Each time your practice this visualization, the details become clearer and you feel your confidence growing. By the time you go into labor, you will have experienced the process so many times in your mind that your body responds with the same calm centeredness, encouraging the flow of oxytocin and endorphins to guide and assist you.