The 3 most important factors for your relaxed birth

Pia Mortimer is a Woman & Birth Coach in Hamburg. What I find so great about her work is that she encourages and empowers women. So I am very happy to publish this guest post from her about shame, fears & birth on my blog. I hope you enjoy reading it!

We hold the positive pregnancy test in our hands and feel pure happiness. The miracle of life, your child starts to grow inside you and probably at the same moment a thousand questions pop up.

What will my child look like? What character traits will it have? How will I feel as a mother?

We have hundreds of pictures in our head, we see pregnant women and mothers with their children everywhere and all the time our thoughts go to our own child, what is growing under our heart at this moment.

At the same time, fears may arise in you... Other women may tell you about their horror births without being asked and you begin to wonder how your own birth will go?

Will you be able to handle the contractions? Will you feel what you need? How does a birth like this actually go exactly? What if I am too loud during the birth? What if I leak stool during labor? What if my husband can't see me after the birth like he could before?

Our shame plays a huge role in preparing for birth.

I will tell you the 3 most important factors for your relaxed, low pain and empowered birth and explain the impact shame and our fears have on birth.

I'm sharing from my years of experience as a Woman & Birth Coach, Birth Companion, and Mom of two, and have accompanied countless women through their pregnancies, prepared for their relaxed births, and through it. I now share with you the 3 most important factors that a wonderful birth needs and give you practical exercises and support.

1) Be aware of your fears!

Fears are exactly the opposite of what we need during birth. They prevent us from relaxing and instead of letting go, we hold on. If we are afraid of being too loud, losing chair or not pleasing the man after birth, these thoughts and feelings have a direct impact on our body,- on our muscles, which hold on in that moment instead of letting go.

Our fears flood our bodies with hormones and neurotransmitters that have a direct effect on our bodies and therefore on our birth process. For example, when we are afraid during birth, adrenaline is produced, which we need primarily to escape. According to this, our arms, legs and lungs, for example, are supplied with an extremely large amount of oxygen and our uterus less, which can of course have a negative effect on the baby's oxygen supply and the course of the birth in those moments.

We may gently approach our fears, learn to become aware of them and dissolve them in a sustainable way so that we can give birth freely & relaxed. It is always important to discover the origin of your fear. Perhaps it will help you to ask yourself the following questions on your inner journey of research: 1. 2. how does this fear feel? What does it change in the way I feel in my body? 3. when did I have this fear before in my life? 4. when did I have this fear for the very first time?

These inner research journeys can stir you up emotionally as you release them in the source. Be gentle with yourself and alert to your thoughts, feelings, dreams and memories, and feel free to find someone to support you.

2. learn to relax.

If you want to have a painless birth, you may use your pregnancy to practice deep relaxation. Birth pain occurs primarily when we are tense rather than relaxed, when we hold on instead of letting go, and when our muscles are so hardened that our baby cannot easily find its way. Again, it is important to understand that relaxation sets in especially when we have looked at and transformed our fears and shame so that the negative thoughts and feelings do not affect the birth.

During pregnancy, research what relaxes you and what relaxation feels like to you in the first place. For one thing, you can ask yourself when you feel comfortable, relaxed, and safe and try a lot of things for yourself. Instead of silent meditation, might a hot bath, dance, a certain scent, a certain touch for a loved one, or exercise help you?

Practice feeling and verbalizing your needs and boundaries.

This point is a big challenge for many women because we often heard as little girls that we should not be so loud, sit still, conform, please everyone... If we want to experience our birth self-empowered & self-determined, we need an inner access to our feelings and especially to our feminine power and wisdom.

Women intuitively knew thousands of years ago how to give birth to their children in love and all that without ultrasound, CTG and cesarean section. We would all not be in this world today, if we women did not have this primal feminine intuitive power and wisdom, with the help of which we know exactly what we need and what we do not need. What we need for this access to our feminine intuition & wisdom is introspection, time and feeling.

With our head, which evaluates our feelings and thoughts and makes 1001 thoughts, we don't get far at this point. Connect with your core, with your power through deep meditations and ask yourself again and again how you feel and what you need. You will notice that the more often you do this exercise, the stronger the answers from within you will be in the form of images, sentences and thoughts!

I sincerely hope that you enjoyed my exercises and suggestions and that they will accompany you in your next weeks and months on your way to your free, self-determined and relaxed pregnancy.

You can find more about me and my work here: My Holistic Online Childbirth Preparation Course, My Website, Instagram and Facebook.

Image Source:

The cover image comes from unsplash.com.