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Hypno Birthing

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Is your glass half empty or half full?

How your perception of birth shapes your birth experience.

Since time began most of us have believed that birthing a baby involves many hours of painfully agonizing work, to be faced with fear. It is something to just ‘get through’ and rarely an event that women look forward to. When a woman absorbs the idea that the act of giving birth is excruciatingly painful - getting this information repeatedly from her mother, friends, relatives, doctors and coupled with how movies and TV depict birth - all of these horror stories and images have lead to the belief that birth must be painful. For a long time we believed the earth was flat - but was it the truth ? The people of those times believed it was.

Birth is a normal physiological process. Mental attitudes and emotions interfere with the ability to give birth naturally and comfortably far more than is generally understood. Hypnosis can help deal with these negative attitudes and emotions by decreasing the mum-to-be's fears, anxieties, tensions and panic before, during and after the birthing experience. But to understand HOW, you need to know the logic behind hypnosis, your subconscious mind and your imagination.

What is Hypnosis?

Have you ever caught yourself daydreaming? When you're daydreaming it's like you're not in the here and now - you're somewhere else, you are very calm and still, you're actually caught up in the moment but you are perfectly aware of what's going on around you. We go into hypnotic states several times during our day and not even know it’s hypnosis.

This is exactly what it's like when you are hypnotised. You experience an overall feeling of calmness throughout your entire body. At all times you are totally aware of what's going on around you. You are in complete control and you can communicate clearly and effectively with the hypnotherapist and - when the time comes for you to have your baby - with the medical team supporting you. As a technique for complete body and mind relaxation, which is really very important in childbirth, hypnosis remains unsurpassed.

What's so important about your Subconscious Mind?

The subconscious is the part of the mind that is utilized in hypnosis and your subconscious mind looks after every organ, muscle and cell in your body 24 hours a day and it never sleeps. Your subconscious mind regulates all involuntary bodily functions including your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, hormone production (prostaglandins, endorphins, oxytocin and adrenaline) and elimination system.

Your subconscious mind is also the seat of your emotions, your feelings and your sensations. It's also where your permanent memory is stored, so everything that you have ever been told about childbirth over the years and the images and emotions you have formed because of these influences are stored within your subconscious mind. So if you’ve heard nothing but horror stories that’s what your subconscious believes.

The brain and nervous system respond only to mental images. It doesn't matter if the image is imagined or real. Like a computer your subconscious mind holds good programs and ‘bad’ ones (horror stories of birth) Hypnosis is like a virus scan for your computer – detecting the ‘bad’ programs and upgrading your ‘software’ (imagery)

A woman becomes very fearful and anxious about the thought of what lies ahead of her. This fear activates the nervous system to produce adrenaline. The effects of adrenaline should not be underestimated.

Adrenaline is like the brakes of birth:

The muscles of the uterus tighten - they become tense and knotted which makes uterine surges less effective thus increasing the discomfort.
There's a marked increase of blood flow away from the uterus to the arms and legs because stress and tension prepare the body for fight or flight.
All of this prevents an adequate supply of oxygen to the big contracting muscle, the uterus, so the 3 layers of muscle fiber that make up the uterus start working against each other - whenever there are two big groups of muscles working against each other they soon begin to hurt and in a short time the pain becomes very severe.

Sound familiar? If you replace the word uterus with heart in the above scenario you’d be experiencing a heart attack! Our heart beats every day from early in conception until we die and it never hurts…until the blood supply to the heart is reduced. Similarly when oxygen rich blood is redirected AWAY from our uterus (by the action of adrenaline) – birth HURTS.

We continually experience childbirth like the above scenario, in our culture - in part because we very much expect it to be like that. If the mind expects something to happen then it will be realised. So if you expect pain, anxiousness and fear in childbirth then you will have pain, anxiety and fear.

If you expect comfort and relaxation and you build up a positive mental expectancy of childbirth then you can change the negative programs in your computer (sub conscious mind) and through hypnosis upgrade your subconscious thoughts to new positive feelings and imagery about birth.

So how does hypnosis for childbirth work?

When you are in a deep state of relaxation your body responds in a very different way to the above described scenario.

Instead of anxiety and fear, you are confident and calm. You start trusting in your body.
Your blood pressure remains at a steady healthy rate.
You breathe steadily, deeply and rhythmically, so you send oxygenated blood throughout your entire body channelling an adequate supply of oxygen to the big contracting muscle that's working the hardest - the uterus.
Your body becomes very limp and relaxed so you're conserving energy for when you need it most.
All your muscles relax and let go and there is no resistance or tension, they work together so your surges are more effective at birthing your baby more comfortable and easily.
As labour continues unhindered by artificial drugs, you secrete in abundance the hormones that make labour and birth easier and less painful. Natural prostaglandins act on the cervix to soften and thin it in readiness for labour. Oxytocin stimulates the surges of the uterus and makes it work more efficiently. Endorphins are a blessing because they actually block the perception of pain, they are your natural anaesthesia.

So your imagination is like the dress rehearsal of the mind and the big secret to accomplishing a comfortable, relaxed, childbirth is to imagine or picture this happening. By using self-hypnosis techniques throughout your pregnancy, you can change the blueprint of childbirth you have built up over time by forming images for the subconscious mind of how you want childbirth to be.

Just like when you learnt to drive a car you consciously had to think about which pedal to push…..checking your mirrors, shifting gears….but now you’ve done it so often that your subconscious takes over and you don’t have to think about it (that doesn’t mean driving and putting on your makeup in the car is a good idea…)

So when the time comes to give birth for real, your body and mind are so familiar with the images of calm, relaxed childbirth, your physical body reacts to these images automatically by completely relaxing all your muscles and producing your natural anaesthesia (endorphins). So throughout the birth process you remain relaxed, calm and in control because this is what you have retrained your body and mind to do.

Our thanks to Ginny of Four Trimesters for providing us with this article. If you want to contact Ginny to get information on her next workshop in Jakarta, visit her website at www.fourtrimesters.com

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