It is only by coincidence that our childbirth classes are on Tuesday nights, the same day I do my things I am enjoying post. We started last week, they run for a month with one full Saturday class in the mix as well. My midwife teaches the class to her clients and a few other homebirth couples that see other midwifes. In total we have eight couples in our class. Six of us are first-time parents to be.
So people ask what technique are we doing in class… Bradley, Lamaze, Hypnobirth? Um nope. As it is we are asked to suspend the common association of some of our anatomy names and practices that have been named after modern male doctors. It is a lot more “crunchy” I suppose than that. While my scientific left-brain tries to wrap around the physiology of my shifting pelvis including my vestigal “tail” arching back in birth we are asked to focus on more right brain concepts.
For me as a yoga instructor this is where my understanding of Pranayama and applying breathing practice to tap into that primordial place where women have birthed for lifetimes comes in to play. While my husband and I read our homework I practice breathing techniques. At this point I think the panting, short-shallow breaths restricted to the chest during the end of second stage labor is the most foreign. I understand it to avoid tearing by leaving the abdominals alone but I don’t have the practice breath down yet.
It is a cool class. In our first week we looked at birth history with some great art history slides. We did breath work. We ate some yummy snacks where it seems like home birth families are on the same page with the wholesome foods. And yes, we even took time to put on some new age music to do some art therapy to express what our concepts of birth are including fear.
I am enjoying these classes, the homework, and getting ready to help baby debut to the world with my husband.
Are you doing "Birthing From Within" type classes? Your class sounds like the ones we took. We did art projects and spent a lot of time dealing with the emotional aspects of birth. It was all very crunchy which led my husband to give me some major side-eyes in class LOL. I really enjoyed them though!
I also like that we learned a lot of techniques and didn't focus on one particular method. I ended up studying HypnoBabies afterwords for pain relief but the mental/emotional and practical stuff I learned in that class was invaluable.
I don't know how much birthing from within, I suppose with it being very intuitive. Last night was actually all physiology with the hilarious addendum that my midwife is pretty "militant" about birthing processes being named after modern male doctors. So we are are looking at soft tissue and bones so everyone understood processes to assist us with visualization but she winced when someone would say braxton-hicks or fallopian. It was pretty funny.
We also do a lot of breath work which like I said for me is easy with my pranayama background from yoga.
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