Nurturing Birth

Doula Courses | Education | Doula

…here to nurture, inform and empower doulas and families

07305 044482 | info@nurturingbirth.co.uk

Blog

What is Mindful Hypnobirthing?

By Sophie Fletcher 

Photo of Sophie Fletcher. Sophie is a white woman with blond, shoulder length hair and blue eyes. She's smiling in the photo, looking at the camera.

You may have come across hypnobirthing before, but what is the real difference between hypnobirthing and Mindful Hypnobirthing? Quite a lot really!

As a hypnotherapist, my first introduction to hypnobirthing was pure hypnosis with some relaxation, breathing and knowledge about your body, which is brilliant for re-framing. A reframe is when you take a situation and change someone’s perspective on it, so they look at it in a different and more positive way.

Early on there were wonderful birth stories, of people whose experience of birth was so much better than their expectation. Those with acute anxiety or tokophobia going on to have euphoric experiences.

Yet, I had a nagging voice in my head that whilst hypnosis was great, it wasn’t enough on its own.

I saw women who had doubts whether the hypnosis would work, or how to use it in labour.  It seemed that many didn’t stop to think that they could labour WITHOUT the hypnosis! The hypnosis often became a crutch for dealing with fear or apprehension. This meant that rather than going into birth with a deep-seated belief that they had all the resources they needed within them, they were worried that the hypnosis wouldn’t work. This reliance on something external took away from the experience that they could do it without the tools, but also busied the mind when it should be quietening down ready for birth.

The truth is:
That we are all perfectly designed to give birth – without hypnosis, and this is where the blend of hypnosis and mindfulness really comes in.

If you had no fear leading into your birth, and the environment and support were loving, quiet, safe and private, you would be able to birth. We’ve just been conditioned to believe that we can’t and forgotten that we can.

In a true birthing state you would be:

  • unaware of time passing
  • awash with oxytocin
  • surrounded with love
  • a conduit for energy, power
  • in a state of presence 

This is where your deep power lies, and where transformation can happen. 

Mindful Hypnobirthing takes this natural ability of our body into account with a therapist’s understanding of hypnosis and its application for birth. It creates a fluidity between the use of practical hypnosis tools and the experience of mindfully being in a natural birthing state.

How is this taught?
In mindful hypnobirthing you are taught some mindfulness tools for birth, as is the birth partner (it’s brilliant for the birth partner!) with the underlying philosophy that when you have prepared using hypnosis you will feel:

  • Calm
  • Confident
  • Knowledgeable
  • Well supported
  • In control

When you feel this way, you automatically go into a state of mindful presence. In my book this is what I call the birthing zone. 

In the course I cover evidence-based approaches to increase your confidence and to let go of any limiting beliefs around your ability to birth.  You will learn about unconscious association in your environment, the impact of fear and anxiety on choices and experience, your soothing system, theories around pain, as well as lots of hypnosis tools to use when you need them.

It’s not just a birth changing course, it’s a life changing course.

What is the difference between mindfulness and hypnosis for birth?  
In a nutshell! 
Hypnosis is all about change.  It’s about creating a different experience, changing a feeling, adjusting a habit or a behaviour.  When it comes to birth, hypnosis preparation takes you from anxious to calm, fearful to confident, and from thinking you have no control to knowing you are in control.  You’ll learn to use tools and techniques that help shift old beliefs and create new deep-seated beliefs that you can birth your baby, and it can be a positive, even euphoric, experience. 

I teach some set techniques, but invite you to understand the theory, why the tools work.  This way you can create your own tweaks and adjustments to the material so that they work far more effectively and are adaptable if things take a different path. This way you can make the change you want in a way that feels right for you.

In Mindful Hypnobirthing you use a lot of short, simple and easy to learn conditioning tools, so that your soothing system is activated unconsciously without thoughts getting in the way.

Mindfulness is about acceptance.  Rather than having the intention of change, mindfulness is about noticing and being curious about why you feel a certain way, whether that’s physical or emotional. Using your breath as an anchor you can learn to meet that feeling instead of turning away from it. This can take courage and strength, but it’s also very powerful.  It can create change but in a very different way. In my experience as a doula, when I see women in this place it’s astonishing.  They are embodied in the experience, not thinking about anything else apart from the moment they are in. Not even thinking about the hypnosis.

Mindfulness is all about connecting with your body fearlessly.

The overall message is
“You have everything you need within you, but if you need a boost then the hypnosis is there to help you get back into your zone”.

What if I find it hard to get into this space?
Modern birth environments make it really difficult to create this space.  When you take a course, you will learn how to work with your unconscious thoughts and associations to create a sense of being in a space where you feel private, safe and unobserved. 

You’ll learn some beautiful conditioning tools to make that as easy as possible, so things happen without you even thinking about it! Preparation using conditioning works well with hypnosis, as it means little and often works brilliantly and easy to fit in, even if you have a busy lifestyle. 

If, for any reason, there are distractions or interruptions that take you out of your birthing zone, you’ll learn how to notice them for what they are and adjust your environment using practical tools as well as hypnosis audio tracks. These powerful tools help to get you back into that focused state of mindfulness.

What are you waiting for?
You can get started today by reading my book Mindful Hypnobirthing. Joining my Facebook Group – where you can ask questions.  I’ll be there in the group all you have to do it tag me. Click here to join (please answer the questions as I like to keep it as safe a space as possible).

Sophie Fletcher is a clinical hypnotherapist and Fellow of the National Council for Hypnotherapy. She has been teaching and training families, birthworkers and midwives in the NHS for over 15 years. She is the bestselling author of Mindful Hypnobirthing, Mindful Mamma and Mindful Menopause.

You can find Sophie on Instagram @mindfulhypnobirthingbook

Nurturing Birth Book Review: Understanding Babies: : How engaging with your baby’s movement development helps build a loving relationship

Book Review by Ruth Patel

Understanding Babies: How engaging with your baby’s movement development helps build a loving relationship by Ania Witkowska is available from Pinter and Martin for £9.99

I am a mum to three very different kids, who had three very different birth experiences and grew up with their own varying temperaments and needs. Therefore I was interested to come to this book and to see through what lens the author gazed upon the early days. The book was published in 2021, sadly after the death of its author, Ania. The term ‘mother’ is used throughout this book to refer to the birthing parent.

What is woven within the pages of this book is a tender narrative of baby’s attachment, development, observations, play, links to you and their surroundings, what you can do as a parent to nurture and encourage their sense of self and how you as a parent can feel confident and equipped to navigate the early days.

Ania Witkowska is a movement specialist whose work has looked at what a baby needs in order to thrive, as well as how parents you can tune into their baby’s needs and development so they can ‘feel more joy and less anxiety.’

The book covers five key areas including emotional regulation, love, movement, play and day to day. Throughout each chapter, she details how you and your baby may feel and your needs in this particular area.

Each chapter has an accompanying mp3 guided session which can be downloaded at www.pinterandmartin.com/understanding-babies.  These are somatic awareness exercises and movements to help you notice what is going on in your body and thoughts. Going through these guided sessions made me feel supported, created a restorative space in my busy day and gave me permission to feel and notice what was going in on in my body.

I feel she touches on almost every part of the first few months and how you might feel postpartum as a mother. Beginning with “before she can fully engage with the world, your baby has to feel safe and happy simply being in it”, touching on their movements as they pass through their developmental milestones, and ending in when things are a little more difficult. The author gives the reader permission to feel all the feelings that a new mother can experience.

I particularly enjoyed the part on how your baby notices their surroundings and the permission it gives to parents to let their babe be mindful of simple experiences such as looking around, the attention on a certain object, the tight squeezing of a finger. Ania asserts that all these things develop their brain, development and attachment to the caregiver. My own babies used to fixate on certain objects in a room, picture frames, wall lights, the wind outside, and I would always think “I wonder what they’re thinking?”

This book began by looking at baby’s emotional regulation and ends with emotional regulation of the mother. I love that. In order to regulate our babies, we need to regulate ourselves. Understanding oneself and our emotions and how to regulate our emotions, is a huge life skill that is invaluable.

 The emotional resource checklist that Ania includes asks such important questions about emotional regulation. A far cry from the form the midwife gives you asking questions such as “have you felt overwhelmed…depressed… unable to cope” and then leaves you in that place saying oh your score is ok, I’ll leave you to it. How about asking some of these questions, “what usually helps you feel better when you feel stressed or overwhelmed?” “Do you know what specific help to ask for when you’re feeling X” (rather than just a general ‘I need help’). One reads Ania’s book and feels supported and gently encouraged; validated as a mother with all the feelings that come with the role.

Throughout Ania’s book her aim is to guide you and give you confidence through the early days of parenting, helping you trust your instincts and connect with them.   If you would like to be gently reassured about parenting, then this book is for you. My only criticism is that the chapters are rather long, but well worth making some time to go through! Remember, as Ania says:

“The journey is as much about us as it is about our babies”

Ruth Patel is a doula based in Shropshire and was trained by Nurturing Birth. She has a special interest in maternal wellbeing and alongside her doula work, runs a post natal support group locally. She can be found @yourbirthmaid and www.yourbirthmaid.co.uk

How To Create A More LGBTQ+ Inclusive Doula Business

By Sarah Taylor

The world of LGBTQ+ inclusion and equality can feel like a minefield full of acronyms, labels and changing legislation and rights for LGBTQ+ people. It can often be difficult to keep up, let alone learn about it all!

One thing I do want to say right from the get-go is that when it comes to allyship and running an inclusive business it’s ok to not always know what to do or how to do it. And I can promise, that we, LGBTQ+ people, would much rather you try, and make mistakes sometimes, than take no action at all. The reality is that we all have a lifetime of societal conditioning to unlearn and dismantle which will mean that sometimes we mess up.

[Read more…] about How To Create A More LGBTQ+ Inclusive Doula Business

Nurturing Birth Book Review: When Breastfeeding Sucks

Book review by Leia Basko

Front cover image of When Breastfeeding Sucks by Zainab Yate. The cover is bright pink. It has the image of a crying eye next to the image of a breast dripping milk.

When Breastfeeding Sucks, by Zainab Yate, is available from Pinter and Martin as a printed book for £12.99, or on Kindle for £7.99: https://www.pinterandmartin.com/when-breastfeeding-sucks

I chose this book because I’ve become a very passionate advocate for breastfeeding and breastfeeding support and wanted to better understand some issues women face. This was a really interesting book about breastfeeding aversion centred around a woman’s experience; an issue that has not been widely discussed or studied.  Whilst reading this book I recognised some patterns of moderate aversion in my own breastfeeding journey which has helped me to understand and process what I have found challenging.

The beginning of the book describes aversion as a multilayered issue that affects women in many different ways.  She writes about the different symptoms and the spectrum of aversion, as well as how hormones, specifically oxytocin and others related to a woman’s menses, and sleep deprivation can contribute to aversion.  She introduces the word ‘skinship’ which is a mix of the words ‘skin’ and ‘friendship’ and describes the “interaction through skin contact that builds love or closeness”. (pg. 18) This word appears quite frequently in the book and is quite useful in explaining the dynamic relationship that is breastfeeding.  It also was used to describe the ways in which it can contribute to aversion and feelings of being ‘touched-out’ or trapped in motherhood.

The chapters are organised in a way that makes it easy to understand aversion from various different angles. What resonates is the third part of the book where she dives into greater detail around biology and society. She elaborates on a common theme in modern day mothering which is that expectations rarely meet our realities and as a consequence we suffer from a wide range of mental health problems. Throughout the 20th century there was a lot of conditioning away from the biological norm of mothering and breastfeeding, which has set the tone for subsequent generations of unrealistic expectations and normal infant behaviours. A confusion that commercial marketing has capitalised on.  She touches upon the loss of community, the prevailing attitude of individualism and self-sovereignty in today’s western society that doesn’t value the role of being a mother.  This contributes to the pressure we feel to be ‘someone’, that being a mother isn’t enough, and in turn leaves us feeling disillusioned and ill prepared for the restrictions of breastfeeding. 

Another concept she introduces, that I’d never come across before, is the polyvagal theory of the social nervous system which suggests that our behaviour and health are impacted by our social circumstances (pg.127).  Basically, we are affected by other peoples’ perception of the situation; we look to other people to help assess the situation and if they are similar to what we are feeling we feel a sense of relief.  This can be beneficial, for instance when one is in a breastfeeding support group and we can receive reassurance from other women.  But it can also have adverse effects when our babies start mirroring the emotions of our aversion. They become more needy and clingy, therefore leading to a positive feedback loop that exacerbates aversion. 

In the fourth and final part of the book, Yate writes about the psychology behind aversion and how a lot of time post natal depression and anxiety are often misdiagnosed and confused with breastfeeding aversion.  She notes the importance of fully understanding your symptoms before devising a treatment plan. What I liked most in this part of the book was her chapter on ways to alleviate aversion which focuses on preventative care.  She provides a chart on ‘Navigating Aversion’ which first helps you to understand where your aversion is coming from. It then goes on to discuss elements to alleviate your feeling of aversion, exploring concepts such as expectations, diet and hydration, mindfulness and sleep hygiene. She even mentions the importance of a healthy microbiome with more research indicating the large role it plays in our behaviours.

Yate states that “Aversion itself isn’t necessarily the problem: it can be an indicator of other problems, though what these are will vary” (pg. 174).  I think this was an interesting concept after discussing the symptoms of aversion, that aversion could actually be the symptom. Taking a look at your mind, body and lifestyle in a holistic way can help you not only alleviate breastfeeding aversion but help with your overall health and wellbeing.  Of course, she recognises that this isn’t always possible or that simple and some people have traumas they have to work through which can make finding solutions to aversion more difficult. 

One small part of the book that I found could potentially cause confusion was where she parallels breastfeeding toddlers with addictive behaviours.  Whilst I understand her argument of breastfeeding being more than just milk, and babies can have a dependency of sorts, I think that it could be an unhelpful and slightly confusing parallel without going deeper into the psychology of addiction.  I think there is a large majority of people, and cultures,  that don’t understand the complexities of addictive behaviours and this misunderstanding could potentially contribute to the idea that toddlers can become addicted to breastfeeding. This could lead to the discontinuation of breastfeeding past a certain age when we know that natural weaning happens anywhere between the ages of 2 to 7 years.

Overall, I found this book to be very insightful with a lot of really good information and tips that I can apply to my own life and to those that I will help in the future.  I think this book went beyond breastfeeding aversion and asked us to be honest with ourselves and attempt to strip away the decades of conditioning that tells us who we should be and how we should mother.  Furthermore, with the ever increasing studies looking at human lactation, we will hopefully one day have a better understanding of the issues faced not only by women but by everyone who chooses to embark on this journey. I would definitely recommend this book to a client that was experiencing aversion and I think it could also be useful in helping women prepare for breastfeeding and ultimately avoiding aversion.

Leia Basko is a Nurturing Birth doula and trainee breastfeeding counsellor

Birth Rights and Birth Choices

By Sophie Brigstocke

Photo of Sophie Brigstocke. Sophie is a white woman with long, light brown hair and she's wearing a blue top.

This week the press reported a legal case involving a young woman who has agoraphobia.  In advance of her birth her NHS care providers went to court to get legal consent to transfer her to hospital (against her wishes and with “proportionate” force) prior to labour.  Whilst we can only rely on the media story being presented in this case it follows rather worryingly close to another similar situation just a couple of months ago involving another person with agoraphobia making a choice to birth their baby at home against the recommendations of medics.  Birthrights, one of two brilliant charities supporting people around their legal rights in birth, wrote this blog about the case.  

As a doula I feel incredibly saddened by these two stories.  It feels like we are in a culture of fear and coercion when a birthing person’s feelings and instincts are not respected.  When I think of someone being forcibly removed from their safe space into an unfamiliar environment I am chilled – it calls to mind historical images of people manacled and restrained during birth.  I am wondering who is in the birthing person’s corner?  These stories also raise questions about the future of birth in the UK, especially homebirth.

[Read more…] about Birth Rights and Birth Choices

To all Midwives everywhere, Thank you!

By Sue Bryant

Musings on Midwifery life: On International Midwives’ Day, Susan Bryant shares her story of being a midwife who has now trained to be a doula.
Since qualifying as a post graduate midwife in 1988 I thrived on the variety of work that was the midwife’s role. Rotating around the various specialities of Delivery Suite, Antenatal ward, postnatal and community setting meant that we kept up to date with the service as a whole.

I enjoyed the pace in delivery suite, with the excitement of not knowing what the shift may bring. We had some frantic day and night shifts but also some long, quiet nights when we could talk and get to know our colleagues- often becoming slightly crazy at the 5am witching hour! Tea and toast together at 6 was a time to pause, collect ourselves and regroup, although this particular part of a night shift soon became forgotten the busier we became.

[Read more…] about To all Midwives everywhere, Thank you!