How to Use the Lessons of Hypnobirthing to Change Everything
When they say that having a baby changes everything, I now realise they didn’t mean it in a positive way.
After reading The Happiness Trap many moons ago, I had a breakthrough and realised (shock) my thoughts were not the truth. What I hadn’t realised until I was pregnant, was that my overarching beliefs are not the truth either.
I had always walked around with the line that I wanted to have kids, but that I was petrified of labour. I bet you’ve heard this said before too.
I was 100% sure that I was going to be scared going into labour and that it was something I was always going to dread throughout my pregnancy.
Enter hypnobirthing.
It sounds more woo woo than it is, so I tell people it’s basically meditation for pregnant women, and it helps you change your thoughts about childbirth.
I’ve meditated for many years, so it was not a stretch for me to learn the concepts of hypnobirthing. What was a shock for me, was realising how inundated I’d been with negative messages about childbirth.
Suzy Ashworth, my hypnobirthing teacher, talks a lot about how we are conditioned to believe childbirth is painful and scary. Think of the scenes you see in movies about childbirth. I like the film Knocked Up but that was the scene I kept coming back to when I thought about childbirth in film.
Women screaming and acting crazy. No other option.
The language we use around childbirth also has a subliminal effect on our beliefs. The word “contraction” sounds negative and makes me think of shrinking or tensing. Medical intervention is discussed often, which instilled in me that I was never going to be able to have a baby alone, without serious medical help. No wonder I was scared.
Hypnobirthing changed everything. The word “contraction” becomes “wave” or “surge” and my all time favourite affirmation from the course was, “My surges cannot be stronger than me, because they are me.” Read that again! I know I’ll use this in any painful situation I may have in the future.
No longer being afraid of childbirth meant that when I needed intervention both before and during labour, my doctor couldn’t believe how calm and measured I was. I had literally retrained my brain. And I had stripped away the social conditioning that had led me to believe childbirth was scary in the first place.
Since I had my daughter, I’ve used these lessons in other areas of my life and I know I’m going to continue using them.
The social conditioning I’d had around the early days of parenting had to be undone too. I had learned that your partner had to be home at a certain time every night and that you should thrust the baby at them and run. I learned that your partner always gives the baby the bath as it’s about the only thing they can do. So I missed out on bath times I actually wanted to be there for. I learned that I was going to be exhausted and frustrated and depleted. I unpacked these beliefs and wondered who’d told me that’s the way it had to be.
Did I have to resent my child and feel they were a burden I had to get rid of as soon as I could every day?
Look around at the moment. In the strange times we’re in with the pandemic, some channels are trying to condition us again with panic and fear.
In what other areas of your life have you been conditioned? I don’t know if it’s anyone’s fault, or if there’s any malice behind it, but we just absorb messaging around us, and I’m loving learning how to stop that absorption. You can do it too.
I’m willing to believe I can choose my own beliefs, and that they don’t have to be negative.
If you’d like to jump on a free call and talk through how you can undo some of your negative beliefs, you can send me a message here.