My Empowering Hypnobirthing Story

Ever since the possibility of having a baby was in my consciousness, I experienced pangs of fear when I thought about giving birth. After all, I’m pretty sure that every woman out there has heard horror stories of childbirth, and the dramatic stories always stick out more than the positive ones.

The fear lingered in my brain after I found out I was pregnant last December.

During pregnancy I read a ton, and the more I read about Western medicine when it comes to birthing  – epidurals and c-sections and episiotomies, oh my! – the more I came to the conclusion that I’d like to have as natural a birth as possible, *if* I was tough enough to withstand it and of course, if my health and the baby’s health were not endangered.

At some point during my second trimester, I was thinking about how the mind is so powerful on an unrelated topic. Something clicked, and I realized that if I was going to succeed in having the kind of labor I wanted,  I needed to get my mind right. I had to come from a place of calmness and confidence in being able to birth my baby, not fear of the unknown and insecurity in my body’s ability.

This thought process was how I found hypnobirthing, and this is the story of how I birthed my baby girl almost a month ago.

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It was the very early hours of August 7th, and my husband and I had gone out to dinner to celebrate my birthday the night before. I woke up to a strange sensation of my sheets feeling wet. I got out of bed and said to myself, “What is happening?? Stop peeing yourself!” as I walked into the bathroom to investigate. I gained a bit of consciousness as water gushed out from me into a big puddle on the bathroom floor – which I could not stop to save the life of me – and realized that it was not pee. My water had just broken.

I woke up Adam and we kind of just smiled at each other in disbelief. Could our baby be coming today?

I made a few failed attempts to put clothes back on, but the water just kept on coming. I was at the beginning of my 36th week of pregnancy and wasn’t feeling contractions yet, so there we were, sitting in bed at 3 am, Googling water breaking and any risks associated with giving birth at 36 weeks.

I didn’t want to rush to the hospital, where I would be utilizing midwives to give birth, because I figured it would be an all-day process. Instead, we watched three episodes of Criminal Minds in bed as I almost immediately began to feel contractions. My #1 priority was staying calm during labor and putting yogi thinking to practice during the whole process. Looking back, I may have taken my time a bit too much, but I was anticipating a long labor and didn’t want to get stressed.

The contractions weren’t yet terrible, and they felt like surges of cramps and back pain. But I downloaded an app that tracks contractions and realized that they were already only a few minutes apart, so I called the midwifery center to fill them in. They advised me to come in immediately, so I packed a bag (nope, no bag was yet packed!), my husband dropped our dog off at the pet resort, we threw the car seat I had just gotten delivered a few days before in the car still in the box (no joke!), and headed up to the hospital.

During the 45 minute drive to the hospital, we played hypnobirthing audio in the car. The contractions were feeling a bit more intense, and I started practicing breathing through it and visualizing the outcome that I wanted to have.

When we arrived at the hospital, we were put in a temporary room while they assessed my situation. The midwife and resident doctor wanted to do a test to confirm that my amniotic sac had ruptured. I repeatedly relayed that I was 100% confident it had, but paced the very tiny room during contractions while we waited for the test.

The rooms were enclosed just by curtains, so I could hear what was going on with the other woman in early labor next to us. She was 3 centimeters dilated and was not happy about her level of pain. The midwife was tending to this woman because she had come in right before me, but I just remember walking around the room as my contractions intensified, hoping I was at least 3 centimeters dilated as well because it was starting to really hurt! Most of the pain was in my back, which I wasn’t anticipating. Breathe, breathe, breathe, I just kept telling myself.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if I was like 5 centimeters dilated?” I said to my husband. The midwife overheard us from outside the curtain and kind of laughed and said, “The chances of that are unlikely,” which would have aggravated me had I been not focusing my attention on hypnobirthing and remaining at ease.

The midwife and resident asked me to lay down so they could test for the amniotic sac rupture. I could barely sit still for it and immediately felt a strong desire to stand up and walk around afterwards. Laying down made me want to jump out of my skin, but in standing up, I felt like I could at least channel my energy better and kind of sway back and forth during the contractions.

The medical staff kept mentioning the possibility of “augmenting labor” if I wasn’t having regular contractions due to an increased risk of infection after the water has broken, and at this point my husband was getting annoyed because it was obvious to him that I was already in labor.

At this time, we had been at the hospital for two hours. My contractions had most definitely progressed since we arrived, and while they were *still* waiting for test results to come in, they fortunately decided to admit me after I reiterated for the tenth time that I was very sure my water had broken, now over 6 hours earlier.

What my feet and calves looked like a few days before giving birth… 

To what they looked like a few days after giving birth… 

Pregnancy swelling is wild! 

Once we got up to the delivery room, the midwife finally checked me to see how dilated my cervix was.

“You are amazing! You’re 8 centimeters dilated!”

Ahhhhh! I felt a strong surge of mental relief. I knew I was in pain, but I honestly had no idea how far along in the process I was. I knew that if I was already at 8 centimeters, I could do this. This baby was coming, and she was coming quick.

The look on the midwife, doctor, and nurses’ faces was one of shock once they realized that I was nearing the time to push, and things quickly got CHAOTIC in the delivery room. I think that I had been so calm, they didn’t realize how far along I was. Picture all of this happening at once:

Nurses were having me fill out admittance forms.

They insisted we pick a pediatrician at that very moment, so my husband was scrolling through a list randomly picking a doctor.

They also insisted that I tell them what shots I was okaying and refusing right after the baby was born, and I had to fill out a few refusal forms.

Since I was only 36 weeks along, they wanted to give me steroids to strengthen my baby’s lungs, along with antibiotics in case I had Group B Strep (since this is tested for at 37 weeks). There was a nurse and a midwife trying to get IVs started in my arms for these things, but since I had pregnancy edema, they were having a hard time finding veins. This time may have been the worst moments of the entire labor, because every time they got the IV set up, I would start to have a strong contraction and they would need to pull the IV out. The midwife didn’t know how to administer this particular kind of IV for some reason, and at one point blood was shooting out from my arm onto the floor and I could tell that she was a bit panicked.

Oh yeah, and I was in A LOT of pain! It continued to be mostly felt in my back.

Looking back, this time was what I’d refer to as a SHITSHOW. It was enough to make me, or any woman in labor, have a complete panic attack.

But luckily, I was succeeding in being in my own world.

We had my favorite hypnobirthing videos on YouTube playing on loop. I had my eyes closed, and I was tuning out all of the chaos. The only person I was really paying attention to was my husband, who was wonderful and just kept telling me that I was doing an unbelievable job. I couldn’t pay attention to what was happening, because if I did, my body would have tightened up and I would have stressed out. All that mattered was that I was going to birth my baby that morning.

You are capable. 

You were made to give birth. 

You are strong. 

Your baby will fit. 

Open, open, open. 

Towards the end of my cervix dilating, my baby’s heart rate kept crashing right after my contractions. I could tell that this made the medical staff very nervous, and after standing up and walking around the whole time, they made me lay down in the hospital bed positioned sort of on my right side. They also had me use an oxygen mask. Baby seemed to react better to this, which I was thankful for. I think if I didn’t have a midwife, they would have forced me to do a c-section.

A little while before I began pushing, my mom arrived. I had called her in the early morning hours to fill her in, but since she was asleep at that time and lives a few hours away, she arrived just in the nick of time to see her granddaughter being born.

In all honesty, pushing was harder than I anticipated it to be. The midwife had told me that my baby’s head was down very low, so I was hoping it wouldn’t be too strenuous  (ha!)… but for 40 minutes I had the toughest core workout of my life pushing my baby out! It was exhausting and surreal, and when she came out, I was completely surprised to see that she had a head full of brown hair (I’m very blonde and my husband was a blonde baby) and a ginormous cone head (No wonder why it was so tough getting her out, she had to really contort herself to fit on through my birth canal!).

Delivering the placenta was also harder than I anticipated. I actually had to push hard to get it out. The doctor and midwife asked me if I wanted Pitocin to deliver the placenta, which I was perplexed about. I had just given birth to a tiny human, and they wanted me to take drugs after the fact?! The answer was a hard no, and while it was painful getting the placenta out, it was over and done with about 30 minutes after my baby made her debut.

Of course I was tired afterwards, but honestly, I felt pretty good in the hours after delivering. A little while after giving birth, I wheeled my baby into the maternity ward with me. I visited with family, ate vegan chocolate birthday cake my mom had gotten to celebrate my 32nd birthday at her house that day, and took a shower that night. I was walking slow, but I was moving at least!

Delivering a baby is a wild ride, but I’m happy to say that it was empowering experience for me. Afterwards I felt strong and proud of myself for how my labor unfolded, and it’s an experience that I’m confident will stay vivid in my memory for the rest of my life.

Here are a few things that helped me during and after labor:

• Hypnobirthing. It sounds like some sort of hippie voodoo, but simply put, this is what hypnobirthing meant to me: Getting my mind in a relaxed, confident state, and putting in the effort to keep in there throughout labor while not allowing the fear – tension – pain cycle to take over. The mind is POWERFUL beyond measure, and I know that if I went into labor letting fear take over, I would not have been able to have a natural birth. I think hynobirthing would also have been useful even if I needed a c-section or other intervention.

While some of the hypnobirthing audio that you’ll find around is a little too – shall we say, hippie dippy for me – I employed meditation techniques that I’ve learned in yoga, delved into an e-book, and listened to my favorite hypnobirthing videos just about every day during my third trimester, and then over and over during labor. Here are a couple of tools I found helpful:

1. Centre of Excellence’s Hypnobirthing Audio Course
2. Loving Mama Doula’s Birthing Affirmations
3. The Power of Hypnobirthing TEDx Talk
4. Emily Norris’ 6 Hypnobirthing Tips

• Being in good shape. I worked out throughout my pregnancy and actually had done some yoga practice the afternoon before I gave birth. I believe that a strong core and body in general helped me to push my babe out without drugs.
• Coconut oil. The midwife rubbed coconut oil on me when I started pushing. I had a fear of experiencing horrible tearing down there, which did not happen at all, and I think the coconut oil helped a lot with that.

• Being active. I started moving and going for slow walks the day that I got home from the hospital. It was nothing crazy, but I believe that a little movement helped me to get back to normal-ish quickly. I also think that being active and walking around during labor helped me to get through it, since laying down seemed to magnify the pain even more.
• Letting my core rest. More-so than anything else, my core felt sore and weak from labor. For probably two weeks it felt like complete mush, so I made sure to keep disengaging my core to let it rest. I think I naturally use my core a lot to try to have good posture, but during this time, I actually felt the need to do the opposite to let it just heal.
• Witch hazel wipes. Every night for probably 10 days post labor, I used witch hazel wipes to help things heal down there.
• Sleep…. hahaha, just kidding! Like most do, my baby had her days and nights confused for probably the first two weeks that she was here, so sleep did not (and has not yet) come easy. I did catch naps when I could and that helped me to power through those first days.

One tool I wanted to use but didn’t get the chance to….During pregnancy I wrote a Shape article about essential oils for pregnancy, and I had planned on mixing up a few of the essential oil concoctions mentioned in the article to assist me in labor, but I never got the chance to. The only oil I used was lavender, which I rubbed on my wrists to center and calm myself a few times during labor.

Tell me… Any questions? Are you familiar with hypnobirthing? Mamas, what was your birthing experience like?