Why Birthing From Within?
Adding childbirth classes to our birth doula services seemed a natural progression but it took some time to find an approach that fit our values and our vision.
Here's why we settled on Birthing From Within:
the labyrinth is a powerful symbol for the labour, birth, and postpartum journey.
1. Recognizing expectant parents as active and knowledgeable participants in their preparation for birth and parenting.
Every person enters into their birth experience with a pre-existing set of values, assumptions, and beliefs. Discovering and exploring these parts of ourselves is an incredibly necessary part of preparing for labor, birth, and parenting. We have as much to learn from you, our class participants, in regards to who you are, what you want, your hopes and fears as we have to share about pregnancy, labor, and the postpartum period.
Each Birthing From Within class is unique to its participants.
creativity helps us integrate what we are learning
2. Engaging your whole brain by using tactile, creative, and multi-sensory processes to integrate what you are learning into your heart, mind, and body.
“Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration - it is how we fold our experiences into our being...creativity is the mechanism that allows learning to seep into our being and become practice. The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.” What we understand and learn...is only rumor until we live it and integrate it through some form of creativity so that it becomes part of us.”
Birth art, journaling, sculpture, role play, story telling, ritual, etc are not fluffy, new age, woo-woo "things to try" but are an integral part of taking what we are learning from our heads and putting it into our hearts and bodies.
3. A holistic approach to childbirth preparation.
In addition to knowledge and facts, you need time and space to prepare emotionally, mentally, and spiritually for birth. Giving birth and our subsequent transformation into parenthood are a profound rite of passage - acknowledging and celebrating this fact is a meaningful way to welcome the extraordinary into the every day.
In our classes, we balance the sharing of information with time to pause, reflect on, and integrate the journey.
our group class space
4. Mindfulness based pain coping practices.
The one thing every person preparing to give birth wants to know is "How do I cope with the pain?"
We take time in class to try out different mindfulness based pain coping practices. While pain and intensity are an inevitable part of the birthing process, there is a great deal we can do to ease suffering in labor. These practices support you in birthing-in-awareness, no matter the external circumstances of your birth. They can be used and practiced at any point during birth or parenting, with nothing more than your own presence and breath to guide you.
Finding yourself drawn to prepare in a deep, mindful way for birth and parenting? REGISTER TODAY>>
Did you take a childbirth education or preparation class? What worked well for you? What surprised you?
Rachel is a DONA International Certified Birth Doula, Birthing From Within mentor, and mother of three. She is passionate about helping women and their partners discover their own inner strength and wisdom so that they can begin their parenting journey with confidence. With a focus on supporting her clients as they determine what their own priorities and preferences are for their birth while giving them the tools they need to realize those priorities, she feels fortunate to witness her clients come into their own and become their own best advocates.
