What is Hypnobirthing?
Hypnobirthing is a tried and proven method that guides
and prepares families for a positive birth experience.
It is a program a that considers the psychological, as well as the physical, well-being of the mother, her birth partner, and the newborn, independent of context, whether that be in the quiet of a home, a hospital, or a birth centre.
The Hypnobirthing program is built around an educational process that includes special breathing, relaxation, visualization, meditative practice, attention to nutrition and positive body toning.
Most importantly it fosters an air of mutual respect for the birthing family, as well as the health-care provider in a traditional health-care system or an alternative setting.
The Hypnobirthing Premise
Women have been conditioned to believe that excruciating pain is associated with labour; and because of this, women today hold an unprecedented fear of giving birth. This extreme fear causes their bodies to become tense, and that tension prohibits their bodies from easily performing a normal physiological function. The result is exactly what they feared most–long, painful birthing or unnecessary intervention.
Through a very simple program of self-hypnosis and education, healthy, low-risk women, as well as women who need medical assistance due to special circumstances, learn to dismiss fear-based stories, misinformation, and birthing myths; and they are helped to see birth as normal.
They learn to trust that their bodies know how to bring their babies into the world in the calm and gentle way that Nature intended.
Hypnobirthing however, is not about getting the perfect 'hypno-birth'.
It's about being empowered, prepared and knowledgeable so that they can calmly and confidently navigate whatever turn their birth might take.
Hypnobirthing
Techniques & Benefits
Contemporary women in our culture hold an unprecedented fear of giving birth, too often associating it with excruciating pain, thereby causing their bodies to become unable to perform what should be a normal physiological function. Hypnobirthing is a unique method of relaxed, natural childbirth education enhanced by self‑hypnosis and guided imagery techniques that allow women to use their natural abilities to bring about safer, easier, and more comfortable birthing.
In a series of five confidence-building classes, they learn what makes labor hurt; but more importantly, they learn the logic behind why labor doesn’t have to hurt and what they can do about it.
Mums and their birth companions study the physical and chemical changes that occur over a period of time when fear and anxiety are allowed to accumulate. This awareness of the fight, flight, or freeze response helps them to choose calm.
They practice Hypnobirthing techniques in class, designed to help them see the relationship between fear and the possibility of pain. These exercises become life skills that also shore up their parenting skills. Armed with this knowledge, the pattern of calming techniques and steps that they learn helps them to create endorphins and avoid the effect of the negative hormones that cause their bodies to constrict, rather than open.
Since Hypnobirthing is therefore an approach to birth rather than a type of birth, the tools and techniques learned in Hypnobirthing could be as easily used for a cesarean birth,
as they could be used at a homebirth.