The challenge of giving birth in the current times is to nourish your self-confidence about your body and baby, and let nature lead the way.

I often think and reflect on the births that I attend. Why is it that for some women, the process of giving birth is a conversation of her body with her baby, which takes on a spiritual quality? Why is it that for others, the entire process gets overridden with fear? Pain — and the ability to manage it — is then only a small aspect. A very important aspect, but a small one.

Here are some things which I feel impact the quality of the birth experience:

✨ How we live today: So much chatter! Social media, so much digital information at our fingertips. But so little time spent with ourselves, downloading information that your own body is giving you. If you have an ache, instead of seeing what it could be signalling, you run to Google which could scare the life out of you. But Google cannot feel what is going on in your body and how, for the most part, the intelligence of the body is to automatically seek out comfort.

✨ Quick fix relief for everything: Pop a pill. If not, run to the doctor, who will most likely tell you to take a pill and get yourself some bedrest. Now, sometimes, both the pill and the rest maybe needed. But by scaring yourself or wanting to immediately anesthetise yourself to any discomfort, you have lost the ability to sit with yourself, comfort yourself, and listen to your body’s signals.

✨ Living in Crisis Mode: For the most part, many of us live in crisis mode. Constantly multitasking and trying to be the “best” at everything we do. As we live, so we birth. Birth can then take on a crisis mode as well. Something that needs to be tackled and completed. But with as little discomfort as possible. The truth is you can prepare all you want, but you have to be able to be in non-crisis mode. Let your body do the work of slowly letting your baby out.

✨ Family: While we expect that family will wait on us, encourage us, and help us during the time of birth, sometimes the exact opposite happens. Family does help for sure, but for the most part instead of waiting on the process to unfold, everyone is waiting for the family’s baby!! Nothing wrong with the excitement and the anticipation. Everything is wrong with looking at birth as a project that needs to be completed. And in that way, the pressure is on the laboring mother, who has enough to deal with already. She is then waiting on the family!!! And, has to perhaps explain that it is okay. How can birth progress smoothly in these circumstances? Who has the onus of waiting on whom?

✨ The current maternity care system: Which believes that the mother has to be saved and rescued from her own body which has been sending millennia-old signals to birth her baby. These signals have been encoded in the mother’s body since the first baby was born. And by wanting to “help” labor progress along, in a particular fashion that has been ordained expedient, we are directing the body to move out of its wisdom of biology. Sure mothers and babies need to be monitored and around 15 to 20% benefit from being saved, with all the technology and modern medicine. But 80% needing a major abdominal surgery? Or 90% being augmented with medications? This “saving” of all women from their own bodies, now becomes the new narrative, which further erodes the confidence of the mother in her own body and ability to give birth.

More fear = More pain = Longer labor = More stress on the MotherBaby = More interventions = Self fulfilling prophecy “Women need to be saved in/from childbirth!!

So back to the original question: What helps some women experience childbirth as a transcendental experience?

Not just childbirth classes – which give information about labor, coping skills, breathing, exercises, what to avoid. But, still with all of that information and practicing and reflecting and meditating about what you need both internally and externally to help go through labor in a peaceful manner

Not just Birth Stories that you read on this page & others – While they are very important to increase the conversations around birth being a positive event, only relying on them is like expecting to wake up in a candle-lit room, with a smile, with a baby in your lap, WITHOUT going through the discomfort and pain. No one can be in comfort and give birth. You will need to step out of your comfort zone and step into the unknown realm, then you can experience the spiritual nature of birth!

Not just Pain, But Also Pleasure – Feeling the contractions, recognising the magnificent pressures of bearing down, feeling your baby move down the birth canal, feeling tired yet exhilarated as you say “The baby is coming” 😊 These are nature’s design to elevate childbirth as an experience that the mother and baby both get imprinted for a lifetime. The cascade of hormones, love, connection, touch, smell, feel – all were designed not only to make you survive, but thrive!!

Control – We cannot control birth! It is that simple. We can prepare, yes. But not control. Mismatched expectations can lead to labor slowing down or feeling more painful. When the woman stops trying to control, but surrenders and opens out her heart to the pain, the sensations, the nausea, the shivering, the peeing, the pooing, the sweating, the roaring, the moaning, the groaning, the whining, the silence, the tiredness – however her birth might unfold – she opens herself up to receiving her baby, her way. This permanently alters her way of existing!

When we stop looking at birth as a linear process and understand that birth is as circular as life is, we will all empower the mother to experience birth as a transcendental experience!