What does birth really feel like?
“What does birth feel like?” That’s one of the most frequent questions I get asked as a birth coach.
The answer I never give is painful.
Challenging, intense, expansive; yes. But never painful.
Yet, painful is the most used word to describe birth, so, you may ask, why am I going against the grain?
Firstly, pain is a word that is used to describe the feeling we get when something is going wrong in the body or when we are hurt.
Birth is a totally natural process that should be happening to your body so “pain” isn’t the correct terminology. And terminology, when it comes to birth and how the mind processes words and in turn how the body then responds, is crucial.
Birth is a complete mind, body and spirit process and it should be prepared for in this way.
Currently society sees birth as a primarily physical act and doesn’t factor in the mind, the mind-body connection or the spiritual aspects of birth. Without all three then the birth experience isn’t honoured in the complete way it should be, often leaving women feeling incomplete themselves after the process.
In fact that’s my definition of postpartum depression, a mother feeling incomplete and struggling to find herself in her new role. But that’s another story for another time.
We must start to acknowledge the the words we use in and about birth, and get a handle on how the mind processes those words through the body in order to open ourselves up to the truth of birth and be able to really understand it. It’s only then that we can experience birth in its true profound essence.
Secondly, as the @gabormatemd quote below suggests, healing or in other words, expansion (which is one profound way we can frame birth) is a way of holding pain. Which is to say, in reference to birth, it’s about feeling discomfort in order to move through what no longer serves us, which is exactly what the rite of passage of birth is about.
So in order to manage our birth as much as we can, we need to reframe how we see birth and how we feel birth.
Some of these concepts aren’t the societal norm, and maybe a little hard to really get your head around but trust me when I say, when you do get a handle on them, you’ll be able to surrender beautifully into birth.
Because that’s one of the main lessons birth teaches us; how to surrender.
So now when you think of birth and how it feels, imagine that it feels like a deep opening and expansion into what you are capable of, that in its discomfort you are able to let go of what you no longer need to make space for all the beauty that is to come with the arrival of your child and your new role as a mother.
It’s a teetering on the edge of what’s real and what’s not, at the point where life crosses over from the spiritual realm. It’s magical, and blissful as well as transformational. It’s the phoenix going up in flames, only to re-emerge as a more potent, strong version of herself.
That my loves, is what birth feels like.
