Doula Voice: Demelza Danquist

Prepare Your Mindset for the Birth YOU Desire

Part 2

5 Tools to Master Your Birthing Mindset NOW!

1. Make up your mind.
2. Get educated.
3. Speak it, see it, be it.
4. Eliminate fear
5. Repetition, repetition repetition.

Make Up Your Mind

What would your ideal birthing experience look like? You are a powerful, intuitive human who is deeply tapped into the needs and desires of this being whose body is growing inside yours. You have it in you to co-create the birthing experience that is best for you and this baby. To do this, it’s important to ask yourself some target questions:  Where would I feel most comfortable and at ease laboring and birthing? Who do I want to support me through this transition in our lives? What do I want? What are my needs? What is best for our family?

Get Educated

Childbirth education is an investment that can benefit you for the rest of your life! Almost daily, I find myself using the tools that I learned almost 6 years ago from the first HypnoBirthing® classes when I was pregnant with our first child. Breathing through difficult moments rather than reacting,  relying on positive affirmations and asking effective questions are just a few of these valuable tools. Learning what your body is actually doing during labor and how to work with your body to support your baby is invaluable. Knowledge and understanding eliminate fear and encourage surrender and curiosity in the birthing process. Learn about all of the options available to you and don’t give your power of choice away.

Speak It, See It, Be It.

Create a daily practice where you speak your personally crafted affirmations especially when you are doing “mindless” tasks, feeling fear creep in and right when you wake and fall asleep.Visualize with focus your ideal birth while incorporating as many senses as you can. Feel into all the feelings of what it’s like to have already experienced your ideal birth.

Eliminate fear

Fear=Tension=Pain. Birth is naturally powerful and filled with extraordinary sensations that may require all of your attention and focus to stay relaxed and calm. When one can stay in a place of calm, deep relaxation, and confidence your autonomic nervous system stays in the parasympathetic state which encourages the release of hormones 200 times stronger than morphine. When you are stressed, scared or feel unsafe,  those hormones go away and are replaced with catecholamines which are made by the adrenal glands and are useful with fight or flight responses. Staying calm and peaceful allows blood flow to go to the uterus, your baby and your opening cervix. Training yourself to remain in a peaceful state is crucial to achieving your desired birth.

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition.

Bruce Lipton suggests that two most effective ways the subconscious learns is via Hypnosis and repetition. Repeating new beliefs about birth and the experience you desire daily, and telling your mind something new while feeling excited about it, can change the mind and therefore change your experience. Work with your mind by giving it updated, specific, detailed, relevant information about birth, your body and what you’re capable of. Trust your choices and confidently move toward them in all that you say and do while believing with all your being that what you have chosen to create is possible.

“When you change the way you view birth, the way you birth will change” -Marie F. Mongan

 

Click here to listen to a beautiful, relaxing, and connecting gift meditation from the author.

About Demelza Danquist.

Demelza conceived her passion for empowered birth while pregnant with her first child in 2014.Through a dedicated and daily meditation practice, child-birth education classes and endless hours of reading she achieved a birth that was long, required all of her attention and completely pain-free. She knew that if she could do it, anyone could do it. She became a birth doula in 2015 and a certified HypnoBirthing® instructor in 2018. She is currently training to be a clinical Hypnotherapist to expand her scope and serve her clients more deeply to feel empowered through pregnancy, birth and beyond.