Hypnobirthing is a shit name….
I almost didn’t use it in my business name but then I decided to own it and start a crusade, plus 3 letters for you….. S.E.O.
I guess “Hackney Hypnobirthing” is very much does what it says on the tin… except no one knows what’s in the bloody tin.
In the simplest possible terms, hypnobirthing is the only antenatal education that begins with the mind…. what goes on in our brains and how it impacts the rest of our body….
and how we feel about birth, can impact how we birth.
Antenatal education shouldn’t really need to exist, we’ve birthed for millennia, however we don’t exist in a vacuum and to be frank, we need it now more than ever.
We have culturally been conditioned to fear birth, with constant depiction of birth in the mainstream media as dramatic and traumatic. Over time this constant stream of negative, dramatic birth depiction has totally eroded our trust in the safety of the physiological process of birth and we’ve grown to store birth in our subconscious as dangerous, unbearably painful and unachievable.
The knock on effect is that in labour, a lot of us go into the “fight or flight” branch of our autonomous nervous system. Unfortunately this shuts down a lot of the ingenious mechanisms that support us to birth most comfortably and efficiently.
On top of this our medicalised model of care is really struggling. Underfunded, under resourced and really not supporting people in the way that it should. Let me be clear, I’m hugely grateful for the NHS and we are so lucky to have the access to medical intervention where appropriate, but we are intervening at astonishingly high rates. “Normal birth” now means caesarean or induction as according to the 2022-2023 Maternity statistics for NHS England, you currently have 43% of going into spontaneous labour. This is shocking.
I don’t dispute that some of those will be absolutely medically necessary but that number is insanely high. We are not incapable of physiological birth but the system is not set up to support it. So if we’re going to operate within it, we have to understand it and have confidence in work arounds to stack the odds in our favour of getting the birth that is best for us.
Hypnobirthing is not a magic bullet that will guarantee your birth outcomes but it really helps you to feel confident to make decisions that feel right for you as an individual
“Anna’s Hypnobirthing course gave Jake and me such a brilliant understanding of birth - from a factual, physiological and practical point of view. It enabled Jake to become well informed and be the best birth partner I needed - calm, patient and trusting in my body and it’s ability to birth our baby. We are both eternally grateful to Anna and her course, and feel that it united us in the journey of birth”
Hypnobirthing uses lots of very simple tools and techniques to re-programme your subconscious to feel positively about birth; to move it to the “safe” filing cabinet in your brain. This helps you to stay in your “rest and digest” or “feed and breed” response, helping labour to unfold more easily.
With daily practise, this reprogramming alongside
Clear appreciation of how our bodies are built
Understanding that we are mammals with very basic environmental needs in birth
Harnessing and manipulating our birthing hormones
how to navigate the modern maternity system
An amazing and well prepped birth partner by your side
and finally and perhaps most importantly of all
A huge process of unlearning, appreciating your innate wisdom has always been there all along.
All of this together you’re stacking the odds in your favour for a more positive birth experience to help you to confidently deal with the twists and turns of labour as it happens. There are no guarantees, no one can give you that. However what I can tell you is the people who I’ve taught and who have bought into hypnobirthing mind, body and soul are the ones who feel most positive about their birth experiences even when it really hasn’t gone to “plan”.
It’s all science but there is undeniably a little bit of magic in it too.