The Mind-Body Connection in Pregnancy: How Reconnecting With Your Body Transforms Birth and Motherhood

Welcome I am so glad you are here.

The mind body connection is powerful and today I am going to share my thoughts on how that resonates through pregnancy, labour and birth.

I’ve recently had some old thought patterns and behaviours mirrored back to me through other people. Behaviours of ignoring the body’s signals that something is not right and pushing on regardless. I used to do this daily and sometimes still do — but less frequently! It’s sparked a huge amount of reflection about how I’ve ended up running my own pre and postnatal business in North East England…

I support pregnant women living in the North East to have a calm pregnancy and a birth where they feel in control. I am also an expert in pelvic floor rehabilitation  and support women through pelvic girdle pain in pregnancy and postpartum pelvic floor dysfunction. Through face to face or online appointments. I also support any woman navigating the birthing system in with a carefully curated antenatal yoga programme and one to one support. I hold women, helping them to find thier power their inner strength as they shift from maiden to mother. 

Now is the perfect time to connect or reconnect to your body. Pregnancy and birth are biological physiological processes. Our bodies grow and birth our babies. Each one of us is beautifully unique and will birth in our own way. And you deserve to build on that sense of self trust. Not just to help you in pregnancy and birth but to support intuitive mothering once your baby is here! 

If you feel a disconnect to your body and are pregnant or newly post partum this blog post will help and inspire you listen deeply to your physical body. You can also access my FREE pregnancy resources by clicking here. 

“My body letting me down”: A phrase that shaped my story from maiden to mother.

One sentence keeps coming up for me: “my body letting me down.”Our bodies are never “letting us down” — they are only trying to communicate with us. To tell us that something needs to change. 

As a former dancer and yoga teacher I have always found expression, a sense of aliveness and joy in my body. But for a really long time I also felt a deep disconnection. A disappointment, a self loathing in my physical body… To sum it up I felt as if my body was “letting me down” I didn’t trust it.  I hated the way I looked, tall, a little bigger than the other dancers. On the pill because my periods went wild at 17. This mis trust and loathing really came to the forefront in my late teens and early 20’s at university. I would dance for hours. Then do more cardio at the gym and nourish my body with vegetable because carbs were “bad” and protein not important!  Oh how wrong I was! 

As women we live in a world where women are only considered beautiful for such a short period of time. And beauty is modelled as being thin, smooth, in order, slick… Diet culture is huge, we are taught we need to deprive ourselves of things in order to fit into the size 6/8 jeans. Or hit the gym hard for a slimmer waist or a bigger bottom. We witness women around us berating themselves as less than what they see on the TV. Airbrushed. Rich. (Soulless?) certainly opinion free! 

We are also the generation of women whose mothers who were mainly born in hospital. Our grandmothers (which is where the egg that made you was developed) were subjected to birth trauma before we knew that’s what it was. Sedation, episiotomy, forceps, vontuse. Failure to progress. It all began here… (not that long ago.) And from this I wonder if maybe we have created this monster this beast that many women live with every day. This doubt in ourselves this self hatred, indeed hating of other beautiful women too.

As I write to you today I am still healing but I no longer hold a single piece of loathing in me. My first pregnancy and birth paved the way for a new found love and respect of my body (My first experience was not however entirely positive). The work deepened as I went head first into yoga practices not just movement but meditation, restorative, yoga nidra and breath work too. The further studies I have taken to heal my own pelvic floor dysfunction have also supported a feeling of power and strength within myself and a realisation that no matter what I will always be ok. 

We push, we drive, we keep going… and it’s exhausting

We operate from our brains. Ignoring our body because we “just have to do…”

You go to work full of cold when really you just want to hide under the covers.

Have you ever looked at a person full of cold and been secretly annoyed that they came to work anyway and spread their germs?

Have you gone to work through sleep deprivation when it probably wasn’t safe to drive but you didn’t want to let people down?

Have you said yes to meeting your friends when all you really wanted to do was hide under a blanket and watch Bridget Jones?

Have you decided to push on working right up to your due date? To get more time at the other end despite being so tired your whole body aches? 

Let’s just take a moment to pause on this last one. In my first pregnancy I did just this. And on my due day I came down with the most horrific cold and cold sore  and felt utterly terrible for 5 more days. (When William then arrived) I began my motherhood journey completely depleted, running on fumes, in a state of fight or flight. 

This did not help my labour, my nervous system was on high alert! My para sympathetic nervous system found it really hard to take over and do its job of birthing my baby because my thinking brain would not surrender and let go… that’s right you cannot think or plan your baby earth side. Your body does it not your brain. And I see you scoughing with your pregnancy tea over there. I did to first time round… but it is true you need your thinking brain (neocortex) to switch off and surrender to the power of your body to birth your baby! If reading this makes you feel worried, if you believe that you cannot possibly every surrender to your body I can help you. Yoga was the starting point for me, any layered in came birth bio mechanics, birth physiology and so many ancient learnings that will give you power and strength to birth with your body! You can learn myre about me pregnancy yoga and birth preparation programme here. Or get in touch to find out about my face to face birth preparation courses in Northumberland or online if you are further afield. 

The early signs we ignore (and why it matters in birth)

We desensitise ourselves to the communication our body is giving us… in order to conform to society’s expectations, to earn enough money, to not let people down, to prove something to ourselves…When it comes to birth this is a huge problem.

Perhaps you have a constant headache, or you’re so tired you can’t keep your eyes open at 2pm. Maybe you physically feel walking for more than a few minutes is too much but you do it anyway…

These are the first signs your body is communicating. It’s telling you something needs to change. But do you respond, and support rest more? Or ask other people to help so you can walk less? Do you get annoyed with your body and then carry on through it? But ask yourself who benefits from doing this? You certainly don’t and if you do not then neither does your baby. For now they are an exertion of you. And this is both beautiful and overwhelmingly scary at the same time! You can read more about the impact that living in a state of anxiety or stress has on your baby here https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2254139/

When it comes to pelvic pain, back ache or sore hips in pregnancy you just pushing on through could hinder your birth! That’s how serious this is. Those tight glutes cause deeper external rotation placing loads of pressure at the back of your pelvic floor! If you stay tight here in labour your baby is going to have less room to work with as it twists and comes down into the vagina! 

And if you keep pushing through pain or don’t get enough rest your nervous system will sit in fight or flight. In this state your body won’t produce the oxytocin it needs to initiate spontaneous labour… 

There is an irony here that I see. So many women are so stressed about being “forced to have an induction” it becomes more likely because their nervous system perceives threat and so won’t initiate spontaneous labour to keep mum and baby safe! And if you are holding tension from being in a state of fight or flight but you do you into labour then your contractions are going to be so much more painful. So much more overwhelming. 

But there is some good news! Because pregnancy gives you 9 months to learn how to first of all find your rest and digest state and practice it benefiting your mental and physical well being and setting you up for a beautiful post part period. Your body also gives you the gift of continuous communication from before you even know you are pregnant. Clever. See we are SO clever! We have this thing called bio feedback between mother and baby and it is this magical communication that will keep baby safe in pregnancy, birth your baby and support your breastfeeding journey. Beyond that your intuition and connection then make you the most incredible mother. It’s all within you. You just need to believe that it is.

Your nervous system holds the key to physiological birth

You see it’s the parasympathetic nervous system that manages physiological birth… that’s the system that keeps your heart beating, digests food, produces the hormones you need to regulate your cycle, sustain a pregnancy it’s the system that works away in the back ground without you consciously controlling it. The only way you can impact its productivity its efficiency is to connect in. Is to down regulate your nervous system to come into rest and digest… 

So what actually happens in physiological birth?

Your brain makes lots of oxytocin toward the end of your pregnancy and we think that once babies lungs are ready for breathing earth side they send this signal via bio feedback to mum. 

Oxytocin then gets released and the receptors for the hormone oxytocin layer down in the third trimester begin to receive this magic love hormone… once your receptors have enough oxytocin they start to make the lining of the uterine wall contact… and it’s this contracting and releasing that signals the beginning of labour. 

As more oxytocin is released by your brain the more your body knows it’s safe for labour to continue and your contractions will likely become stronger and closer together. (Most women establish a contraction pattern but it looks so different for each women that I am not going to give you any time frames here) 

Oxytocin is as you see a really awesome hormone. It supports birth, it’s what you experience a rush of during sex and after orgasm. It also is so important for breastfeeding. Our body will only make it when it feels completely safe. But the good news is there is so much that we can do to communicate to our body that it are safe! Breath work, reducing light levels, removing unnecessary people from the room… massage, essential oils for pregnancy. 

The list goes on… and it’s these things that you need to trail and then use in pregnancy so that when you do go into labour you can support your nervous system in feeling safe so that it can get to work birthing your baby. 

You can get access to my free birth preparation tools here! this is a great one to play just before bed or when you get home after a busy day to help you come into your body! These things take time and practice to truly embed so the sooner you begin the better. 

Pregnancy, labour, birth and motherhood — they are slow

Breastfeeding my nearly 2 year old to sleep every night. And indeed through the night (and day)

Pregnancy, labour, birth and motherhood. They are slow. Painfully slow sometimes. Parts of it can be boring… Lots of it is messy, complicated, nuanced, unpredictable and pretty hard to control. All the stuff us humans do not really like!

Pregnancy and birth (my first birth anyway) felt like such a slow process. The sickness lasted for 20 weeks, the uncertainty of those first 12 weeks lasted the whole pregnancy. Each phase of my labour was long. Including the “pushing” phase of labour although that was initiated a long time before my body was ready through coached pushing… 

We live in a world that rewards productivity, moving quickly “bouncing back” after birth. In the North East of England I find the pace of life is much slower, than it was in the midlands. But having worked in the corporate world North of the Tyne I would still surmise that ultimately there is a drive and desire to continue to push forward both in work and home life.

But the one thing I’ve learnt in motherhood is that it’s often in the 2 or 50 steps back that you take that the biggest healing and subsequent growth occurs. Motherhood is less about reaching an end goal and more about surviving each minuet. Being present for the tiny things. The first time your baby grabs your finger. The unimaginable joy that comes from watching them splash in a puddle or tucking them in at night and the first whisper “I love you..” Motherhood is so hard but children show you where the real joy in life is and it comes from the simplest things. 

If there is one lesson I applied to my pregnancy and postnatal period second time round it was to slow down. Embrace the stillness in the early days and be in the moment 

My number one tool is my body. It is right every time

I believe we have this gift from birth. And are given many opportunities to reconnect with it over the course of our lives — especially as women. My number one tool is my body. It is right EVERY TIME.

Tips for nervous system regulation in Motherhood

I make sure I take some deep breaths at some point each day. 

I pause to feel both of my feet soften into the ground.

I use rose essential oil and massage it on to my womb space.

When I feel panic rise up I make sure I get outside. Of if I can I move my body, even just a little. A down dog, a cat cow. A jump up and down. 

I also ask myself these two questions:

Does this really matter?….

Is this a full body yes? 

If you are ready to start listening to your body in pregnancy I have created by beautiful online pregnancy yoga programme you can access it any time any where with flows and meditations. And if you need to be held through postpartum and motherhood and this post has resonated with you then do reach out. I love nothing more than connecting with you on a personal level. 

Love to you always C x