How Coping Techniques For Labor Can Alter Your Reality

I have recently faced a situation where I had to be separated from a loved one for a period of time.  This was very difficult, and yet while driving away with tears streaming down my face, I started thinking thoughts that echoed the very thoughts I had while enduring contractions!  With sadness and fear all around me, I kept repeating, "Yes!"  And, I believed it.  "Yes, we are separated.  Yes, I am sad.  Yes, this is a good thing.  Yes, I can stay connected.  Yes, my heart will always be with you."

At some point during my first labor, which was very difficult and traumatic for me at the time, one midwife sat by me, put her hand on the small of my back and said, "Don't say no, say yes."  She most likely has no idea how those words affected me!  Apparently, at the beginning of each contraction I had been saying, "Oh God, no!"  Saying, "yes," wasn't just a way to sound better while laboring; it physically altered my mind and thus my labor.  Words are not just words.  What we say, affects what we feel, and what we feel affects how we act, and how we act affects what happens to our bodies and to all those around us.  A thought is not without consequences!  Somehow, that lesson learned during my first birth, gave me the courage and the mindset to face a completely different life event with grace and acceptance.

Labor is a unique life event where we progress only by releasing control.  I would wager to say that all major life events follow this same pattern, however we often fool ourselves into thinking we still retain control and we use many different avoidance patterns to try to cling to our control.  Death is inevitable.  As is pain, sorrow, difficulties and suffering.  It is our human inheritance.  That does not mean that we are helpless.  This is, I believe, the major lesson of birth.  The harder we fight the more pain and suffering we endure.  Once we let go, physically and mentally, we realize that we are not left alone and helpless.  Rather, we are caught up in the grace of God, and we see, perhaps not in this moment or the next, but we do see that our love is stronger, more resilient, more compassionate.  And, this is what it means to be human.  We take reality as it is handed to us, and we transform it into something bigger, better and more meaningful.  Glory to God!