Stress to Success: Week 10

In-lightened Birth Basics 

Ambivalence about having kids & its costs during birth:

• Your career
  
• Life balance
  
• Your partnership
• Your body (which has gone through so much)
• Coming off of a difficult fertility journey
• How to tell when you need emotional support during a pregnancy

Naming Your Double Binds - Journal Activity

The "Birth Fear” Culture

• Media
• Family stories 
• Our medical systems & birth
• Our brain & stories 

Creating your Customized In-Lightened Birth Story

• Confidence (and the "normal" amount of fear)
• An In-lightened birth = alert, consciousness intact, sentient, aware baby
• Easier bonding, breastfeeding, and rhythm-building

Update Your Goal (click here for ideas)

You & Your Doc

• What Drs. don't know & what they don't know they don't know
• Relatively recent confines of doctors - Read this post from a surgeon outlining changes in medicine that are encouraging many doctors to retire early
• Attract the best practitioners that will work as a team to support your pregnancy & birth (look at the birth pro panel here) 
• Stand up in your power, use your voice
• Be in touch with your inner wisdom as you interact with doctors… and learn what a difference this sets up in your confidence as a mother & father
• Another article link about the problems in medical research. Here's a quote: "He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed." 
  

Spirit Babies – Communication Intros

• your biggest teacher
• alter/devoted space
• meditation & journaling practice to allow more "dialogue"
• the language of spirit - how to listen to a foreign language?