How close are you to giving birth? Now think ahead a few years into the future, and imagine what it’s going to be like to teach your child how to ride a bike for the first time - without the training wheels. Or jump off the high dive. Or step foot into the kindergarten classroom. 

The same kinds of things kids need you to embody in these situations that might be a tad-bit scary for them, are the same things they need as you get close to your due-date. 

In today’s video - just 3 minutes long - I share the 3 basic messages you want to send to your baby as you think about birth. Sometimes it’s easy to get so caught up in your prep process, classes, etc. that you forget your baby has a big job to do in his or her own right. So as you communicate with you lil one, stick to these core messages, and it will do a lot for them. During the 3rd trimester (and really before, as well) babies are showing us more and more about how much is being programmed into their neurology. That’s why my clients and I talk so much about protocols for releasing any stress that’s been in the picture.

But just as an older child will often respond courageously to little boosts of encouragement, your baby will too. It’s pretty simple, really. Take a look. :)

I was surprised at how much I learned from the short time I spoke with Rachel Lewis about fostering, and foster-to-adopting... Find out the highlights in this video, or access the full replay by clicking here.

Courtesy of Center for School Transformation - www.schooltransformation.com

Courtesy of the Center for Richer Living:

Guest Blog - Surviving Mother's Day, Dr. Tara May 

Such a loaded holiday. If you are reading this, then you are probably one of many who are struggling with this upcoming Mother's Day. You may be grieving the loss of your own mother. You may be struggling with wanting a better relationship with her. You may be called on to be celebrating as a  mother to living children while remembering your nonliving children. You may be struggling with whether you are considered a mother when you have been unable to conceive at all. You may be wondering how to get through this holiday when the only children you have are no longer here to be mothered.

While many in our society won't be thinking of you and your aching arms and heart, know that there are many of us who have lost our innocence and will be thinking of you and our tragic predicaments.

If you've embraced the dream and cared for your potential child through your own body,You are a mother. If you've made heart wrenching decision to hold your child through their last breath, You are a mother.

If you've made the ultimate sacrifice to spare your baby a life of trauma, You are a mother.

If you've held a baby in your womb, never to meet him/her, You are a mother.

If you've know the sweet tenderness of a living child who is no longer here, You are a mother.

Motherhood is many things and mostly it's about love and for many, it's about unthinkable loss, a shattering of the heart and soul. You are not alone.

As you approach this Mother's Day, here are some things to consider to get you through. Do what resonates with you and ignore the rest. May you find some peace and comfort.

Follow the Love. Surround yourself only with loving and supportive beings.  Don't waste your time with those who won't recognize the predicament that you face or who won't help you feel loved and cherished. If your own company is the most loving, then cherish yourself and your memories.

Create a Ritual. Rituals are a wonderful way to focus our memories and acknowledge what we are grieving and honoring. You can light a candle, give yourself space to remember, paint, journal, release balloons, butterflies, bubbles, create a real or imagined ceremony, decorate an item of your child's or make something using an object that you associate with your motherhood.

Ignore the "celebrations". It may be just too hard to venture out of your house. That's ok. Honor what you need and set boundaries with those who have different expectations. They are not in your shoes.

Write a letter. Letter writing is a powerful way to get in touch with your experience and move through it. You may address the letter to your own mother, yourself, or your living children or your deceased children. The point is to give yourself the freedom to express whatever is in your heart without the burden of other's reactions.

Accept yourself. Accepting where you are today is important. Give yourself time and space to feel sad, comfort, peace, anger, and whatever else is coming up. You may discover that you need extra support and allow yourself to recognize that and find it.

Since I talk so much about stress and the impact it has on the body, particularly during preconception, pregnancy, & birth… I love the perspective this video brings on the topic. HOW you think about stress, the STORY you have when you feel it - it all makes a difference. Give it a look!

This article was inspired by a client of mine who – literally – had a pain in her neck off and for two weeks. :) 

When tension or pain shows up in your body, if you’re like most people in our culture, your first thought is either to ignore it if you can, or to take some kind of drug to make it go away. But what if the pain is there for a reason? What if it has a message, or several messages, for you?

Take Medical Action & Emotional Action

I don’t have an “either/or” kind of holistic mindset, so if you were to go into my medicine cabinet you’d see Tylenol sitting right next to the Arnica. Sometimes when I have a headache I reach for the Tylenol, but often  times I don’t end up needing to once I’ve tuned into the sensations of pain or discomfort and gotten the info my body wants me to focus on.

What I do is simple, and is something you can try, too. I always ask a few questions of myself as I tune in to any physical symptom that pops up in my body.

Question1: What’s going on physically?

This is where you take inventory of things like what you’ve eaten, how long you’ve been at the computer, how much stress you’re under, what activities might have contributed, the position you slept in last night, and so on. This is the logical and linear part of the investigating. The yang part, you might say, because it’s where you think, analyze, and use the process of elimination.

But don’t stop there! Even if it seems pretty clear cut, stay curious.

Why did you catch this bug that’s going around? (you don’t always catch whatever’s going around)

Why did staring at the computer hurt your head so much this particular day? (some special reason at play?)

Why did your child happen to get an earache now? (not last week, not next week

There are always germs in the environment. And there are always curbs to trip on, accidents to be had, papers you could cut your finger on, etc. So when something happens in one given moment, or when tension “sticks” to your body one particular day, there’s probably more to the picture than you’ve considered before.

I encourage you to follow through for more info to see what else you can find. It’s worth it – it often helps move through the “pain” faster. So ask a few more questions.


Question 2. What’s going on emotionally, or “personally” this week?

I always start my work with 1x1 clients with a check-in by asking, essentially, what showed up in their week. It never fails that a head cold, a sore throat, or a stubbed toe ends up directly informing the topic we left off with, or the emotional topic de jour.

One client, would always find when she had a sore throat, that there was something bothering her that she needed to either express to her husband (we were working on relationship stuff) or simply admit to herself.  She’d take supplements and vitamins, but would find that when this emotional piece was brought into the picture, that’s what made the soreness dissipate. It worked every time.

Others find that there’s predictably something to be discovered behind tense shoulders, cold sores, wheezing… you name it. The emotional piece, as it relates to shoulders, sores, and wheezes, might be straight-forward and easy to identify. Or it might be a little more subtle.

But either way, I invite you to investigate every symptom of pain through this emotional lens. The more information you have about what’s going on with you, the better. Logic will help you to an extent if things are relatively straight-forward, but if you get stuck finding an emotional connection to the symptom, try to access your intuitive knowingness, your gut instinct.

It’s not that hard to get intuitive information, it’s just something we’re under-practiced on. Simply breathe deeply for about two minutes to still your body, and get your mind focused solely on your breath. Then, “presence” yourself with your throat (we’ll stick with that example). In other words, let yourself focus on the sensation of pain or discomfort, visualize a picture of your throat, or imagine you could have an interview with this one body part by giving it the microphone.

Then ask it what you need to know. Listen. The information you get might come in one quick download, or it might come in scattered pictures & half-thoughts that you’ll need to assemble, like a puzzle. Either way, just try to see what you can gather – without censoring out the things that seem illogical. This is the yin approach. The yang had its turn already.

Question 3.  What's this about on both levels?

To recap for yourself all the contributing factors for your sore throat, make a mental list: not getting enough sleep, not speaking up to your husband, stress at work over this project with your boss.

Sometimes this step helps shed light on how much more a “non-medical” issue impacts your body than you’d previously realized. Like, “Wow, both with my husband and my boss there’s a pattern of me not being heard. I guess that’s a bigger deal than I thought.”

Question 4. What actions can I take – again, on both levels?

Alright, it’s totally fine to take whatever medical action makes sense – in fact you SHOULD attend to your body/complaint on that physical level. Just make sure you make a plan for the “non medical” aspects as well.

Ask that body part, in our example the throat, what all it wants you to do. It wants some vitamin C? Great. A really good couple of meals? Got it, makes sense.  And for you to make a space to communicate with your husband? Ok, will do.

Question 5. Connected to other body parts?

This is kind of an advanced step, but I think you’re ready for it.

Once you’ve gotten all the info you need about your throat, which is maybe a 3-4 minute process max, tune in again and ask if there are any other body parts connected to any of the issues you identified. In Chinese medicine, there are always interconnections between various body parts, so whether you do or don’t get much info on this question the first few times you try this, just remember that a throat imbalance might go hand in hand with some other body part.

If nothing comes up, you’re done. But you’re not looking for anything fancy here. If you ask the question, “Where else in my body do any of these issues show up?” and an image comes up in your mind of your calves, great. If a shooting pain goes down your wrist, great. Just go with it. Repeat the process with those parts (questions 1-5) that pop into your awareness.

It’s Easy, Once You Practice It

Following the logical (yang) part of this process is usually easy for everyone. The intuitive (yin) part takes some practice, because most of us haven’t spent 12+ years in school honing it the way we have our brains.

But the upshot of this whole thing is that finding out everything you can about a symptom usually supports the body in healing more quickly. So it’s really worth the 3-4 minutes of effort, even if part of it feels a little clunky as you’re getting used to it.

Sometimes a symptom goes away quite quickly after asking all the questions –  like the gas alert in your car that goes off the minute you leave the gas station. Other times, 24 hours is enough. And yes, sometimes when we’re working with symptoms that are accompanied by a complex or life-long story, the detangling (both medically and “non-medically”) can require several months or professional support.

Just remember, the next time you twist an ankle or your hemorrhoids flare up – the body has a message for you both on the surface and under (sorry, that wasn’t a hemorrhoid joke). :) 

Testing, testing - My first attempt at a Video Article: How to Engage Your Heart on a Daily Basis.

When you’re pregnant, the information gathering is ON! But amidst all the reading, doing, and class-taking, there are a few essentials that too many women overlook… and when they do, they often find:

• their stress increases the closer they get to their due date (which can cause early labor & unwanted tension)
• they’re constantly “in their heads” and have trouble connecting to their bodies (which makes it harder to relax the body when needed)
• the emotional aspect of birth isn’t sufficiently addressed (and old birth traumas creep in to the delivery room, which is entirely avoidable)
• labor and birth becomes unnecessarily difficult 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Do the Emotional Prep… It changes everything.

Most people will need to focus on 6 steps to make labor and delivery MUCH easier, quicker, and yes – orgasmic. At least 2-6 months before your due date, treat & clear all pregnancy/birth/motherhood-related fears or traumas that you might have running a little too strongly. Let me show you what I mean.

6 Steps to an easier, more transcendent birth:


1.    Process & clear your own birth trauma (Do you know your birth story?) - You may have access to “the facts” and you may not. Either way, whatever occurred during your birth made an imprint for better or for worse, and is cued up to be repeated. If your own birth was difficult, it's more likely that the birth of your children will be, too. This repeating pattern doesn't necessarily mean the same exact issues will arise... but just that your body will give you another chance to try to work out whatever wasn't resolved from your past.

When I was born, my grandfather was in the end-stages of Alzheimers and my mom was under an incredible amount of stress. She can’t remember too much about my actual delivery – I was kid number 3 and things were relatively routine – but this grief imprint that I know was there has been important for me to address. I was born surrounded with a lot of love, but also with a lot of angst and worry. The difficult feeling wasn't about me, but the imprint was still there waiting to be healed.

Often times, the connection is a little more direct. 

I once had a client who was terrified to give birth and didn’t know why because her own birth story was uneventful. After thinking for a minute, she remembered her mom almost died in childbirth when her older sister was born. So that fear was still in the room during her birth, no doubt. As we cleared that family trauma of mom almost losing her life, my clients’ fear about her own pregnancy dissolved, too. Permanently! (She now has given birth twice and describes both as being “...incredibly easier than she ever imagined possible.")

In your case, particularly if there were any complications during your birth, I highly recommend finding out what those complications were (to the extent that you can), and making sure you’ve done some healing work to shift the places where your body still holds those traumas… You don’t want them in the room during your delivery, so move ‘em on out!

 

2.    Clear concerns you have about labor  - This may or may not overlap with Step 1. If you're nervous about labor, as mentioned above, the first thing to look at is your own birth story. But there are other places to look, too. Some women pick up fears about labor just by listening to all the horror stories friends, doctors, and the media spout out too regularly.

It’s impossible to not pick up a few fears from our culture in which birth generally requires hospitalization, medication, and so forth, just as if you were sick.

But if you are more than a little nervous about labor and birth, you should know that you can heal your fears.

Many, many of my clients reported that they had “twinges of nervousness” as they approached labor, but that they overall felt prepared, trusting, and ready to go. You deserve the same.



3.   Detangle issues you have around sexuality – “Orgasmic” birth experiences are real, but relatively rare. I think that’s because so many of us grew up with tons of hangups about our bodies, being attractive, being feminine, guilty about sex, etc. 

On top of that 1 out of every 4 women report being violated sexually by age 25 or so. There are a ton of sexuality triggers just waiting to blow up, especially during labor and birth. It’s not your fault if you’re part of the silent majority that suffers sexual shame, blame, or anxiety. Just know that any work you do to release these patterns will automatically free your body of tension.

Creating new patterns in your body of sexual freedom will increase circulation, allow for more openings physiologically, make it easier to breathe, and much more FUN to give birth.

Are you intrigued? ;) Good!



4.    Address your worries around being a mom – If you’re stressed about this baby, about finances, about balancing work responsibilities, about how you can make things work given all that’s going on, let’s talk. If these concerns (or ones like them) are on your mind on any regular basis, there’s good news and bad news. 

Bad news first? Those thoughts are sending a cocktail of stress chemicals through your body every time they take the driver's seat. Which causes more tension in your body and, over time, an increased possibility of complications. 

The good news is that you really can employ a myriad of tools to manage the day to day stress that you don’t have control of (like work stress, perhaps), as well as totally dissolve the many sources of stress you do have control of.

You might not have ever believed it IS POSSIBLE TO GET RID OF STRESS, but it is. If you don’t know how to do it, enlist support. It’s going to make a major impact on how you feel – and how your body responds during birth.



5. Attend to Dad’s birth trauma – This is important! Does your baby’s father know his birth story?

There are times when you can’t attend to this directly (you are pregnant from donor sperm or are otherwise not in communication with the father), but otherwise, you need to ask Dad to investigate his own birth story, what his mom experienced before, during, and after birth, what the story was like during his siblings birth(s), etc.

I know this concept is a little more abstract, but I need you to get that Dad, and whatever is going on in his energy, is in the soup here. He’s part of the alchemical mix.

If Dad knows he’s got some birth baggage, best case scenario is he invests time to heal and process it himself. That’s what creates the best outcome during the birth of your baby. If he won’t (some men don’t get how important this is) some of the work can be done almost as if on his behalf… It’s all about sexual alchemy & healing work at its essence. This is something I'll share more information on in the future.


6. Clean up Dad’s fears, family traumas, and/or worries about being a dad – When dad is stressed, it impacts you physically. It impacts your energy. So take the time to engage some conversation with Dad about what he’s worrying about. It may not be at the forefront of his brain, so this process may take some time and attention.

Again – If Dad is willing to tackle his own fears, stressors, and traumas himself, that’s ideal. If not, make sure you feel solid on your end.





The Bottom Line: The task here one way or the other is to make sure you’re supported and feel a firm foundation underneath you as you progress through your pregnancy, that you feel healthy, that your mind is working for you (not against), and that you feel prepared – mentally, physically, & emotionally.



Out of the six steps listed, which one would do you think would be the best one to look to first? 

If you're interested in a free consultation with me click here.