Somatic birth preparation
I can provide you with mindfulness practice specific to pregnancy and birth preparation. With embodied awareness you can connect with yourself and your baby in the moment. These skillful means prepare you to track with your own inner cues and your baby during birth. Your ability to follow inner cues and to join with your baby’s as birth partner provide you with essential resources during labor.
Settle into pregnancy
I can lead you inward in awakening your inner voice to connect with your body-mind systems that prevail in pregnancy. You can:
- Breath opening through body awareness
- Integrate inner rhythms and cues
- Soften into the organs to ease into third trimester
- Energize through qi gong and toning
- Tone into the glands for alignment & hormonal resource
- Practice compassionate attention
- Practice the expanding and condensing energies of birth in guided experiential meditations
- Make deep internal connection within yourself and with your baby through developmental movements
- Find fluidity for the profound changes of your body and mind through physiological rhythms
Actively partner with your baby in birth
You can know your baby by sensing in your own body. When you experience the simple, developmental movements that your baby is doing in utero, you find your own source of mothering.
I can help you connect kinesthetically with your baby in pregnancy. Your baby’s developmental movements in utero include fluid rhythms and physiologic connections between you and your baby. As well as directly connecting you with your baby, these movements help you adapt to the big changes in your body and life.
Your baby has powerful movement resources for birth in her primary reflexes. She can fulfill these mastery activities if she has a natural birth with a head down presentation. You can give your baby a lifelong gift of meeting the challenge of birth with her own resource and flexibility. I teach these small, potent movements, so that in labor you can partner with your baby as she is coming through her birth journey.
You and your baby can actively partner in birth. These explorations foster compassion as you come to know yourself and your baby with an open heart and mind.
Alignment for easier pregnancy & birth
During pregnancy you can begin to align your body and your baby for greater ease in birth. I will teach you simple Spinning Babies activities in a home program for couples which you can begin early in your pregnancy. A home program includes solo activities for moms, and partner activities for couples. It is recommended to begin Spinning Babies by week 28-34. Earlier in the pregnancy is even better! One of the clues to good alignment is that that your body feels good, even as your baby grows.
Baby belly
Where is that little one inside you? In the last trimester a baby belly session takes clues and cues from your own experience to assess the position of your baby. It’s fine to include ultrasound information too! I will draw a baby belly, creating a tangible sense of your baby’s presence, and giving you & your partner (and big siblings!) an image of the baby in your belly. It’s a sweet imagination. Photos included!
Prepare to move into intensity of labor
- Yoga for pregnancy & labor
- Practices for working with intensity and for opening through toning, breath and movement
- Move with power and ease
- Release energy through the body into the earth
- Opening body through awareness of internal connections and parallel structures
- Increase confidence in the ability of mother and baby to birth well together
Emotional release
I can help you work through anxieties and fears of pregnancy and birth. You can release limiting patterns such as self doubt, fear of uncertainty, need to control and lack of trust. With my support as a witness and facilitator in your healing, you can meet loss and old emotional trauma with an open heart.
Heart to Heart to Heart
I provide support for you and your partner to deepen your connection in forming a new family and birthing your baby. You can arrange a private session in Heart to Heart to Heart.
Essential wellness for mother and child
Body-mind integration from the beginning