Today, as I type these words, my two boys are seven and 11. They were both born at home, in 2013 and 2017, with two midwives and their dad in attendance. Their births were active, meaning that I moved almost the entire time via walking, yoga and floating/ flowing around in a birthing pool.
As a prenatal yoga instructor, I like to share these techniques with the moms in class by incorporating the poses I used into the flow of the class. Furthermore, I like to provide resources outside of class that can support women in their pregnancy and birth journey.
Thus, below is an updated version of the original list of resources that I used to prepare for active, natural home births. I hope that these recommendations can enhance and empower your pregnancy and birth.
Recommended Web Sites:
Spinning Babies is "an approach to optimize the physical relationship between the bodies of the mother and baby for the easing of childbirth." Spinning Babies, led by a midwife with 35 years of experience, offers yoga and informational videos, literature on birth anatomy and optimal fetal positioning, tips on working with a breech baby, daily self-care activities for expecting moms, yoga and stretching routines and more.
Baby Center is full of information - I see it as my pregnancy encyclopedia and use it in the same way that I use the book What to Expect When You're Expecting. It offers straight-forward information, and because knowledge is power, it became an excellent way to bolster and empower myself as a pregnant woman.
Yogaglo is actually a yoga app that offers many types of yoga, including pre and postnatal. I began using it for its vinyasa classes when I had my first son and have been using it daily ever since.
Recommended Books:
Active Birth is a fantastic, hands-on resource for expecting mothers, prenatal yoga instructors and those who work in the baby delivery field. It provides lots of effective, easy exercises that can act as an on-going resource. Author Janet Balaskas founded the Active Birth Centre, located in the United Kingdom, and worked closely with the famed French obstetrician Michel Odent. Both the author and Odent work to fight for the most natural means of labor possible for the benefit of women worldwide.
Birthing From Within was recommended to me by my prenatal yoga instructor. It is interactive, offering simple art projects that explore deep feelings, cultivate creativity, poses lots of questions to prompt exploration of feelings and short, intriguing, thoughtfully written chapters that make reading it a breeze. My husband and I read it and did the activities together.
Bountiful, Beautiful, Blissful... YES! I LOVE this book and author/Kundalini yogi Gurumukh! When I became pregnant, I abandoned my Kundalini yoga practice, because I did not know how to do it in a pregnancy-friendly way. Then I found this book. It changed everything! The book offers potent, intention-based, active, moving meditations synched with mantra and breath. It's fantastic not just for yoga instructors or Kundalini lovers but for all pregnant women. Along with Birthing from Within, this is one of my top picks!
The Pregnancy Journal: A Day-to-Day Guide to a Healthy and Happy Pregnancy is an uplifting daily reader to read with your partner and even your children. Mothers can log information such as weight, inches around the belly, cravings and mood. This makes it a sweet piece of memorabilia.
Spiritual Midwifery was one of the first books that I read in my first pregnancy. It's a compilation of true birth stories attended by home birth midwife Ina May Gaskin, founder of The Farm Midwifery Center in Tennessee and is simple, moving, raw, positive, uplifting, refreshing. It brings the light and love back to birthing. The stories remove the fear, darkness, complication and exaggeration associated with birth, without diminishing the intensity and challenge of it. It shows the strength of women who own their births and make their births their own. This is a beautiful companion for those who feel that all they hear about labor and delivery are negative, scary stories. Let it be your light!
The Birth Partner: A Complete Guide to Childbirth for Dads, Doulas and and All Other Labor Companions is what Eric read during my second pregnancy, and a book we read together with my first. Having a partner who understands everything there is to know about birth and labor, from the good, the bad and all things in between, can form a team-like bond.
Recommended DVDs:
Prenatal Kundalini Yoga & Meditation is the accompanying DVD to the above book, Bountiful, Beautiful, Blissful, by the same yoga instructor. What I love: It is 108 minutes long (108 is a sacred number in yoga) and is spiritual, active, full of variety, meditative without being boring, purposeful, full of poses and sequences that are interesting and useful. Plus, the music adds to the positive experience!
The Business of Being Born is sad, infuriating and eye-opening. It talks about the "business" of birth and how labor evolved from a purely instinctual, quiet, woman-led, woman-centered, sacred event from a routine, male-dominated industry. It offers a new perspective to the all-too-routine modern-day birthing interventions and procedures, which are indeed necessary at times but often overused.
Orgasmic Birth is... entertaining and inspiring? When I first watched it, I thought, "Maybe this will happen to me!" It did not, LOL! Regardless, it's awe-inspiring and, forgive me for saying, but it makes me laugh. And laughing is the always a good thing!
Recommended Online Courses:
Core Exercise Solutions by Dr. Sarah Duvall offers a wealth of in-depth information pertaining to the pelvis, pregnancy and postpartum. I discovered this just last year and recommend it to professionals as well as individuals seeking self-knowledge and understanding.