Did you notice how we didn’t refer to ‘pain relief’ in labour? Believe it or not, not all mums will describe their labour as painful, and we talk about that in more detail in our blog post called Is labour painful? So here at MummyNatal, when we talk about what a Mum may experience in labour, we like to use the phrase ‘intense sensations’, as a Mum may or may not feel her labour sensations as ‘pain’. During our weekly MummyNatal classes for expectant mums, we do something that we call ‘intense sensation practice’. This is our way of empowering expectant mums with various tools that they may like to choose from, in order to cope with the sensations they experience in labour. We talk about mindful breathing, movement, doing a body scan, mantras, visualisations, and sounding meditations amongst other things.
Of course, when we talk about the birth environment and birth choices, we may get some questions around the more ‘traditional’ or medical options for pain relief. And we’ll always answer any questions or signpost our mums to different places where they can find out more, to be able to make informed decisions. Seeing that we may not cover these points in such a detailed way in a MummyNatal class, here is some additional information that you may want to read on the topic. Continue reading