Calmbirth…Making Birth Choices Possible

By Kate

This thank YOU has been a long time coming!

I want to say thank you for building birth education workshops focused on calm, empowered choices for families. My midwife at RNSH suggested we attend and I immediately connected to what you teach, promote and inspire in childbirth.

Both my husband and I attended one of Peter Jackson’s workshops back around January 2013 at your education centre in Bowral. I think I was about 35 weeks pregnant and had a very open mind to birth and had a clear vision that birthing my daughter would be completely life changing.

I was never aware of birth choices or even that midwifery existed until I fell pregnant and rang the hospital as my GP instructed I do to book in. I was given 3 options and decided that the Midwifery Group Practice, MGP, sounded like my kind of support, as at the time we could not afford to pay for home-birth or a doula so the MGP sounded perfect.

Your weekend of stories, information and meditation techniques greatly impacted our birth, especially for my husband who at that point did not have a strong idea about what his role was going to be in the whole process. Having learnt skills for life through the Calmbirth program he now does meditation with our daughter every week!

What I took with me and into the birth was the clear function of the muscles that worked and stretched during labour, I thought I’d picture waves or a flower or some visual like that, but the strongest visualisation was the balloon and ball Peter used to demonstrate the muscles working to get baby down and out.

I laboured at home allowing my body to be pulled down toward the earth, relaxing into the contractions, doing this felt really good. We went into the birth centre when I felt I could no longer cope on my own, I was about 5cm when arriving and kept an open mind to the length of time I would be labouring. I went from 5cm to 10 in 2hrs which I felt pretty chuffed about!

I wanted a water birth as I was so drawn to it and loved being suspended in water feeling weightless, I swam all through my pregnancy so it felt good to be held in water. As my body took over I remember going into myself and meeting my daughter seeing her hair and body, we were working together in this process and it was mind-blowing, even now it spins me out that I met her before she was born. The deep meditative state I learnt from your techniques and meditation guides was a powerful tool. Birth was so empowering and mystical I still am impacted by it 4 years later.

From this experience I have found my vocation, I am in first year Midwifery and looking forward to the day I can help support and guide mothers in the same way you helped guide and empower us.

I want to say THANK YOU,  your presence in the birth world is so important, I’ve now encouraged all our friends to attend your Calmbirth workshops and we hope to come back when we have our next baby!