A brief note on "not wanting to talk about it" as well as less brief notes on Birth, pain and musings on the possibility that birth can be pain-free.

I do not wish to talk about how messed up the system is.

Instead, I wish to maximise what precious time I have on this earth, telling the truth about birth. The truth about our bodies, and the truth about how powerful we really are. I don’t actually know how powerful we are. No-one does. That’s the beauty. All I know is that it we are powerful to a limitless degree, which we are constantly discovering and uncovering new waves of strength and capacity.

Birth is powerful. Women are powerful. Mothers are powerful.

We don’t have to do anything to realise this. Other than to realise it, through first opening to the possibility that it could true.

We don’t have to sit in self limiting beliefs. We don’t have to suffer.

When I say that we don’t have to suffer, I am in no way implying that we will never experience pain. Pain is part of the human experience.

And we don’t always have to suffer with pain. Suffering is created when we resist reality, when we do not accept what is happening. There is a formula here – suffering = pain x resistance. No resistance means no suffering. It doesn’t mean no pain though. Pain is our body telling us something. It is the result of a process that is happening. And also, I know that there are women who have experienced birth without pain. So although I wouldn’t say I experienced no pain in my first birth, I remain open to that possibility with my next birth. I also wouldn’t use the word ‘pain’ to describe my labour and birth experience. I would say 100% that the sensations I experienced were at times incredibly intense, and at times I wondered how long it would take to decrease in intensity, and I remember thinking I have never wanted to lie down so much in my life, and lying down in that moment certainly did make the sensations very painful so I didn’t lie down for very long – sometimes for a minute or less before the next contraction came and I sprung back up onto all fours with incredible speed in order to avoid the enhanced pain.

Looking back I think it really helped me when I had the embodied experience (a few years before becoming pregnant) of realising that I am not only my physical body – but a complex web of interconnectedness, comprised of constant moving energy, or life force, which runs through everything. It is perhaps then the logical next step to experience pain merely as an energetic force running through the body that I inhabit.

I am not talking about disassociation (I am not saying that is wrong, either). But I am talking about watching the sensations, and not attaching to them. You do not become it, and you do not get consumed by it. You allow it to run through you. And therefore its grasp is weaker. Attaching to the pain, feeling victim to it, feeling woeful, self-pitied, and desparate for it to end, will certainly make its grasp much stronger. And so, this is why I remain open to the possibility that labour and birth can certainly be pain – free. If it is possible to extract yourself from the pain enough for it to become less intense, then perhaps it is possible to detach yourself enough for it not to register on the pain scale whatsoever. Although, as I said before, the word ‘pain’ is not really applicable here. The word pain is used in our culture as something that is gratuitous and needs to stop and be fixed so we can get on with ‘things’. We treat our bodies like they are somehow flawed, or like an old clunky 70s desktop computer with a virus that stops us from using it, something unfortunate and unnecessary that needs to be overcome so that we can get back on and start doing the things we need to do. But when we see pain as an intelligent communication strategy from our body, it changes our relationship to it. It is a necessary part of the process. In terms of breaking a leg, it tells us that we have an injury that needs care, attention and rest. In terms of giving birth, in simplest terms, it tells us that our baby is coming. The finer details of which are individual to each and every woman giving birth but can be crudely summarised as a set of surges, culminating in an expulsive stage and resulting in a baby emerging.

So, there we have it. Some of my thoughts that I thought I would share. I hope it is has been interesting to you, or at the very least am insight into how I view birth. It is a pleasure to share.