A good friend and fellow yoga teacher once summed up a great approach to mental attitude during yoga class in three phrases: “Stay on your mat! Don’t get on someone else’s mat! And don’t let anyone else get on your mat.”
Stay on your mat: Stick to what you can actually control, which is your own experience.
Don’t get on someone else’s mat: Don’t try to copy someone else’s practice. Don’t try to copy someone else because they are thinner, faster, or more flexible. Don’t try to copy someone else who seems better or more together in some way. That is their practice and their dharma. Never try to live someone else’s story.
Don’t let anyone else get on your mat: Don’t let someone else tell you what your practice should look like, feel like, or be like. Even your teacher can’t know how a posture feels within your body. Don’t disregard your own internal intuition which says to stop, back up, or do something different. While you can choose to explore a challenge that a teacher may offer, don’t place your trust in their judgments and feelings about your practice.
These principles can also be applied to the birth experience. In the process of working with labor, the second cornerstone is this idea of staying on your mat. There are things we can control during the process of labor, and there are things we cannot. Be mindful of what you can control and what you must let go. What is actually your own experience to have, and what are you grasping for or allowing in? Control what you can control, but let go of the rest.
So what are the things you can control? Well, for starters, your own reactions. That’s decidedly challenging because it requires looking at your habitual patterns, then being willing to sit with uncomfortable situations long enough to start making different choices. A mindfulness practice is important here. This is meditation in action, where the practice of observing and seeing our thoughts more clearly gives way to a small gap, and the chance to choose a different action or to not react. As an often quoted Buddhist joke goes, “Don’t just do something. Sit there!”
Your reactions are the most important part of what can be controlled during labor. When you are conscious of your own mind, you can decide not to be annoyed by that negative birth story you may be trying hard to avoid. You can see the thoughts that arise when you hear about other people’s negative and possibly traumatic experiences. You can choose to entertain those thoughts or let them go and focus on being confident in the experience you are going to have. And you can clearly see if you are actually letting the thoughts go or if those stories are still affecting you. Just because we say we’re fine doesn't mean we are.
However, we can do more than choose our responses to other people’s comments and birth stories. If you are planning a natural, holistic birth experience, why hang around other moms who are telling stories that bring up anxious thoughts? You have choices: ask them not to share, or don’t associate with them during your pregnancy. If you don’t feel totally supported by the people around you, go find another group or establish clear boundaries around what you are willing to hear.
I’m not suggesting we avoid information or birth in ignorance. By all means, go and research the common practices where you are planning to give birth. Learn who you will be birthing with and what options are available to you. Solicit stories from people if you wish, but watch how their stories make you feel. You don’t need every gory detail of someone’s traumatic or sensational birth imprinted on your mind before your own experience. Your own birth may be completely different from theirs. And regardless, how does hearing their story help you in working with your own? It’s not as though you can scare yourself into having a good birth experience. Remember the Fear-Tension-Pain cycle?
This curation also applies to books, blogs and any other information you encounter about the birth experience. Carefully consider your sources. Is the person writing or speaking with an ulterior motive in mind (like selling a book or having an exciting story)? Is their information based on evidence or anecdotes?
If you are taking a childbirth class (which I encourage!), be sure to evaluate carefully before selecting one. Not all classes are created equal, and it can be hard to tell which classes take a supportive stance on working with your labor and which simply encourage you to “be a good patient” and follow the instructions of your care providers.
Also be mindful about who you share your birth plans with. I have often heard moms in my prenatal classes confess that they had to stop telling their families about their plans for an unmedicated birth. They were constantly met with the response, “Oh, why would you want to go through all that!?” or some variation thereof. This is not a supportive response, and I applaud my students who felt empowered enough to create their own mental shields against those judgments. (My husband also confessed that when I was pregnant, he appreciated my position in the birth field. He didn’t feel the need to defend our decisions to his non-birth-world colleagues. “She’s been teaching this stuff for years,” turned out to be a great push-back against incredulous colleagues. Then he’d stop telling them about our birth plans altogether.) All of this is to say: stay on your own mat! Notice when you can control things, and make the changes that create the most support for you and your preferences.
However, just as the perfectly conditioned marathon runner doesn’t control the weather on the day of the race, there will be things during both pregnancy and labor you don’t have control over:
The exact position of your baby when your labor begins. You can influence it, but you can’t control it fully.
Exactly when your labor will begin and how it will start (inductions can take days and are not always successful)
The judgments of other people with whom you share your birth preferences (doctors, family, friends, colleagues, and others)
Comments that strangers may make about your body shape
Whether your family is overly involved or not involved enough
The length of your labor, possible special circumstances, or birth complications which could arise.
Countless other circumstances specific to your individual life.
Given that you can’t control those things, worrying about them is a waste of time and energy. You could be spending those resources getting to know your mind and feeling confident in yourself. Being willing to speak up about your needs during labor is absolutely key to being able to work with whatever comes up.
There is one area where you both do and don’t have control during the birth process. You often cannot control the exact doctor or midwife who will attend to you during labor, unless you have chosen a solo practice OB or a homebirth midwife. That said, just as you choose which teacher’s yoga class you go to, and which studio you practice in, you can exercise discernment around who you choose as your care provider, which childbirth classes you participate in, and which hospital or birth facility you wish to enter to give birth. Studies have shown that, if mom wishes to avoid a C-section, her first consideration might be the hospital where she plans to give birth. As lead researcher and OB Neel Shah states, “the likelihood of getting a cesarean is largely driven by the choice of hospital.” Hiring additional support such as a doula could also be the difference between a birth experience that is traumatizing and one that feels workable. Choose your birth team carefully, and be aware of which door you will walk through in order to give birth. Put your “mat” down in a place where it will be easiest and most supportive for you to “practice.”
Key Takeaways:
There are certain areas of the birth process we have control over, and there are some that we do not
Spending time trying to control things which we never had control over not only wastes energy, but primes us to feel anxious and out of control in our labor and birth choices.
Sticking with our own experience helps keep us focused on what we can actually control
We can help ourselves stay in our own experience by being deliberate about who we share our preferences with, what stories we listen do ahead of labor, and whether we allow the opinions and stories of others to dictate what we want for ourselves
Choose the birth that is right for you, which isn’t necessarily the one everyone else seems to be choosing.