What is hypnobirthing?
Hypnobirthing is an antenatal or prenatal education that prepares you & your birth partner for your labour and birth.
There are 3 distinct spaces in birth and in our hypnobirthing classes we teach you how to shape and navigate them.
The first space is your mind. The second space that we cover is your body. And lastly, the third space that we teach is the birth environment.
Your mind
Your body
Your birth environment
These three spaces are so tightly interlinked that to miss a single one would reduce your antenatal learning considerably.
Your Mind
What do you know about birth already? What are your experiences of birth? Are you feeling scared and anxious or are you feeling positive and happy?
We keep unconscious blueprints about many things in our minds. It’s how we learn as human beings. However, when those unconscious blueprints have been stuffed full with scary birth stories, unrealistic depictions of birth in films and TV and limited actual understanding of the physiology of how birth works, it can have a hugely detrimental effect on how we feel, how we prepare and the decisions we make.
Whether we feel comfortable and confident also affects some major players in our hormones. So we know that labour is driven by the hormone oxytocin and that oxytocin crossing the blood-brain barrier aids in the release of endorphins, nature’s pain relief. However, adrenaline and fear block oxytocin which can lead to slower, more painful and trickier births.
It’s important then that women learn how to exchange fear for nervous excitement. How to remain calm and confident and how to create the best birth space to feel safe and loved so that the oxytocin can flow.
We do this by teaching comfort measures such as breathing techniques, self-hypnosis, visualisations and birth partner skills as well as using hypnotherapeutic MP3’s in advance of the birth.
Your Body
Are you well? Is your baby well? How has your pregnancy been progressing?
Do you understand what your body and your baby do to start labour, to progress labour and to give birth? This is important because the powerful sensations that we have running through our body during labour can feel painful. However, these feelings come with purpose and when we focus on what is actually physically happening and we understand this fully, what we feel merely becomes the path to your baby being born.
Understanding how birth physically works will also help you to understand all of the many choices that you can make about birth place, comfort measures, water birth options and who you would like to support you throughout this experience.
The Birth Environment
Where are you giving birth? What is your healthcare system like? What are your options?
Are there any factors restricting or altering your decision making processes?
Do you want a home birth or hospital birth? Are you going to encounter induction of labour? Or caesarean birth? Will you be supported by midwives or obstetricians and what effect does this have?
We teach these three distinct spaces because each one runs into the other.
How you are feeling will affect how you are birthing. Your environment and those working within that birth environment will be affecting the choices you make, the treatment you have and your perception about birth. Your options will affect how you give birth and how you give birth will affect how you are feeling about your birth.
Women deserve to have good birth stories, not ones that contain pain, fear and confusion. The mother and her birth partner can remain in complete control working together with their birth team to bring about the safe and happy arrival of their baby.
Hypnobirthing really is the only antenatal learning that looks at the whole picture — your mind, your body AND your birth environment.
It just isn’t good enough to offer a course that talks just about how the hospital works and what pain relief is on offer.
It isn’t good enough to discuss what birth looks like without really getting under the hood of what birth feels like. Or what ‘to give birth’ means to you emotionally as well as physically.
How you feel, what you know, your physical experience and who surrounds you.
It’s a wonderful, effective and respectful birth preparation course.
Watch Melanie explain how hypnobirthing works.
There is so much more to hypnobirthing than just breathing techniques. It includes birth evidence and information, hypnobirthing MP3's, birth rights, understanding how your mind affects your body and then all of your birth options. It supports both physiological birth and c-section birth.
“Hypnobirthing for me was a conscious decision to press the override button on all the regular chat about birth experiences. I wanted to breathe positivity into the experience, believing that’s a better muscle relaxant than fear! Melanie’s classes didn’t disappoint and had a real present and lasting effect on my birth experience.”
— Kelly-Ann
Want to learn hypnobirthing?
We offer classes in groups or privately in London, or you can take our online course from anywhere in the world
London Hypnobirthing
We teach hypnobirthing classes in London in person with our One Day Group Hypnobirthing Class. It is £247 for you and your chosen birth partner.
Private Hypnobirthing
If you’d rather prepare for your labour and birth solo with Melanie you can do so in the privacy of your own home if you live in London or via the Zoom platform wherever you are around the globe. It is £397 or £297 for Zoom.
Online Hypnobirthing
We have a full Online Antenatal Hypnobirthing Class that you can follow in your own time anywhere around the world. It is only £39/$49.