Annette said:
‘You asked about my pelvis – I consider it to be a gynecoid pelvis, with a “normal” sacrum. Looking back I think the birth didn’t happen due to muscular tension in the soft pelvis, rather than the structure of my bony pelvis. It would have been useful for me to really find positions that kept me open.
What I had been taught about positions (during my training, yoga, childbirth prep classes) was mainly to stay upright and mobile and change positions frequently.’
Wintergreen responses:
‘Why do you consider your pelvis to be this name? To ‘consider’ something and to have self-knowledge are not necessarily the same thing. When we feel our own shape, we don’t have to name it. It just is what we feel.
Inside all of us is both the inside of the boney hole and the tissue holding things together. There are many women with lots of space in the boney hole who do have very tight soft tissue. If that is your body then did you work on it enough using the Internal Work skills? And now you know (if this comes up next time) that you absolutely must find a way to override your internal tension by:
- Massaging to soften all the internal soft tissue inside your baby’s birth canal
- Turning your mind into the sensations inside your pelvis
- Working on finding subtle positional changes that keep your pelvis mobile, create space and softening inside yourself by intent.
Curious that you never found positions that kept you open from The PK. Why? But don’t despair you’re certainly not alone. This is common when women who don’t get into their bodies but rather take information from elsewhere and interpret this knowledge as though it has meaning without really experiencing it. In other words, finding what positions that keep you open are often subtle positional moves so you’re both aware of how open your body pelvis feels and how soft the inside of your vaginal feels like.
We often don’t think about the top part of our body in regards to the bottom part and how any position of the top part of our body can open and close the pelvis. We certainly don’t think about how every position of our legs impacts our pelvis but they do. The benefits of the Birthing Better Childbirth online birthing classes is that you will learn these skills so your pelvis is demystified.
Over the years I’ve heard a zillion women say exactly what you have said: ‘I was told to stay upright, mobile and change positions’. I met with Andrea (one of the midwives today) and she says she hears that a great deal from women who do pregnancy yoga.
When these skills developed in the early 1970s, it was from these general remarks like ‘just relax’ that we became curious to solve the reality that so many of us found challenging in our births. We had to learn where, when and how to specifically relax. Without these skills, too often women who are standing up get hung up in the 2nd stage. Too many women who squatted got on hands and knees, or were semi-recumbent or leaning forward ended up with a failure to progress.
Too many of us didn’t progress in labour with these ‘position’ formulas that actually didn’t work and Birthing Better families wanted to know why. The ‘why’ we didn’t progress in labor directly had to do with our own unique body and that’s why we spend time to have people work through what positions keep them open and how positions impact our baby.
Remember … at every single moment of time our body is in some position or posture. At every moment we can find ways to stay open often with subtle postural changes of our upper body or legs or become closed or else we go blank and ignore ourselves. It’s a learning process.
Because you didn’t discover how to stay open when you were sitting, standing, walking, lying, kneeling, then you didn’t make choices on how your baby responded to these positions which are the skills contained in the 5 phases of contractions and bell-shaped curve in the Birthing Better online birthing classes. Instead, you relied on these very broad concepts: stay upright, mobile and change positions’. These concepts have led to more medical interventions than people can understand and this is something for another discussion’.
Birthing Better is housed in Common Knowledge Trust