You are now 36-40+ weeks into your pregnancy. My goodness, the steps on your Heroine’s Journey through pregnancy and birth are pushing you down the path faster and faster. Steps #1-7 seemed to go pretty slowly but not now. Heaps of women give birth between now and ‘due date’ of approximately 40 weeks. In fact, 80% of all pregnant women give birth two weeks either side of their due date.
Something else is happening in your Mind. The Baby Brain is more noticeable. At 24 weeks your head was pretty clear, you probably felt good. Your belly wasn’t too big but that’s changing now. At 32 weeks you felt your baby grow every day along with your uterus. By 36 you feel you’ll burst. Your baby doesn’t have much run to roll around anymore. You can feel your baby’s back, head, butt and tell the difference between a kick (foot) and scratch (fingers). You might have more pressure on your bladder and begin to have back pain if your baby is moving into your pelvis. Sleeping patterns change and your Mind can feel foggier which is normal because you’re moving into the ‘nesting’ period.
Characteristics Step #10
- You now move back into the ‘ordinary world’ .. believe it or not!
- This is ‘the road back’
- You can experience ‘a re-dedication to change’
On your Heroine’s Journey, you now dig deeper. You feel the urgency of the coming birth. You rededicate every moment of every day to become really skilled. You can look back to earlier steps where you faced reluctance, obstacles, the enemy within and without and clearly see that you’d be a different person today had you held yourself back.
Now with your birth skills, you can see how you will do everything in your power to cope, manage, work through, deal with stay on top of and in control of your responses to what is happens inside and outside you. You know birth will be hard work. You might not entirely feel confident that your Birthing Better skills will work as well as you hope but you feel different now than when you met your skepticism and resistance in earlier Steps
Re-dedication to change
Something magical happens in Step #10. In Step #1 you resided in the ‘ordinary world’ and then through a series of steps you took a journey into the ‘special world’. During those steps in the ‘special world’ you sometimes wondered whether you would return to you! This sense of self-alienation is part of being pregnant … it’s called Baby Brain for a good reason. You are now part of two and your focus over the next few years will be deeply attuned to the ‘other’ … your baby. Your brain is oriented to ‘other’ now.
That ‘other’ … your baby + your baby brain .. have to exist in the ‘ordinary world’. Birth will require you to be very, very present. Being present in the NOW is really what ‘re-dedication to change’ means.
When you develop your birth skills and know you will use them you recognize yourself as a more skilled you. You now see yourself as more mature, capable, confident, assertive … and you can tap into that primal Woman energy of giving birth. You know yourself as All Women. Yet you also know your birth will be unique to you and that’s your major concern … your birth!
Were you to lack skills you also tap into that primal Woman? You know yourself as All Suffering Woman. That does not feel good because you feel trapped in an experience you can’t get out of. This leads to the shame, guilt, blame, anger and disappointment so many women feel about their birth. ‘I should have had a better birth!’ But something else happens when women experience an alienation after birth, it’s hard to both find yourself and put so much attention to your baby. You can feel your baby is robbing you of yourself.
Together we can stop this alienation!
The mental shift we need to have in the collective mind of expectant parents is profound. There is this HUGE gap in the childbirth conversation … we’ve just plain left out ‘YOU NEED TO BECOME SKILLED FOR ALL BIRTHS!”
Skills have been treated as basically non-essential or only for use to achieve a pain-free or natural birth.
Yet, in Step #10 you are experiencing the profound joy and hard work of learning skills so you can work through your baby’s birth journey no matter where you are, with whom or what is happening to or around you. You are fully discovering the Truth … giving birth is an activity and that you can learn, practice and use a set of simple interwoven skills at each moment as your birth unfolds. You are very close to completing your Heroine’s Journey!
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