I want to thank you for passing on your wisdom and knowledge of child birth and to share my birth story with you as it was the most amazing and beautiful experience. Words just don’t describe the overwhelmingly blissful feelings that I have towards that moment.
Nick and I found your course to be inspiring and it gave me the boost that I needed to believe that I could do this. For some reason I had always thought that I would die when it came to childbirth – no rational reason for this, just fear. I walked away from your course believing that I (we) could do this, my body is built for it and I had to trust it and surrender to it.
I religiously read your course book and the Ina May Gaskin book and meditated with the CD’s. I have always been a visual person and had already started to form a really strong visualisation of our birth and how I anticipated it would happen. The hard part for me was to try and trust my visualisation and that my mind won’t deceive me when the time came. I had this cynical part of my brain constantly saying to me ‘you don’t really believe this mind over matter stuff, you may be able to do this but you may not’. I felt as prepared (and unprepared) as I could be and my mantra in the lead up was to just surrender to the moment, pain cannot kill you, it will not last forever.
The Doctors diagnosed us as being IUGR and a high risk pregnancy because of our baby's size, the likely hood that she might become distressed during labour and my heart condition. I called you and spoke to you about how they had mentioned that there was a very real possibility that we might need an emergency caesarean and to be induced – which was my worst fear! Your advice to me was to take every moment as it came, to visualise the perfect outcome and to remain calm during the birth.
It turned out that positive thinking, the belief that I could birth my baby and the ability to remain perfectly calm avoided us going down that avenue and our dear little girl, Elliot was born on 8 April 2011 with no pain relief, there was virtually no pain, just intense surges!!
Another thing that I found astonishing was that when I was pregnant I would wake up every morning and tell my belly that it only had six hours to be out, no more, no less (because of my heart condition) and our labour time was recorded as 5 hours and 56 minutes – that is just unbelievable!
Birth was such a remarkable experience, I did this drug free and enjoyed every minute of it. I would love the opportunity to do it all again sometime soon hopefully! If I have trouble getting back to sleep after night feeds with Elli, I think of our birth as this has become my happy place with thanks to you! Thank you for equipping me with the tools and knowledge to trust in myself, Nick and Elli – it was truly the most amazing and happy experience of my life.
Nikki, Nick and Elli