There are only three gentle breathing techniques used in HypnoBirthing. The first, Sleep Breathing, is simply a relaxation technique designed to help you enter a relaxed state so that you can continue with imagery and visualization practice.
The second breathing technique is called Slow Breathing. This breathing style is most important as it is the breathing that you will use throughout the thinning and opening phase of your birthing when you experience a uterine surge.
The third style of breathing is called Birth Breathing. It’s the technique that you will use during birthing when you are breathing your baby down through the birth path to emergence during the birthing phase. Unlike the other breathing styles, you will not actively practice Birth Breathing until the time you are almost ready to birth your baby, but it will be reviewed in detail when we handle the information on birthing.
Sleep Breathing
Oxygen is the most important fuel for the working muscles in the uterus. Your baby also needs to have a sufficient, continual supply of oxygen. That is why proper breathing is so important to your relaxation. The Sleep Breathing technique is used at the beginning of each relaxation practice to help your body gradually slip into a comfortable state of relaxation. You will want to focus your awareness on this technique early in your program.
Sleep Breathing will help you to achieve relaxation when you are practicing alone or with your birth companion. It is also one of the methods you will use to resume relaxation between uterine surges during birthing. This technique will help you to conserve energy during the thinning and opening phase of labor. For deep comfort, and to keep your body loose and limp, roll or fold a pillow under your knees so hips, joints and knees will be slightly bent. Allow your shoulders to open outward and sink into the frame of your relaxing body.
To establish a proper breathing technique for Sleep Breathing, practice the following exercise.
Technique
Just relax and settle into the comfort of the chair or sofa beneath you and let the pillows behind you support your head and neck. Now allow your head to gently lean forward toward your chest or let it rest back onto the pillows behind you.
Let your eyelids gently meet without forcing them shut. Your mouth should be softly closed with your lips touching lightly. Place the tip of your tongue at your palate where your teeth and your palate meet and feel the wonderful sense of relaxation drifting throughout your body.
Draw in a breath from your stomach. To a count of four, mentally recite “In–2–3–4” on the intake. Feel your stomach rise as you draw the breath up and into the back of your throat.
As you exhale, mentally recite “Out–2–3–4–5–6–7–8.” Do not exhale through your mouth. As you breathe out very slowly through your nose, direct the energy of the breath down and inward toward the back of your throat, allowing your shoulders to droop into the frame of your body. Breathe your body down into relaxation. Release all tension and let go.
To determine if you are doing this exercise correctly, place your left hand on your stomach and your right hand on the lower part of your chest. As you inhale, you should feel your left hand rising as though your stomach were inflating like a balloon. As you exhale, you will feel your hands fold into each other, as your chest and stomach create a crevice.
Sleep Breathing is easy to master. You will use it regularly in your classes and in your home practice. You’ll feel relaxation coming more easily and rapidly each time you do it. When you have mastered the concept, it will not be necessary for you to recite numbers or test with your hands to guide yourself into this state. After only a few times, you will be able to bring your body into a deep state of relaxation in preparation for further deepening work.
Slow Breathing
Slow Breathing involves a long, quiet, slow intake of breath from your abdomen that redirects your focus to what is happening around your baby and helps you work with each surge. It takes practice and MUST be worked on daily. A few minutes when you awaken in the morning and before you fall asleep at night should provide you ample practice.
The goal of Slow Breathing is to make your breath, both in and out, as long as possible. You will use this technique through labor to coincide with each surge.
As indicated in the illustration below, when your uterus surges, it rises. Slow breathing helps you to work in concert with that upward movement of the uterus as you breathe your abdomen up to the highest possible height—like filling an inner balloon. This maximizes the wave of the vertical muscles, causing them to work more efficiently in drawing up the lower circular muscles, and thinning and opening the cervix. The assist that this gives to both sets of muscles shortens the length of the surge, as well as the length of labor.
When you first practice this breathing pattern, you will learn that its name indicates the manner of intake—long, slow breaths.
Technique
While resting your back against pillows or lying in a lateral position, place your hands across the top of your abdomen so that your fingers barely meet. Exhale briefly to clear your lungs and nasal passages. Slowly and gradually draw in your breath to a rapid count from 1 to 20+, as though you were inflating your belly. Avoid using short intakes of breath; it can tire you and requires that you take several breaths in order to get through the surge. The slow intake to a rapid count up to 20+ and the equally slow exhalation will allow you sufficient time to work with each surge. If it is necessary for you to take a second breath during a surge, do so in the very same manner. Do not hold your breath—ever.
Keep your body still and limp—NOT STIFF—and visualize your abdomen as being similar to a crater or a bowl in which your baby is resting. The rest of your body beneath the crater is totally relaxed and still while you breathe up each surge.
While breathing in, focus your attention on your rising abdomen and bring the surge up as much as you can; visualize filling a balloon inside your abdomen as you draw in. Slowly exhale to the same count, breathing downward and outward. Visualize the balloon slowly drifting off into space. Give your breath to your baby, gently and slowly exhaling down into your vagina.
You may find at first that you will reach an intake count of only 13 to 15. This is not unusual. You’ll stretch the count more each time you do this exercise, and your count will rapidly increase to the long, slow intake. Regardless of how high a count you achieve, the technique of fully expanding the abdomen will be with you when you need it for labor. As each surge occurs, you will feel the results of your practice, taking in appropriately long, drawn-out breaths and equally long exhalations.
As with Sleep Breathing, once you have mastered the concept and the technique, you will not need to use numbers unless you prefer to keep pacing yourself to increase the count.
Birth Breathing
Birth Breathing is used when you are breathing your baby down during the birthing phase of labor. It is intended to assist the Natural Expulsive Reflex (NER) of your body to move your baby gently down to crowning and birth.
Birth Breathing is NOT pushing. Pushing can be counterproductive and actually slow down the birthing process. The concept of forced breathing is totally invalid today. It stems from an earlier time when women were generally anesthetized and unable to birth their babies. Forceps were employed to extract the baby from the vagina. When natural childbirth became popular in the late 1960s and early ’70s, women for the first time in many generations were awake, and the use of forceps dwindled. It was then thought, however, that since there was no means of extracting the baby with instruments, the baby would have to be “pushed” down through the birth path and out past the vaginal outlet. Counted breaths of 1 and 2 and 3, all the way up to 10—called “purple pushing” because the blood vessels in the mother’s face and eyes become purple from the violent pushing—became the rule of the day.
Forced pushing creates stress for the birthing mother, which is self-defeating in that it closes the sphincters of the vagina ahead of the descending baby. Any woman who attempts to simulate forced pushing will immediately verify that there is a tensing of the muscles in the lower birth path, not a release.
There has been much written about the inefficiency of forced pushing and the possible damaging effect it has on the muscles of the birthing woman’s pelvic floor, but it remains a necessary part of emergence in the minds of many caregivers and women themselves. While women who find themselves unable to push because of having had epidurals are allowed to “labor down” by letting their bodies naturally expel their babies, the woman in the next room who is birthing naturally is expected to forcefully “push her baby out.” It is an unnecessary carryover when we consider that women in comas have given birth undetected.
With Birth Breathing, there is no need for a lengthy period of hard, violent pushing during descent. Your baby’s descent will be gradual, but it will not necessarily take longer. The natural pulsations of your body will move your baby down the birth path efficiently and gently. Many moms report using only two or three Birth Breaths to bring their babies to full emergence. That’s because the sphincters at the outlet are not tense and closed. The relaxed body will naturally open for you. Birth Breathing also gives your baby the advantage of a kinder and safer birth.
Forced pushing can exhaust you and press your baby against a resistant passage that is not yet receptive to his journey. Stories of exhaustive pushing that extends over hours bear out the fact that the baby will descend when he and the birth path are ready. There is no need to rush. Would we pull a butterfly from its chrysalis? The natural birthing process has a purpose that must be respected and trusted.
Often women themselves will speak of an overwhelming urge to push taking over. If this is felt, it is also because of conditioning that stems from a deeply embedded notion that babies cannot descend on their own. We seem to be the only mammals who turn our birthings into what appears to be a gymnastic event, complete with “squat bars” and knotted ropes on which mothers can suspend themselves. This scene hardly holds a mirror up to nature. Our animal sisters elect to gently expel their babies.
A calm, gentle nudging breath can be recaptured by slowly establishing the same kind of relaxation that you used for your Sleep Breathing practice. Even if you initially feel the conditioned “urge to push,” surrendering to this impulse can totally turn your birthing around as it limits the amount of oxygen going to your baby. This can cause concern on the part of caregivers, as your baby’s heart rate can decelerate. It may lead to the very special circumstance that you’ve worked so hard to avoid. Let your baby and your body determine the pace. Breathe down into your body to relax the vaginal outlet and follow whatever lead your baby takes.
Because Birth Breathing is not one of the techniques that you will practice routinely to prepare your body for birth, we will defer the directions for this breathing technique until later in the course when we go more thoroughly into the birthing process. It is helpful, though, to consider here the rationale for Birth Breathing and contrast it with strained and forced staff-directed breathing.
Let’s consider the effect of each of the birthing styles:
|
Mother-Directed |
Staff-Directed |
|
Allows parents to maintain |
Tires mother and reduces her effectiveness |
|
Conserves mother’s energy |
Closes and constricts vaginal |
|
Provides continual supply |
Emergency intervention can result. |
|
Gently opens the birth path |
Ruptures eye and facial blood vessels |
|
Increases prospect of birthing |
Limits flow of oxygen to baby, often |
|
Perineal tissues unfold naturally |
Surrenders control of birthing |
|
Baby maintains healthy |
Contributes to tearing or the |
A pregnant woman is like a beautiful flowering tree, but take care when it comes time for the harvest that you do not shake or bruise the tree, for in doing so, you may harm both the tree and its fruit.
Peter Jackson, RN