balancing your emotions
Giving birth and becoming a mother may be one of the biggest transitions you ever experience. While your baby is now outside your body, there is still an intricate connection between the two of you. Your energy and emotional systems are not yet separate and won’t be for a while. To set the stage for a satisfying and even blissful recovery, make choices that reflect your delicate, new relationship. Your baby’s nervous system is developing now, and yours is recalibrating. Having your home as calm and peaceful as possible will provide the ideal sanctuary at this time. On every level, you are adapting to an enormous cascade of changes—energetically, hormonally, structurally, and organically—in a short period of time. Swells of emotion, while they can be unpredictable and disconcerting, are absolutely normal at this time. This chapter will give you the nuts and bolts of what you need to understand about your hormones and emotions during this transition.
PROTECTING THE MOTHERBABY
There is a word in Swahili, mamatoto, which means “motherbaby.” This word reflects the understanding that, in the early postpartum months, mother and baby are interconnected and interdependent physically, energetically, and spirituality.
Similarly, Argentinian psychologist Laura Gutman uses the terms mommybaby and babymommy to emphasize that, while now physically separate, a baby and its mother are still so connected in the months after birth that using separate words to define them doesn’t work. Mother and baby are still intricately linked and do not exist without each other. They are defined by one another. A baby’s health depends on its mother; a mother’s health depends on her baby. The baby is a reflection of its mother’s psyche and is defined only in relationship to its environment that, early on, is mother. This interdependent union is different from any other bond. As such, it has specific and basic instructions dictated as much by physiology as by intuition or ancestral wisdom.
Even our term fourth trimester suggests a time where the baby is as dependent on the mother as it was during the first three trimesters. Of course, after birth, the baby is separate from us physically. However, as Laura Gutman describes in Maternity, Coming Face to Face with Your Own Shadow:
This newly born body is not just substance. A subtle, spiritual body exists as well. While physical separation does take place, a bond belonging to another plane persists. Even while separated, the newborn and his mother remain in a state of emotional fusion. This infant emerged from his mother’s physical and spiritual viscera and is still a part of the emotional surroundings in which he was submerged. While development of the intellect has not yet begun, the infant preserves subtle intuitive and telepathic skills that utterly bind him to his mother’s soul.
Some care is now being taken to ease the abrupt transition for the baby from inner world to outer world. More hospitals allow babies to stay in the room after birth and encourage skin-to-skin contact. Lotus birth, where the umbilical cord is not cut and the placenta is left intact after the birth, has become more popular as a way to honor the connection and soften disruption of that connection. Nevertheless, the physical separation occurs, while emotional and spiritual fusion remain.
Because this interconnectedness seems so miraculous and a bit foreign to us, videos circulate on social media about women whose babies were not breathing but then “came to life” when kept in contact with their mothers. Of course a new baby would be recharged and revived by its mother, the source of its physical, emotional, and spiritual life. I have witnessed the power of this motherbaby connection in reverse.
Community Stories:
Alison
It’s not just babies who need their mothers or can be revived by them. Alison, a mother for whom I served as a doula, had a C-section and her baby was taken to the observation nursery immediately afterward. I went with Alison from the operating room back to her recovery room. Minutes and then hours went by as she waited for her baby. She continued moaning as if contracting and began to wail, describing the pain as worse than her labor pain. The nurses kept coming in to increase the dosage of her pain medication. Nothing was providing relief. Sensing that her body was yearning for her baby and distraught at how long her perfectly healthy baby was being “observed,” I kept calling the nursery asking for him to be brought back up to her room. I held her hand as she screamed and cried in anguish, pleading for more pain meds, but there was nothing more they could give her. Sure enough, the moment her baby was brought to her, her pain subsided. She immediately stopped crying and the contractions waned.
A mother’s body needs her new baby. Physically, energetically, and spiritually, there is a rupture when a new baby is taken far away from its mother and vice versa, so we must do our best to heed the wisdom of the motherbaby, to create conditions for the motherbaby to thrive.
An unwanted separation of mother and baby after delivery creates an enormous amount of stress on both the mother and the baby. This stress can create difficulty for bonding and breastfeeding. When mother and baby are together after a physiological birth, these initial hours have been called the golden hours, because of the surge of love hormones that floods the atmosphere, blessing everyone in it. The nervous systems of mother and the baby are signaling each other, conveying levels of safety or levels of stress.
Interventions like medication or mechanical or surgical delivery interrupt the motherbaby field. A difficult or traumatic delivery is also a rupture to the motherbaby system. Chapter 9 gives more specific instructions on how to work with births that need healing.
One way to support the thriving of the motherbaby unit is to make sure that the energy of the birth process is complete. It will help the mother to feel more grounded, oriented, and present, so she can respond and attune to her baby’s evolving needs.
Completing the Birth Energy
Just as we have physical bodies made of bones, muscles, and joints, we also have energetic bodies. The energetic body cannot be touched directly, but it can be felt. This powerful circuitry is what both yoga and traditional Chinese medicine work to affect. They unblock stuck energy passing through these channels and strengthen our ability to carry energy through our system, so our immune, endocrine, and nervous systems are hearty and resilient.
The raw energy of birth is magnificent. In order to access and channel the power and force necessary to give birth, a woman’s energy fields expand. Paralleling the downward physical movement required to push a baby out, birth energy moves from top to bottom during birth. Women are pulling cosmic energy down through their bodies, into the earthly, material realm.
The birth process itself is a powerful downward process, and this forceful downward movement requires that both the physical body and the energetic body open to a greater degree than ever before. The lower energy centers are opened to near maximum. Just as many women may not have considered the physical impact that this process may set in motion, most of us haven’t considered what will happen from an energetic standpoint either.
While it can seem vague and intangible, especially in a culture that does not include the language of energy and spirit in most health conversations, the expansion of the energy field and its changed shape in the birth process is real. After giving birth, women need to first complete the birth energy, helping it flow all the way through their systems. Then they need to assist their energy field in returning to a comfortable size. The visualizations, “Completing the Birth Cycle” and “Shrinking the Birth Field,” guide you in creating these shifts to preserve motherbaby harmony.
We may be unaccustomed to acknowledging the power of our energy field, but working with it has tangible effects. As a bodyworker, I combine energy work with physical touch to help women complete the birth-energy cycle. The motherbaby physiology is designed for unmedicated vaginal birth. Therefore when births take other directions, there are often unfinished physiological processes that parallel the unfinished energetic processes. I have worked on many women who have delivered babies via cesarean section and even up to fifteen years post-birth when I touch their scar, they have experienced the taste of anesthetic, the anger at a flippant or unkind doctor, and the excruciating sensation of not being numb enough on one side of the incision when going back into the birth experience. It’s also not uncommon for women who delivered via C-section to experience uterine contractions during this process. The body has cellular memory of birth as a downward process with uterine contractions, cervical expansion, and stretching of the vaginal tissues. When birth happens another way, the body’s physiological memory is thwarted.
Babies who are born via cesarean section or with mechanical help, such as with forceps or vacuum extraction, also often have unfinished movements. They weren’t able to do the pushing movement with their feet, the first movement of spinal extension under the pubic bone, or receive the cranial massage from the pressure of the vaginal walls. These reflexes and impulses are a very important beginning part of human development. There are many modalities that specialize in helping babies recover these steps, including BodyMind Centering, Biodynamic Craniosacral work, the Anat Baniel method, Feldenkrais, and Somatic Experiencing. Giving babies support in completing their birth experience can affect everything from colic and sleep patterns in the short term to motor skills and emotional development in the long term.
Whatever kind of birth you had, whether heartening or heartbreaking, or somewhere in between, engage this simple process of completing the birth cycle to give all parts of you the chance to move forward together into the sacred window.
COMPLETING THE BIRTH CYCLE
Begin with an intention and a prayer. Lodge this prayer in your mind, heart, and womb space. Ask that light or spirit or God remove all that does not belong to you. Ask grace to help release the birth energy and whatever is in its way, moving it down and out. Acknowledge its power and all the ways it helped you. Visualize a stream of bright light passing from your crown down through all of energy centers and out through your vagina, clearing whatever is in the way of this light traveling freely through. Allow whatever is old, unnecessary, or not yours to go with the light out and down into the earth. You can begin this process two to three days after the birth, and continue daily for the first two weeks. But you can also do this anytime. If you are reading this book years after giving birth, I suggest that you call to mind a memory from when you gave birth. Call that memory forth in your body, and when that moment is clear in your mind’s eye, call in the divine energy or life force and allow it to move through you.
During birth, your energy field expanded as much as it probably ever will in your life. That expanded field is helpful in allowing you to open to greater wisdom and strength than normally available. For day-to-day life and new mothering, it is important to restore your energy field to a manageable size.
SHRINKING THE BIRTH FIELD
• Close your eyes and imagine the space that you are occupying and your energy field. There is no right or wrong here. Feel into it intuitively. Feel your physical body and then your energy body all around you.
• Imagine this light-space shrinking and coming closer, back toward your skin, until you can feel yourself in an egg-shaped container of light that is protective and nurturing.
• Imagine this dense and loving golden light is nourishing you with the love and connection that you need.
• And then move one more layer in, toward your skin, and imagine being lightly draped in a gossamer net. Feel the contours of your skin and relax into your own body. Your intention to return to the material realm through your physical body will help ground you.
What is required energetically at birth—expansiveness, transcendence, and openness—is quite different from what is required of women postpartum—presence, groundedness, steadfastness. If we can gently assist our energy field in returning to a comfortable size and guide the birth energy out and through, we will experience more focused awareness and less overall confusion and disorientation.
In addition to the size of the birth field changing, the concentration and distribution of energy also changes during birth. The upper centers, which connect us to universal energy, become open and receptive. The lower centers also become supercharged, connecting us to the earth, our ancestry, and to our basic sense of safety and belonging. The energy center at our solar plexus, the place of individual expression, shrinks as we give life to another being. At the moment of giving birth, our energy system forms an hourglass configuration; we are highly receptive to transcendental connection and available for an experience of universal consciousness—we have a wide-open crown. At the moment we are bringing life into the world, we are offered the possibility of entering into contact with the source of life itself. Likewise, at the base we are wide open. We are offered the opportunity to connect to the earth, the ground of being, our physical home.
The process of consolidating our energy postpartum requires that we seal the energy at the pelvis and the crown of the head. When the energy centers are dialed open, they are more vulnerable and exposed. As part of the reintegration process after birth, the lower two centers corresponding to the pelvic floor, cervix, and womb need support to come back into balance as well. This is true no matter how the birth went. Often if women have had a revelatory birth experience, there may be an inner hesitancy to seal their system back up, lest they lose contact with the bliss and transcendence that they encountered during the birth. On the other hand, if a woman had a difficult birth experience, the two lower chakras may seem vague and distant.
In yoga, major energy centers are called chakras, from the Sanskrit word that means “circle” or “wheel.” They are located along the spine and correspond to nerve plexes in the physical body. They are associated with emotional and spiritual qualities. In most systems there are seven of them. The first chakra is the root, located for women either at the perineum or the cervix, related to the whole pelvic floor. It is associated with stability, security, and connection to our tribe. The second chakra in women is located in the womb and the sacrum. It is the center of our creativity and sexuality. The first and second chakras are the energy centers that are most affected by birth, as birth occurred in their territory.
Whatever unresolved experiences, physical or energetic, that have lingered in that territory can be shaken loose and reactivated during birth. The seventh chakra, or crown chakra, relates to our connection to our higher selves and to the Divine.
The necessity for protecting and sealing the lower energy centers is consistent with the way that many cultures use heat and contact after birth to cocoon the mother (see more in the “Mother Warming” section in chapter 6). In East Africa, many women sit over scalding hot steam right after giving birth. From a Western medical perspective, that would be seen as creating more blood flow and potentially leading to swelling. However, this East African practice uses heat to help seal the energy openings. The belly wrapping used in countries all over the world, from Java to Brazil, has both physical and energetic purposes. The rebozo, a fabric wrap from Mexico, is used not just to help a woman’s organs be firm and protected, but also to give a woman a sense of her personal boundaries. Many cultures insist that new mothers stay indoors and limit visitors, so that they have time to harmonize their physical and energetic bodies.
Fig. 9: Birth hourglass
If the birth experience organizes our energy body like an hourglass (fig. 9), the postpartum reorganization looks like a seedpod (fig. 10). We begin to close up the top and the bottom, the crown and the root, so we can reconnect with our own sense of personal identity in our middle centers. We are learning how to feel ourselves as an individual while at the same time being intimately connected to another individual. This transition will happen on its own as it follows the natural fluctuation of how all of life works, a constant pulse between expansion and contraction; however, if we are aware of this process as it is happening, we can encourage and savor each stage.
Fig. 10: Birth seedpod
Honoring Your Womb Space
There are some symbolic gestures that we can take as remembrances of the sacred power of our womb that just birthed life. Especially at this time of purification, restoration, and renewal after childbirth, it is strengthening to have reminders of the power of all of life that is born through the womb space. I suggest that each new mom choose a bowl to eat from that is hers only. The bowl itself is a symbol of the womb. Committing to being sustained from this bowl and not sharing what is in it allows a new mother to maintain a sense of dignity and boundaries. This is not a denial of the motherbaby, but a nod to the need for us to be sustained and nurtured, so we can stay tuned in. As mothers, we share and give so much that it is important to maintain our individuality in small yet significant ways. Another suggestion is to have a bowl with water and a flower in it on your bedside table, mantel, or altar space.
WHAT EXACTLY IS HAPPENING WITH MY HORMONES?
Of course, the changes we experience during pregnancy and birth encompass more than physical and energetic changes: they also include hormonal changes. During pregnancy, you not only grew a baby inside you, but you also grew an organ—the placenta. After you deliver the placenta, your hormones start to shift dramatically. In the first day or two after delivery, you will probably experience an exhilarating high. No matter how your baby was born, what satisfaction and accomplishment it is to finally meet your baby! It is normally after the first forty-eight hours, as the endorphins start to wear off, that women begin to experience fluctuations in moods and emotions. This is what is labeled the “baby blues.” Because there is so much information and fear out there about postpartum depression, many women panic, thinking that this weepy time will last forever. For most women, these cascading emotions normalize at around two weeks postpartum.
From the time the placenta was birthed to when breast milk comes in, a woman’s estrogen and progesterone levels plummet to the levels of a menopausal woman. Progesterone, the calm and chill hormone that you became accustomed to in pregnancy, goes offline, so the hormones needed for breastfeeding can come online more quickly. The process of hormonal calibration continues for months, as the body works to get the uterus back to normal size and to produce an increasing amount of breast milk for a growing baby. The body is flushing itself of excess fluids that store now-unnecessary hormones. One of the reasons that new mothers are encouraged to stay warm and sweat a lot (see “Mother Warming” in chapter 6) is so this process of flushing can be thorough and complete. Tears can also be a part of this process of elimination.
Rather than understanding the role of each specific hormone, it is important to understand how they work in coordination with each other. For this purpose, I love the way that Dr. Claudia Welch, in her book Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life, divides hormones into two categories: yin sex hormones and yang stress hormones. Our body only has so much energy and raw material with which to create hormones. Because our survival is the fundamental need, our body will always prioritize the making of stress hormones that are critical to our survival. Many things register as a greater threat to our nervous system than they actually are. Perceived threat results in a cascade of stress hormones being released. If we are under stress, our body will direct resources to our survival responses, which are related to stress, rather than to our pleasure and sex circuitry, which is related to our ability to relax, bond, and breastfeed.
Fortunately the converse is also true: if sex hormones are being produced, the body is less likely to produce stress hormones. So if a woman feels safe, secure, and protected, her body will produce the sex hormones that reinforce this feeling of relaxation, which, in turn, helps with milk production and the healing process.
The Hormones You Need to Know About
Sex Hormones
The sex hormones are the feel-good hormones. Women’s dominant sex hormones are estrogen and progesterone. Both are produced in the ovaries until, early in the second trimester of pregnancy, the placenta takes over the hormone production and they are produced by the placenta.
Estrogen is the juiciest female hormone, giving women our trademark sex characteristics, like voluptuous breasts, wide hips, and full lips. During pregnancy, estrogen maintains the strong uterine lining, increases the blood circulation, and acts as the master regulator of the other key hormones. After giving birth, estrogen levels drop and stay low for as long as a woman is breastfeeding. Estrogen is found in every tissue of the body and is responsible for lubrication.
Progesterone is estrogen’s counterpart. A woman’s progesterone levels increase to up to two hundred times their normal levels during pregnancy. So it is a steep drop when progesterone leaves the body after the delivery of the placenta, allowing milk production to begin. After the baby is born and the placenta is delivered, the ovaries need to take over the job of producing progesterone again. Progesterone is what gives some pregnant women a happy, dreamy, even-keeled emotional state; the sharp decrease in progesterone can leave a new mom feeling like she has less resilience to all the changes postpartum. Progesterone only returns to a normal level when a woman begins ovulating.
Oxytocin has been called the “love hormone” and the “cuddle hormone.” It promotes attachment and bonding. Oxytocin is released after a thirty-second hug, and also while watching cute puppy or baby videos. Oxytocin is responsible for the fetal ejection reflex, uterine contractions during birth, and the special bonding that occurs between all of the people who are present at the birth. Touch is one of the best ways to encourage oxytocin and why new moms need as much loving touch as they are offering to their new babies.
Relaxin is produced at ten times its normal rate during pregnancy, so ligaments and joints soften, making space in the pelvis for the baby to come out. Because relaxin affects all the joints, some women may experience pain in other joints in the body, as they become looser and less stable. As long as women are breastfeeding, relaxin will continue to be produced in the body, so joints and ligaments may not return to their most strong and stable place until after breastfeeding has been stopped.
Stress Hormones
Stress hormones aren’t all bad. They help to accelerate some fetal development as well as give women the added energy needed to push a baby out! But most often, we are producing way more stress hormones than we need, and that blocks us from accessing the positive, nurturing sex hormones that we need to experience a pleasant, even blissful, postpartum period.
Adrenaline and cortisol work together. Adrenaline is responsible for a short-term burst of fight-or-flight energy that then quickly decreases. Cortisol is always released with adrenaline but is longer acting and, therefore, has longer-lasting effects.
During pregnancy, cortisol increases, especially during the last trimester. This is thought to help speed fetal lung and brain development just before birth. After childbirth, while it is mostly the sex hormones that are responsible for milk production and letdown, some cortisol is also needed. Too much cortisol, though, will compete with the sex hormones, contribute to anxiety and stress, and block access to the oxytocin circuitry that can make the milk letdown of breastfeeding feel relaxing and pleasurable.
The practices given in the “Cross-Training Your Nervous System” section of chapter 4 have given you a felt sense of what these hormonal upswings and downswings feel like in your nervous system. Under stress, when you imagined losing your car keys, cortisol started coursing through your veins, your heart pumped faster, you may have started to sweat. Recalling your favorite vacation spot allowed you to exhale and slow down. These practices also give you a way to reconnect to the present moment through your senses, which is one key to generating more sex hormones.
Asking for Blood Work
Just as it is a proactive step in your health care to schedule a postpartum visit with a physical therapist, it is also wise to ask your ob-gyn at your six-week checkup for a full blood panel to check your hormone levels and immune function. Because antidepressants and birth control pills are often blanket prescriptions in women’s health, underlying hormonal or immune system imbalances may be missed and left untreated. This situation can be avoided by simply asking for blood work at your doctor visit.
It is especially important to check your hormone levels before considering taking antidepressants, so you are treating the right problem. I have recently seen an increasing number of women in my practice who have developed autoimmune disorders in the postpartum period. Many women experience a significant difference in thyroid function after having a baby. A staggering one in twelve postpartum women is diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disorder of the thyroid. Under-functioning thyroid and adrenal glands can present much like depression. The blood work can also show you how your body is processing cortisol.
While a stress response to an event as big as birth is normal, this healthy amount of stress can be mitigated when a postpartum mother is bathed in sex hormones. The “baby blues” can be less blue if a woman is surrounded by people who love her and she is receiving love through delicious food and caring touch.
To understand more about the role of hormones and how to work with them holistically, I highly recommend the book WomanCode by Alisa Vitti. This book was so instrumental in my own healing process that I asked Alisa to write the foreword for this book. Her website, FLOLiving.com, is an accessible resource that provides hormonal support postpartum and beyond so that you can easily understand the steps it takes to balance your hormones with nutrition and lifestyle changes. Implementing the five-step protocol, which has helped many women heal from gynecological challenges including painful periods to polycystic ovarian syndrome to fertility challenges, is an accessible step to balancing your hormones postpartum.
If you need more help and support, the next step is to request bloodwork from your ob-gyn, a naturopath or a functional medicine doctor. Knowing what is happening with your physiology, with respect to immunity and thyroid function, is important before landing on diagnoses of depression.
SUMMARY
• While a mother and baby physically separate at birth, their energy and emotional systems are still intricately interconnected.
• After you deliver the placenta, your hormone levels drop dramatically and begin a months’ long process of recalibration from growing and birthing a baby to now nursing a baby and helping your body recover.
• Between forty-eight hours and two weeks postpartum it is normal to be weepy and emotional, also known as the “baby blues.”
• Sometimes hormone imbalances, autoimmune disorders, isolation, and lack of support can look like depression.
Reflections
• Are there parts of you that feel left behind in the birth experience? Do you feel that your baby was able to complete his or her birth process?
• What is the experience like for you to be physically separate yet very emotionally and energetically connected to your baby now?
• In what ways can you honor and stay connected to your womb space?
Practices
• Do the exercise “Completing the Birth Cycle.” This and the following exercise are inspired by the work of Tami Lynn Kent, a women’s health physical therapist who developed a practice of physical-energetic tools to better access the medicine of the pelvic bowl called holistic pelvic care. She is the author of Wild Feminine and other books and teaches this practice (see www.wildfeminine.com for more information).
• Do the exercise “Shrinking the Birth Field.”
• Before taking the pill or antidepressants, ask your ob-gyn or a naturopath for a blood-work panel to check your hormones and your immune-system function.