~Pregnancy Equals Change~

   Once you know you are pregnant, so many aspects of physical and mental health arise for consideration. As anyone who has already been along this road would know, your body will change, your mind will change, your sex drive changes, financial priorities change, food preferences change, perceptions both of self and others change, emotions change, relationships change, sleep patterns change, families both nuclear and extended change, dormant medical conditions may arise; so many things must change for the forthcoming birth. In a word, pregnancy equals change.
   All of this is perfectly natural, normal and in fact necessary. It is not something to be resisted or seen as a series of problems to be avoided, medicated out of existence, battled with or even overcome. They are just symptoms of that change – and they are actually there to help you – sometimes in perverse ways! They are to be acknowledged, learned from and simply managed on a day to day basis for the best advantage.
   Rather than producing mere physical reper-cussions, pregnancy also triggers massive changes at the mental level. I’ll be going into this a lot more in this chapter. I should explain why I include mental health as an area requiring attention during pregnancy. It is an experience well known by mothers, but a well kept secret from anyone else, that pregnancy can seem to make you go crazy! Crazy thoughts, crazy feelings, crazy behaviours. Very many women experience this, based on their own, their doctor’s and their family’s belief that these things are simply the “unfortunate” side effects of pregnancy’s hormonal changes. But with better information and support methods (such as yoga and relaxation) they needn’t be. The sooner society stops pretending that pregnancy is just a bump in the abdomen, and involves many more subtle emotional and mental factors, the better off women and their babies will all be.
   It may seem like commonsense to suggest that with all these areas of change occurring during pregnancy, a whole reassessment of one’s lifestyle should be considered when planning a baby but, curiously, many people don't do this. Maybe it’s because they haven’t been told of the coming changes; maybe it’s because they don’t believe that things really will change that much; maybe it’s because they don’t want to let a little embryo start controlling their “normal” existence; maybe they don’t think it matters to the outcome of their pregnancy and birthing experience;

maybe they think that a mother’s needs are that much greater than an unborn child’s; maybe deep down they are just afraid of change; or maybe a combination of many such things. So many women seem to just stagger along, trying to cope with each new change as it presents, making the baby adapt to their own established life patterns.
   But ultimately, none of those attitudes are best for mother and child. Pregnancy, whether planned or unplanned, is an opportunity to consider yourself, your lifestyle, your past, your present and your future in a fresh, expansive, more spiritually satisfying way.
   In this chapter, first I am going to run through the standard, conventional medical approach to pregnancy which you may already have encountered. Following that, I am going to share with you a very different approach, that of the yoga, tantra and natural birthing approach. Depending on you and your partner’s ideas about pregnancy and birthing, you may wish to embrace aspects from both these approaches.

   Early on in her pregnancy, a mother needs to give some consideration to how and where she will source information about pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. Up until 100 years ago, it was the norm for babies to be born at home and so childbirth education was just knowledge passed between mother and daughter and other local women. But in our modern world of hospital births and nuclear families, so few women of childbearing age have ever had contact with a pregnant woman, have ever seen a baby being born, or have ever experienced a newborn baby first hand. Many a modern young girl’s understanding of these things has most likely come from television or school biology lessons.
   With the change in the direction of childbirth over the last century, formal childbirth education has now come to replace the former familial and community women’s networks in the passing on of birthing experience. Such classes are very helpful in helping women understand what is happening to their bodies, what they can expect in a hospital birth and how to handle a newborn babe. And these are Truly Good Things. As women have become more educated, as medical research has delved deeper into the process, and as more and more books have been written on the topic, much of the previous ignorance about pregnancy and childbirth has been overcome.