Birthing and Parenting Workshops
I have just had the most furious email from an NCT practitioner. I sparked her outrage with a flier in which I advertised MY Hypnobirthing workshops as ‘a modern, up-to-date alternative to NCT’.
She felt this slandered NCT. Needless to say, I feel I AM an alternative to NCT! And if Oatly can run the campaign ‘alternative to milk’ and ‘alternative medicine’ doesn’t mean don’t take medicine…well, she’s just going to have to be angry with me.
But the truth is, I did have a dreadful experience of NCT. The teacher would not only not talk about hypnobirthing (‘it’s not something we teach’), but she wouldn’t even offer an opinion. Ina May, my goddess midwife wasn’t on the reading list, and role playing a C-section only put the possibility more in my head.
What’s more, I failed to make any friends which was probably why I went. Just because someone is going to also have a baby, doesn’t meant they’re your ‘tribe’.
We took the financial plunge and went on a hypnobirthing retreat in Glastonbury. My partner and I loved the visualisation, the meditations and the pondering on who we wanted to be as parents. I found a paper recently on which I’d written down my visualisations; no drugs, the baby weight, the length of time in stage 1 and 2 labour and everything turned out exactly as I’d visualised.
After doing a module on hypnobirthing for my qualifications, I offered to teach my sister and decided I could offer even more to expectant couples with my experience of parenting and my therapy training.
So what I can now offer couples is not just a hypnobirthing course, but personalised tapes, a unique information pack and a therapy element to ‘clear out the baggage’ so to speak so couples can enter this new phase in a healthy, happy place mentally. I myself spent a week alone in a Tipi in Wales when I was 8 months pregnant, reading and working out what the role of a ‘Mother’ is and how I would bring up a child.
So I now offer hypnobirthing to couples which is a mix of experience, hypno-tools and therapy. The NCT might not like it, but it really is an alternative to the other classes on offer, simply because it is totally unique and individually tailored to the people who attend.
For more information, please visit The Barefoot Hypno.