Thank you so much for this episode. It’s the first one I’ve heard. It’s so very interesting how we have all of these expectations of our birth experience. I’m currently 33 weeks pregnant with our 5th baby. I can’t wait to begin shifting my thoughts and have a new and positive birth.

Thank you for sharing Maryn, this is very helpful for envisioning a future birth. Just sharing this briefly so as you would have any feedback based on your experience. My first birth was really al flowing, with no “obstacle” (in my body, mind or emotionally), and being a “fast” 5-hour labor since my waters broke. Still I lived it and described after as very “intense physically”, as rushes were really strong soon after it all began (not like a normal slowly growing in intensity labor). i remember it as beautiful and also being almost all hard work. So being pregnant with my second child, I wanted to open more to the possibility of “enjoying” the process more, also a midwife friend from New Zealand shared with me something that was really helpful at the time, ” to not feel or think of the rushes/contractions as pain but as strong love, that it was not pain”. Actually during this my second baby boy’s birth I could open and feel like that all the rushes and most of them feeling really pleasure too (and enjoying them), and maybe the last ones more intense, I was more concentrating on my birth sounds and becoming more that Birth force. And on the pushing part, just as with my first baby, I felt I had to do it with all my force and energy, as all this force of Nature running through me, and the only way in that moments to birth my baby, as with my first baby (considering that with this baby I was mentally opening too to the possibility of the pushing being more ‘non-active’, as other friends had shared her experiences). So it resonates with me, how the discourse you had of “it is the way my body does it, and how I birth my babies” is similar to the one I still have. Up to know I think like “yes, I could feel as pleasurable almost all the process, but when it comes to the pushing stage, I have to do it with ALL my life-force”. So after listening to your podcast, I wonder if this is a box too, that I may shatter for a next birth? although I thought to open to other possibilities in the pushing with my second pregnancy, but still I experienced the same intensity. Maybe there was some hidden thought still back then? or is it a part that sometimes remains about “how your body does it”? or you would say after your experiences, there is not such fixed physicality thing?