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Birth/Labour
Holistic Birth Story by Matrona
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Full Blog on the phases of labour by me
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Preparation Stage of Labour
This is when your surges (contractions) begin. They may start irregularly—sometimes long, sometimes short, sometimes intense, sometimes gentle. Like the tides, they ebb and flow, building slowly, easing off, and returning again.
You might feel chatty, restless, or have a burst of energy to nest. Or you may want to retreat and rest quietly. Both are completely normal. Your cervix is beginning to soften, thin, and open. Some bodies do this work quietly over many hours—or even days—before labour really gears up. And that’s OK.
You may hear about guidelines (like NICE in the UK) suggesting set timings—such as active labour starting at 4cm dilation, or pushing lasting no more than a couple of hours. These are useful for clinical settings, but don’t capture the full, natural range of normal labour. Your body is unique, and your timeline is yours.
If surges begin during the night, breathe, relax, and rest as much as possible. Stay calm—you have everything you need. Let me know when you feel you need support, and when you do, please call merather than just messaging.
If labour starts during the day, you may feel able to move through small tasks. Honour your instincts. If things intensify or demand more of your focus, connect with me. Keep relaxing through each surge. Use your breathing, visualisations, affirmations, oils, music, massage—drop into your space. Call when you’re ready for closer support.
• Move intuitively: walk, sway, slow dance, rock on the birth ball.
• Try different positions: hands and knees, sitting on the loo, standing, side-lying.
• Stay upright and mobile if you can—it helps your baby find their best path.
• Listen to your body. It knows what to do.
• Use Up Breathing during surges to stay calm and open.
• Breathe in slowly, breathe out fully, keeping your body relaxed.
• Visualise softening and opening with every breath.
Things to Practice Before and During Labour
These are your embodied tools for working with labour:
• Breathing: Natural, intuitive breath—calm yourself with Up Breathing and Down Breathing as needed.
• Visualisation: Imagining opening, flowing, and moving with your baby.
• Massage: Soothing, grounding touch to help relax muscles and mind.
• Rebozo: Gentle sifting and support techniques to create space and comfort.
• Biomechanics: Moving to encourage balance and optimal positioning.
• Pelvic Floor Releases: Learning to consciously soften and release between surges.
• Birth Ball Work: Swaying, circling, leaning—helping hips open and baby descend.
Things to Plan or Discuss Before Labour
These help create your calm, supported environment:
• Lighting: Think about dim lighting, sunglasses, or an eye mask.
• Music: Prepare playlists that soothe, ground, or energise you.
• Aromatherapy: Choose oils you love—or none at all if you prefer.
• Homeopathy: Consider a Childbirth Kit if this feels right for you.
• Jaw Release: Practice humming or sound to soften jaw and pelvis.
• Affirmations: Select words or phrases that uplift and ground you.
• Space: Decide who you want present—protect your calm space.
• Acupressure Balls: Handy tools for pressure points in the hands.
• Personal Items: Bring comforting objects from home, like a favourite blanket or pillow.
Hospital/Birth Centre (or Midwife for Homebirth)
When your surges are around 3–4 minutes apart, lasting about one minute each, and this pattern has continued for one hour or more (the “3-1-1” rule), it’s time to:
• Call the hospital or birth centre (have their number saved)
• Or, if you’re birthing at home, call your midwife.
Remember: this is a guide, not a rule. Always trust your intuition. If you feel you need to move sooner or wait longer, follow your instincts.
On the journey:
• Stay inward—headphones, eye mask, breathwork.
• Let your partner or doula handle logistics like triage check-in while you focus on staying relaxed.
Things to Remember Once There
• Settle into the room and make it yours—dim lights or use an eye mask.
• Play your music, use massage, oils, and visualisations.
• Move intuitively—stay fluid and open.
• Keep water, snacks, and a toilet break rhythm going.
• Protect your bubble—keep interactions minimal if possible.
• Laugh if you can—it softens everything beautifully.
The Middle: Active Labour and Deep Focus
This is when surges usually become stronger, longer, and closer together.
You may no longer want to talk through them. You might naturally fall into a rhythm of movement, breath, sound—your body knowing what to do without needing your mind to lead.
Oxytocin and endorphins—the love and power hormones—are flooding your system now. They help your uterus contract, your cervix open, and you to drop deeper into “labour land,” where instinct and intuition guide you.
There may be a resting phase before pushing begins—a precious, natural pause. Your body is gathering energy. Your baby is rotating, descending. Trust the stillness. Nothing is wrong.
The End: Pushing and Birthing
This stage rarely looks like the movies.
Many birthing people feel a powerful, involuntary urge to bear down when it’s time. This can take minutes or hours. There’s no stopwatch. Your body and baby are working together in perfect timing.
Patience is everything here.
Monitoring has its place but should never override your intuition. Too much interference can stall the natural flow. Trust your body’s knowing. Trust your baby’s journey.
So What’s Actually Happening in the Body?
• Oxytocin flows when you feel safe, loved, and undisturbed—it powers your contractions.
• Endorphins build to help you cope with the intensity—they’re your natural pain relief.
• Cervix softens, thins, and opens.
• Uterus contracts from the top, guiding your baby downward.
• Baby rotates, tucks their chin, and finds the best way through the pelvis.
• Pelvis shifts, sacrum moves, tailbone flexes to create space.
• Fetal Ejection Reflex may take over at the end, helping your baby be born naturally.
Birth is physiological.
It’s hormonal.
It’s primal.
It’s sacred.
Final Words
You don’t need a timeline.
You don’t need to perform.
You need support, space, warmth, nourishment, and trust.
Labour isn’t linear. It’s not a test.
It’s a process that flows and shifts—just like you.
Wherever you are on your journey—whether preparing for your first or your fifth—remember:
You are enough.
Your body knows.
Your baby knows.
Birth Partner’s Role
• Stay calm and grounded.
• Tune in: does she need encouragement, silence, touch, space?
• Remind her to physically relax—soften shoulders, jaw, hands.
• Offer comfort measures: massage, counter-pressure, breathing support.
• Just be there. Presence is everything.
• Use the BRAIN acronym when decisions arise:
• Benefits
• Risks
• Alternatives
• Intuition
• Nothing (What happens if we wait?)
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Comfort Measures
Need a little prep & practice;
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Breathing - Natural - intuitively - calming yourself - think yoga - Up Breathing - Down Breathing
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Visualisations You may have ones you like to use, here are few written down for you to use - here are some recorded
Massage - My main tip here is pressure on the lower back through surges, but shoulds and fee can be helpful too.
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Rebozo - A few ways the rebozo scraf can help support your postioning​
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Pelvic floor releases
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Birth ball - If using one make sure not to just bounce bounce bounce, think hips swilrs loos and free let baby find their way.
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​Birth Positions - Bio mechanics
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Dancing, Walking, Hanging, Squatting, hands and knees, supported squat, birth ball, sitting on the loo, lateral lying on left side, left leg extended, right leg bent and lifted by midwife or Birth Partner. Massage, Pressure, Environment, Sound, Smells, Rebozo. ​
Birth Space - Think about your space, the space you feel most comfortable within, and the space you want to bring your baby into.
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Lighting/Sunnies
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Plan your Music
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Oils​ Essential Oils for Labour (I will have these too)
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* Lavender – Calming, reduces anxiety
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* Clary Sage – May help stimulate contractions (use only in late pregnancy)
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* Peppermint – Helps with nausea and energy levels
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* Frankincense – Aids deep breathing and focus
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Personal Items - Blanket something that maintains familiarity, this can be key to maintaining your labour and ease it affect the way the body releases hormones.
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Space clear of too many people - know who you want in and out
Helpful Tools - Don't need practice or prep;
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Homeopathy (Child Birth Kit) - I will have this simple kit if we feel anything might help
Jaw Release (Humming, get used to using your voice, be free be loud be whatever you need)
Affirmations - Phrases of support (choose ones you like) - this can be a really lovely way to keep them forefront in your mind, stick them around your mirror or have them ready to lean into.
Acupressure balls - Little spikey balls to use as pressure in palms through surges
5 Flower Remedy
Lip Balm​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Pre Birth Things to do
Emotion & Fear Release
Write down any of the limiting thoughts, situations and issues that could still remain with you and that need to be released so that you can have the calm, birth that you are anticipating. Write them down and ask your partner do the same. Do this as they come up. Before you are 38 weeks we will go through them ad I recommend you do the same with your partner, compare them, and discuss how you might resolve any of the issues so that you can be free.
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We will talk through and do an exercise of release together but can continuously do your own too. ​
​Birth Stories Sometimes can be really helpful and supportive to read varying stories, but recognise if it serves you personally its not for everyone.
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Birth Plan
We create a plan that helps care providers follow your cues on the day, this will state your wishes and how you like to create the space things you are pkay things you do not wish for and things you may want to be explained or decide on at the time.
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Birth Plan Template​​​​​​​​
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Your Placenta Plan
We will talk about most things in some form or another, one of those being what's the plan for your placenta, where does it go if theres no plan and what is it's sacred role. There are lots of traditions that honour and bury their placenta believing in this nourishing the earth and your journey into parenthood. - Your Placenta the forgotten chakra a beautiful book - you can borrow mine if you want
Breathing & Visualisations
Visualisations
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Water visualisation
Water is a really powerful and soothing image in labour.
For example, you can visualise labour as being out in an ocean.
There is nothing you can do to control the waves, but you know that you can flow with each wave, no matter how strong they are.
As the ocean waves get bigger, your confidence grows as you find that you are always able to rise and fall with them.​
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Surges visualisation
Another visualisation that I used a lot during my births, is that of picturing the muscles of the uterus as soft blue satin ribbons.
The uterus has two sets of muscles that work together during dilation. Every time you have a surge, the vertical muscles contract up, and as they do, they pull the lower circular muscles out and up, opening the cervix.
As you’re in the surge, you can visualise these muscle fibres as blue satin ribbons.
As the vertical ribbons pull upwards, see the circular ribbons easily yield and open, with no resistance.
You can probably think of other images that could help you during dilation. It’s such a personal thing, so spend some time on this and see what comes to your mind.
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Opening of labour visualisation
For the opening stage of labour, when your baby is moving down the birth canal and into the world, a really effective visualisation is that of an opening rose.
As you imagine your baby gently moving down the birth canal, see the vaginal opening as a rose and visualise the petals slowly moving apart to let your baby gently out.
Everything soft and yielding.
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Keep the oxytocin flowing- Feel the love
And finally, at any point in labour, just imagine yourself cradling your baby in your arms. It’s such a simple image and it helps to soothe the mind and keep the oxytocin flowing.
You can make these visualisations work even better for you by bringing feeling to them.
So, how do you feel during labour? Powerful, focused, confident, happy, relaxed.
Feel these emotions as you bring the images to mind.
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Breathing
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Up Breathing
You simply breathe in for 4 and breathe out for 8. Yep. That’s it. How easy is that?! By breathing in for 4 and out for 8, 4 times over, you will have breathed your way through a surge, and be one step closer to meeting your baby! By extending your exhale, you tell your body and your mind that you are calm and safe (even if you don’t feel it right at that moment!). This tells your brilliant nervous system to stop producing Adrenalin as you have no need for your flight or fight response when you are calm and safe. Once your Adrenalin response has been tamped down, you will start to feel calm and safe for real.
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​​​Down Breathing
​So as you enter the down stage of labour, you will feel your muscles beginning to push down - at first that will feel like you need a big poo, but then you will realise that actually that is your baby’s head! As you feel your body begin to push down the idea of Down Breathing is you use your breath to help, rather than hinder your body. So at the start of the surge you take a quick, deep breath in - no need to count - and as you breathe out you send your breath down through your body, with purpose. If you place your hands on your abdomen when you send your breath down, you will feel your muscles engage. As the surge ends you will feel that downward pressure relax, and you go back to normal breathing, then as your feel the next surge build you breathe in and send the breath down - and keep doing that until the surge ends. As you breathe down you will feel your baby’s head move down the vagina and as the feeling passes, the head will bob back up, slowly kneading the walls of the vagina, allowing gentle stretching of the tissues and a slow gentle birth for your baby.
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