What Are Antenatal Classes? What Are Hypnobirthing Classes?
What are antenatal classes?
Antenatal classes are classes that the mother and her birth partner attend to learn all about pregnancy, labour and birth. They are there to help you prepare for your baby’s birth and give you confidence and evidence based information on everything from where you can give birth to the types of birth you may have.
Antenatal classes come in many guises from groups such as NCT to hospital classes, active birth to hypnobirthing classes.
Hypnobirthing classes are a full antenatal class but with the addition of skills and drills to enable you to remain positive and calm in the lead up to and during your labour and birth.
When should I start my antenatal classes?
Most antenatal classes suggest that you take your class during your second trimester. This will be after your 12-13 week scan when you can feel confident to let your friends and family know that you are pregnant. It will give you long enough for practice but not so long that you start to feel birth learning fatigue!
If you don’t get to take your antenatal classes until your third trimester please don’t worry. At Better Birth Stories we have taught plenty of women right the way up to 38/39 weeks pregnant and they do just fine!
What is hypnobirthing?
Hypnobirthing is an antenatal/prenatal preparation that is attended by the birthing mother and her chosen birth partner.
At Better Birth Stories we teach it as a study of three distinct places.
Your mind.
Your body.
The birth landscape.
The first space is your mind. What do you know about birth? How do you feel about birth? What is your prior experience with birth? Do you have mental blueprints about birth that are positive? Or negative? Do you see birth as a medical issue or something that is pretty normal?
All of these feelings and thoughts and blueprints that you have stored away in your unconscious mind will be drawn upon, especially during those last few weeks of pregnancy and when you go into labour. It is your mind that will run with panic or fear and then be unable to think straight and make great decisions.
It is your brain that creates the hormones that will run through your second space of birth which is…
Your body.
Are you healthy? Are you well? Is your baby or babies healthy and well?
Do you understand how labour and birth works? How the muscles of the uterus work? How the hormones released from your brain affect the build up to labour and the progression of your labour? Do you understand the positions that your baby can get into and what this may mean for your labour?
Do you understand what happens physically when you are scared or when you are confident and how these thoughts and feelings can stop and start your labour?
And to the third space. Your birth landscape.
Where are you planning on giving birth? Who will be supporting you? What are the belief systems of those who are supporting you? Do they believe that birth is a medical event or that it is a normal physiological event? How experienced are they with uninterrupted physiological birth? Or breech birth? Or caesarean birth? Or induced birth? Do you understand that differing birth landscapes have differing protocols.. But that protocols are not laws?
Then you get to see that each of these three spaces are linked.
Your birth place will affect what is happening in your mind.. And this will then affect your body… which in turn will affect those caring for you in the birth place.
What is happening in your body may affect the care you are being given and the care you are being given will affect your emotions and feelings.
What is happening in your mind may make for a straightforward birth or a fearful, scared and complicated one.
So, the job of hypnobirthing is to explain how to align these three spaces.
It is without a doubt one of the most powerful and complete birth preparation courses that you can take.
Does hypnobirthing work?
The most important thing to know about hypnobirthing is that you cannot actually fail at it.
There is a fair amount of nonsense taught and written about hypnobirthing… that we only ever breathe babies out… that the mother must be silent during birth… that you must only birth in the garden under a full moon… etc etc!
However, once you cut through the nonsense it is clear to see that a calm, informed, confident and happy mum, who is with a birth team who are caring for her well, will probably go on to have a more confident and positive birth experience than someone who is terrified of birth and has little to no idea of what is happening.
It really is an evidence based approach that strips away the idea of birth being too hard for women and instead places the woman front and centre and clearly states that it is not just that birth is painful but that women are powerful and capable. And that this is productive pain with an end in sight, as opposed to ‘I have hurt myself’ pain.
You might like to roar your baby out into the world. You might like to breathe your baby down and out while in the corner of a dark room while wearing an eye-mask. You might choose to birth via caesaren section, surrounded by a wonderful obstetric team. You might birth in a pool, or while standing, or with midwives or with obstetricians. You might want to feel it all, you might wish to select an epidural and feel nothing.
Throughout it all though you will be able to use your hypnobirthing skills and drills, your physical knowledge of birth, your ability to centre yourself in the entire experience as well as seek out and ask for all of the information that you need.
Hypnobirthing is as diverse as women are.
Hypnobirthing works.
Does hypnobirthing support every type of birth?
Yes! You can hypnobirth at home and you can hypnobirth at hospital. You can hypnobirth for a singleton birth or for a multiple birth.
You can use your hypnobirthing while having an epidural and while having a c-section.
The skills and knowledge that you will gain from your hypnobirthing classes can be applied for pre-birth anxiety, for all of your pre-birth planning, for the early stages of your labour and right the way through to post birth baby blues and understanding postnatal depression.
Want to prepare for your birth with us? We teach hypnobirthing in three wonderful ways:
Our in-person hypnobirthing classes held in London