Your Job Is to Surrender

In the first stage of labor – the stage in which your body is contracting and your cervix is opening, thinning, and moving down – there is truly not much you have to do except let go. Birth, in many ways, is a passive process. You don’t have to “think about having a good contraction” or “work really hard to make your cervix dilate.” Your body does the work for you. You just have to allow your body to do what it wants to do.

This is in some ways a simple task and, in other ways, the most difficult.

Our society is results-driven. To live in today’s world, with all of its demands, we are often not given many opportunities to deeply surrender. We have to stay hyper-focused and hyper-intellectual to do our work, show up for our families and friends, and complete every task on the to-do list.

To complete them well, all of these tasks take “work” from us. We have to actively create our lives on a daily basis. 

We live in a world that is domesticated. We have paved the roads, built our buildings, and divided the days into seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years. We judge ourselves daily on what we have accomplished in our lives. We do not have time to settle into our bodies and let go, because we have created a world that demands us to be hyper-focused, hyper-intellectual. Our nervous systems are often working overtime, and our hormones are producing adrenaline and cortisol.

So when I say, “all you have to do is surrender,” I understand this is a big ask. It’s a significant shift from the way we live our daily lives. I am not casually asking you to surrender; I am asking you to as deeply as possible let go during the most difficult and important moment of your life.

Birth is the last wild thing in our domesticated society.

In order for the women of the earth to take back their births, we must embrace this wildness. We must acknowledge that birth does not exist within the confines of our structures of time. It does not exist within the confines of our ideas around progress. It does not exist solely in our intellectual understanding of this plus that must equal blank. 

At this point in my career, I have been to 200 births. I must tell you: there are infinite variations of normally healthy labor, that even the breakdown of the phases of labor cannot accurately portray how women’s bodies progress in labor. Many women do not experience labor the way that we educators teach it. Our framework of stages and phases of labor views the body as a machine that needs to produce a baby. But the body is an ecosystem that is alive and responding to the life and influences of its environment.

We are desperately trying to domesticate birth, but it is not working. Birth will not allow it – a wonderful truth that draws me to birth. The medical model of care has not produced the outcomes that were promised to women when birth moved into the hospital setting. Our mothers are now dying at a higher rate than they were 20 years ago. This makes no sense.

Let me repeat that: this makes no sense.

This is criminal, inhumane even. It is truly heartbreaking that we are dragging our feet when it comes to reversing the errors we have made with maternity care. We are letting women and babies die when we have research that indicates simple changes that can be made to the maternity care system that would create radical improvements.

Most of these changes are low-cost to the healthcare systems: make doula care more accessible, listen to mothers as they voice their experiences and needs, create environments where women feel safe, and do not rush the process of birth.

These are institutional changes that need to happen. I promise you there are good people working and fighting for these changes – even if it feels like a small army of birth workers against the tidal wave of the medical industrial complex.

As birthing people we also have a role to play. We must embrace this idea of birth not being domesticated. I am not talking about avoiding interventions that are medically necessary, or having a free birth at home without medical support. But I think we all know at this point (if you don’t, then do a quick Google search) that doctors are overusing most medical interventions, and that our cesarean birth rate is embarrassingly high, both domestically and worldwide. Part of the solution to this problem is for birthing people to undomesticate birth.

What do I mean by this?

The first step is figuring out how to drop deeply down into your body. As a society, we often lead with our minds and forget about our bodies. Birth needs the complete opposite. You need to figure out a path to shutting your thinking mind off so you can drop deeply into your body, bringing your awareness inward to your breath, your body, and your baby.

Creating a safe space within yourself is what connects you to your intuition and your needs. Birth demands that we learn to quiet our minds so we can approach it with both confidence and intuition. The first step to creating a safe birth environment is feeling safe in your own body.

How do we do this?

There are so many different ways. Sometimes it is as straightforward as a meditation practice or a prenatal yoga class, but those are not the only options. It could also be a physical activity like going for a daily walk, or an artistic practice of painting, writing, or creating music. You need to be curious about yourself and find a pathway into yourself. In birth, your intuition and your body are your guides. 

I do think this deep dropping in is actually us connecting with the wild world. Our life force is so strong pulsing through our whole body – especially when pregnant. Our blood is flowing, our hearts are beating, our lungs are breathing, and our bodies are radiating. On a daily basis, we miss this because we are in our heads. This moment needs to be all about the body. I promise you that your body will guide your mind into understanding your needs during birth.

Birth unfolds in a way that is best for your unique body and baby. You have to trust this. Each person on earth is unique. I mean how truly incomprehensible and incredible is it that no two people are the same? We take this as a boring truth and an “of course,” but this is truly incredible. Even with  similar physical makeup, we are all so unique.

So, I put the proposition out there, that each person’s path to being born must be unique, as well. Each birth story must be uniquely its own because each woman’s body is unique and each baby is unique. How could we possibly expect each birth to unfold in a uniform way when there are endless variations of birthing people’s bodies? We are not an assembly line of reproducible machines that create a product.

Your first task when preparing for your birth is to figure out how to drop into your body, your breath, and your baby. Figure out how to create a safe space within yourself that you can trust, that allows you to hear your intuition and release expectations around birth.

This truly is a gift you can give yourself and your baby. This will allow you to truly know what your needs are when giving birth. It will allow you to feel safe while you labor your baby into this world.