I attended a hypnobirthing course with Cassie when I was 7 months pregnant with my first baby. Like all first time mothers, I was unsure of what to expect. I didn’t feel scared or anxious, the hypnobirthing course was a brilliant way to prepare for birth in a calm and relaxed way. I had been listening to the hypnobirthing CDs every day for about two months and felt fairly confident that I was going to be able to cope with the birth but I had no idea what the contractions, or surges, were going to feel like. On the hypnobirthing course, I had learned that they would not be painful and yet everyone else I spoke from midwifes to friends assured me that they were incredibly painful. When I mentioned that I was doing hypnobirthing, many of them shook their heads in disbelief that I could be so gullible.

I had planned to have a home birth. My labour began with mild contractions that I was able to continue sleeping through but within two hours, I had to get out of bed and lay on the sofa to begin concentrating on breathing through my surges. From then on, the contractions became gradually more intense. I focused on my breathing and trying to relax. I got into the birthing pool to labour there and my contractions intensified. They were certainly very painful and it took all of my concentration to stay on top of them. I was praying that my labour wouldn’t go on for too long. I laboured in this way for about 2 hours.

I had been listening to birthing music all day as well as my hypnosis CDs. At some point, I started to really focus on a hypnosis CD that I was listening to. Every time it finished, I asked my partner to play it again. I concentrated everything I had on relaxing completely and realised that throughout my labour up to this point, I had not been “doing” all the things I had been practising for the past 6 weeks. When I did this, when I managed to completely relax – which took a huge amount of concentration – I brought my experience of pain under control. The contractions were no longer painful as they had been previously, instead they were waves that I rode. I felt like I could have gone on labouring all day. My birthing experience actually became pleasurable. It was an amazing feeling. I was lying in the birthing pool, completely relaxed, riding my surges in complete control of them with my partner soothing me by sponging water over my shoulders.

Unfortunately for me, one of the midwives who was attending me interpreted my extreme relaxation as sleep and an indication that my labour had stopped. She intervened in my labour by manually pulling back my cervix and convinced me to try and push my baby out before I was ready as she thought that the labour was taking too long. This resulted in me being transferred to hospital and my baby being born by an emergency c-section. It was a textbook scenario of a succession of interventions whereby one intervention led to another which led to the ultimate c-section.

Knowing what I do now, I would be able to stay in control of my birthing experience were anything like this to happen again, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. During your first birth when someone with 20 years experience is insisting that you push, I gave in to the pressure as I had to assume that she knew best. The best advice I could give anyone planning any kind of natural birth is to enlist the help of a doula or get a private midwife. It is unfortunate that not all midwives working for the NHS are sympathetic to natural births and my midwife had never witnessed hypnobirthing before, hence her misinterpretation of my relaxed state.

Something that I think my story highlights is that it can be easy to forget what you have learnt when the moment comes. It took a HUGE amount of concentration to reach the trancelike state that I needed to achieve in order to completely relax and to not experience the contractions as pain. In retrospect, I had been focusing on my breathing and on the pain, rather than trying to relax as I had been taught. My partner had not been particularly active in practising for the birth and although he was brilliant during the birth, he didn’t remind me of what I had been learning. Cassie really emphasized the importance of your birthing partner during the course and it really is true. They are there to remind you to relax, to remind you to do what you have been preparing for.

Having been through this experience, I know that I can look forward to my next birthing day with excitement. Having experienced both painful contractions and pleasurable surges, I feel that I now know, I mean really know, how to give birth.