​"After a difficult start to our parenthood journey, including three consecutive miscarriages, when I fell pregnant with our rainbow baby, Charlie, I found myself feeling almost constantly anxious and worried. My sister-in-law told me about something called hypnobirthing, which she said had helped her with anxiety during her pregnancies. At first, I didn’t like the sound of it. Hypno sounded pretty strange, and as a Christian, I didn’t want to do anything that went against my faith. After looking into it, I became more relaxed when I found out it had nothing to do with a man on stage waving a pocket watch in front of someone’s face or any kind of mind control, and was simply a relaxation practice for birth using positive words and imagery, combined with antenatal education. There were times, though, when I was listening to some of the relaxation tracks, that I would find myself having to change certain words, like the universe or inner goddess, to make them fit with my personal beliefs, so I decided to google “Christian Hypnobirthing” and was disappointed to find that it didn’t exist.

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A little later in my pregnancy, I came across a Christian book, which, while helpful in some ways, was quite discouraging of natural birthing methods and instead suggested that just by having enough faith, birth could be pain-free. Unfortunately, because of this, I stopped using hypnobirthing techniques to prepare for my birth and decided that I would just have faith, like the book said. One of the major downsides to the idea of a pain-free birth being the result of having enough faith is that if you are experiencing pain, you start blaming yourself. It puts the responsibility solely on the mother and doesn’t take into account the environment she’s in, how supported she feels by those around her, whether she’s able to labor in an upright position, the position of the baby, and the many other factors that massively impact the level of comfort a woman feels during childbirth.

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When I went into labor with my son, we set off for the birth center. Unfortunately, when we arrived, they told us it was full and sent us to the labor ward. I was given a midwife who kept telling me I would need drugs and ended up insisting I get hooked up to an IV, have constant monitoring, and also convinced me to have my waters broken. The process was a far cry from what I had envisioned, and I felt deeply shocked by the level of pain I was in. I thought it must have been because of a lack of faith, or that God had abandoned me, or that I was doing something wrong. I had no awareness of the massive impact that intervention, the hospital environment, and fear have on how our body works during labor and how we experience pain.

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I had really wanted to give birth unmedicated, but it had become so painful, and with being strapped to the monitor and having the IV in my arm, unable to move around, and all the midwife’s negativity, I felt exhausted, disheartened, and like it was impossible. Thankfully, my husband was an absolutely incredible support; he had been doing light touch massage on me for hours, and when I felt I couldn’t go on, he reminded me of our prayers in the lead-up to birth and that I could do it. Just after that, I had one of the most spiritual experiences of my life. It was a profound moment, and one I don’t really know how to describe. It was like time and space disappeared, and it was just me and God for a moment. I was able to see that God had never abandoned me, that he had been with me the whole time, but that there were many other things going on that were making the birth experience so much more difficult than it was designed to be. 

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Suddenly, I got this renewed strength, and I started praying with power, filled with this knowledge that I could do it. Not long after, I started getting the urge to push, and the midwife kept telling me not to, and that I wasn’t anywhere near ready. I reached down and shouted, “I can feel his head!” The midwife then went running out of the room to get help. I got down on my knees, leaned against the bed, and in about ten minutes, our beautiful boy was born, weighing in at a hefty 9lb 8oz—an absolute miracle.

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Despite feeling very grateful to have a beautiful baby boy, in the days and weeks that followed Charlie’s birth, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what happened and couldn’t help feeling that it was so much more difficult than I believed it could have been. While it was overall a positive outcome, there was a lingering feeling of trauma. I remember thinking that it would have been such a different experience if I’d had relaxation tools and breathing techniques that could have helped me stay calm and positive, reminding me to draw near to God, and if I’d been educated on the different routine procedures so I could have made informed decisions instead of feeling coerced into things I didn’t fully understand. I really felt that Christian mothers deserved to have tools like those provided in hypnobirthing, but which aligned with their beliefs, and would help them feel God’s strength, love, and support throughout birth.

 

This idea of a faith-based hypnobirthing app just kept coming into my mind, so I decided to look into the process of creating an app. After googling it and finding that it cost, on average, $40,000 to make an app, I gave up hope that it was possible. We had no savings as we’d just put all our money into the deposit to buy our two-bedroom apartment. I didn’t know anyone in the tech industry, and I had no coding experience myself, so it just felt totally unrealistic.

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A few days later, I was listening to the Bible while breastfeeding Charlie, and Matthew 19:26 was read, where Jesus says, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” Even though I’d probably heard it many times before, it just really stuck out, as if I was hearing it for the first time. I was so surprised that I stopped the recording and skipped back to listen to it again. It was totally mind-blowing to me, and it still is. It is such a radical and mind-expanding thing to say. All things are possible with God.

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I felt encouraged that God wanted me to create this app, even though I didn’t have the money, the contacts, or the tech skills. I knew there must be a way. It took many months of researching, writing, and working out how to use app-building software, mostly done while my son was napping, or during the night. One baby step at a time, God made a way for it, and the Christian Hypnobirthing App was released on App Store and Google Play over Easter in 2018. It was only getting a few downloads a week as we didn’t have any budget for marketing, but step by step, through word of mouth, it started to grow.

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When I found out I was pregnant with our son Samuel, just two months after releasing the app, it felt like a wonderful opportunity to be able to test it out on myself. I would listen to it every night while going to sleep. It was amazing how much more peaceful I felt, with so much more trust, and virtually none of the anxiety I’d experienced in Charlie’s pregnancy. It felt like there was something about the combination of the beautiful, encouraging scriptures reminding me of God’s love for us, combined with the breathing and visualization exercises helping me to regulate my nervous system, that felt special and different from any of the traditional hypnobirthing tracks I’d listened to in my first pregnancy.

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When I started having contractions with Samuel, instead of rushing off to the hospital, I put the tracks on and drifted in and out of sleep. This happened a couple of nights in a row (prodromal labor), and instead of getting annoyed, I tried to see it as my body being able to do its important work while I was still able to rest. Even if the contractions were too strong to sleep through, I’d just keep the tracks playing while lying on my left side, breathing, and relaxing, drifting between consciousness and sleep. Then, by morning, they would disappear.

 

On the third night, I was resting while listening to the tracks, and I felt that the contractions were growing in intensity, and coming more frequently every three or four minutes. So we decided to go to the birth center. We picked a different birth center this time that was less likely to be full, but surprise, when we got there, it was full again! This time, instead of letting that send me into a downward spiral, my husband and I both literally laughed and said, “Of course it is.” They sent us to the labor ward, and my husband and I cracked jokes and laughed, other than when I had to focus on breathing through the contractions.

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The midwives who examined me weren’t convinced I was in active labor and were going to send us home, as I was only two centimeters dilated. Thankfully, they ended up letting us stay in a waiting room, and said they’d transfer me into a labor room once I was in active labor. I turned the lights off in the room, turned on the Christian Hypnobirthing tracks, and just sat there praying and breathing while my husband had a little nap. After about an hour, I felt the need to get on all fours and was instinctively doing these cat/cow-type movements. I said to my husband I had to go to the bathroom, and from the noises I was making, my husband called the midwife. She came in with a wheelchair to take me to a labor room, but I was already giving birth in the waiting room! They recorded it as 16 minutes of active labor and eight minutes of pushing. He was born en caul, which means his amniotic sac (or my waters) never broke. This is really rare and happens in less than one in 80,000 births (although interestingly, a lot of our app users have reported having en caul births, and I’ve since heard theories that it’s more common in undisturbed births).

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It was such a surreal experience, as it was so much more comfortable and enjoyable than Charlie’s birth. Even though the pressure in those final minutes was big and very intense, it never felt unmanageable, and I wouldn’t characterize it as painful. Because of the practice I had done with the tracks and being able to labor undisturbed in that room, completely relaxed as I listened to them, I was able to follow my God-given birthing instincts, and my body was able to work as it was miraculously designed to, optimizing my oxytocin and endorphin levels, and helping labor to be as efficient and comfortable as possible. A total night and day experience compared to my first birth.

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The wonderful thing is, this wasn’t just a fluke. It wasn’t lucky. Having a positive, faith-filled birth has now been experienced by tens of thousands of women who have used our Christian Hypnobirthing app and course to prepare for birth. Because when you are educated about how our bodies work during birth, have the knowledge to make informed decisions, and actively train your mind and body to embrace birth (instead of fighting it), you give yourself the best chance of experiencing a far more joyful, empowering, and spiritual experience than what most of us have been taught to believe is possible."

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