(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
Welcome to the birth prep podcast. I'm Taylor, your birth bestie, who's here to support you as you plan and prepare for the unmedicated birth of your dreams. If you're ready to ditch the fear, conquer the hospital hustle, support that bump and bod, and walk into the delivery room like the HGIC you were born to be, then buckle up, babe.
This is where it all goes down. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the birth prep podcast. If you're new here, hi, I have lots of newbies, I believe, because my numbers are going up a lot and that means more mamas are getting the education that they need and deserve to pull off their desired birth experience, even in the hospital.
So that just brings me a whole lot of joy and look what the Lord has done. And I just love that you guys are hanging out with me. I'm loving the DMs that you guys are sending me.
If you are new here, my name is Taylor. I'm the birth prep coach. I have been a childbirth educator for about five years now, literally coming up very soon, my little anniversary.
So that's exciting. I have five babies, soon to be six. I'm pregnant with baby number six.
I am wrapping up my first trimester this week. Thank you, Jesus. That was a rough one.
And I love, love, love just getting to educate about birth, God's design for birth and how beautifully our bodies were created for this work. I'm also a huge advocate for informed consent. I believe that you deserve to make informed choices for yourself and for your baby.
And I really just love walking with you guys as you prepare your mind, your body, your teams, your skills, all the things for this beautiful, amazing season in your life. It's truly an honor, but enough about me. We have very important work to do together today.
Okay. I believe that each one of you were chosen for this baby, for this season, for such a time as this to carry this life as God hand knits this baby inside of your womb, and that you were called to do this. If you have felt the nudge that God called you to this birth, but you're stuck between preparing and surrendering, this episode is going to act like your little bridge.
Okay. You're going to leave here with a Bible backed framework for stewarding your birth prep. Taylor, that's such a weird concept.
Like, no girl, I get it. It's not my concept. It's the Lord's.
He's been telling me to talk to you guys about this. So that's what I'm going to do. On the side of my, I have like a big monitor on my desk that when I hook it up, I use like my laptop and like mirror it onto my monitor.
And it's like, it's a TV. It's large for a computer. It's small for a TV.
But along the whole side of it, I have a sticky note at the top. It says, Lord, help me be a good steward of my, and then I have sticky notes for all of things that I am working towards being, you know, the best steward that I can of the things that the Lord has given me finances, motherhood, my mental health, physical health, my home, my business, my time, my talents and skills, my marriage, my friendships, my prayer life, my consumption. And recently I added a sticky note for my birth prep.
I am stepping into yet another season of preparing for yet another birth. And this time it's going to look a lot different than it ever has. And I've prepped with the Lord, but this time I'm being incredibly intentional about it and listening to him and leaning on him and really just trying to make all my decisions through him as well.
Like I'm an educated girly about birth, right? So I've like, Oh, I know what, what's best and all the things, but it's like, yes. And I'm still going to run everything by the Lord because that's what he's asked of me to be fair. He asks us all to do that, to lean not on our own understanding and to submit in all of our ways unto the Lord Taylor's translation.
Um, the Lord knows a lot more than you and I ever will. So he's called me personally to this, but also wants me to share this with you as well. I imagine the Lord looking at this generation of pregnant mamas and just watching them drown in information.
It's information overload. Like we have never had access to so much information, which is fantastic in a way, but also it can be really damaging to, if we're not careful, we are so overwhelmed by options. And I just think that we're all trying to do our best to prepare without letting it all consume us.
And I see it all the time. And I've dealt with it too. It's like the questions, the never ending questions of like, what if I can't do it without the epidural, which car seat should I put on my baby registry is swaddling bad now.
And at the core of all of these, what ifs and questions and doubts, I really truly believe that it's just us desperately wanting to get it all right. So he sent me to remind you that he goes before you. And I honestly love that for each and every one of us truly.
Let me get personal for a minute. My walk with the Lord in my adult life is newer, like over the past couple of years. So my first couple of kids, I didn't seek the Lord on things.
And it's not that I didn't believe in the Lord. Like I, that's not new. I'm not new to that.
I was born and raised in a Christian home. I was a pastor's kid for over a decade and, you know, always believed in Jesus, always believed in God, went to Christian schools growing up, experienced the Lord as a teenager, personally. And as a young adult, I just didn't prioritize it.
I got super lukewarm, still always believed in him, but only ever prayed when I needed something. Never read my Bible, stopped going to church, but the Lord is faithful and so, so good. And my relationship with him has never been stronger.
And I just am so grateful for everything that he's brought me through and everything that he has changed about my life since re-encountering him a couple of years back. And it's just been life-changing to put it as simple as I can. But anyways, all that to say, I did not prep with the Lord for my first three births and really, honestly, like barely with my fourth.
I was doing like the Christian hypnobirthing tracks, which honestly I'm not really for hypnobirthing now. I let them play during my labor experience, but the only one that I actually listened to in preparation for my birth was like the affirmations. And I really got behind those.
They were really comforting for me. They were really important for my mindset journey, that pregnancy. And we were going to church and all the things, but it just wasn't like, I didn't have like that strong of a relationship quite yet.
A lot of stuff in my life unfolded between my fourth and fifth baby. A lot of stuff brought to light, a lot of personal stuff that was just so heavy and so hard. And quite literally, I couldn't have made it through without him.
My miscarriage happened between that time as well. It was just like one thing after another and just, you know, drawing close to the Lord and all of it. And I would not like to repeat any of that, but I'm so grateful that I went through what I went through because it brought me to a place where I could quite literally only depend on him.
Anywho, we were pregnant with our fifth baby and I was very intentionally preparing with the Lord. I'm always learning new things and I'm always here to further my education in the childbirth space, but I was pretty solid with everything at that point. I knew what I wanted for my birth experience, like I didn't have to make a new plan or anything.
And I knew, you know, the decisions that I was going to be making and all of that. And I was able to focus so much on that prep work with the Lord. And my prayer that pregnancy was for an enjoyable experience, which honestly felt a little crazy to pray for because like who enjoys their birth, but I believed it was possible.
And I believed it was possible for me and everything was pretty smooth sailing through that pregnancy experience until the end. And when my due date came and went, I had a lot of feelings come up and there were feelings throughout the whole pregnancy of like the miscarriage and like, um, if I was going to get to meet this baby and if that was going to happen again, and like, there was a lot of that once I was feeling baby every day and stuff, those kind of subsided. But when I was overdue, quote unquote, I don't believe that I was overdue at all.
I believe baby came absolutely perfect timing, God's timing. But when I was overdue, I really, really struggled with, oh my gosh, am I ever going to actually meet this baby? And there was so much back and forth in my mind, like, am I going to like, try to do some natural ways of trying to force my body to go into labor? I was having conversations with my midwives. I was looking into all the different options, like just re-educating myself on things like, okay, what does this, what would this actually look like if I changed the plan? And one day when I was 41 weeks and three days, 10 days past my due date, I was scrolling on Instagram.
Cause you know, the Lord will use anything. And I came across a carousel post from one of my doula friends, probably somebody in childbirth education space. I truly don't remember, but I was scrolling through the slides and all of them I agreed with, right? Like all these, um, unpopular opinions about birth.
Like, how are you all of a sudden too old to birth the day you turned 35 and how is laying on your back the best position when gravity's actively working against you. And I scroll all the way to the end, you know, post number 10 and there it is. How is your baby late? The moment you hit 40 weeks.
And in that moment, I just like felt super convicted because I absolutely wholeheartedly believed that both fear was trying to take me out. And I was letting it that moment. I said out loud.
I said, okay, God, I hear you. I'm not going to do anything to get this baby out. I trust your timing and I trust your design and I'm not, I'm not going to do anything.
Not even 20 minutes later, my waters broke the Lord's funny like that, man, he was totally waiting on my full surrender. And I'm glad he did because honestly, that was such a huge moment for me, such a beautiful thing. And the birth that followed was, Ooh, I could cry about it.
Supernatural. The most peaceful thing I've ever experienced in my life. It was pain-free.
It was enjoyable. It was all the beautiful, wonderful things. And then some, um, Jesus was in the room and it was just so amazing.
After that birth, the Lord asked me to make the Mary method and the Mary method is a training that I have inside the birth course that teaches you guys how to birth with faith and surrender. My course isn't actually like Bible-based it's all just straight education, teaching how to advocate for yourself, teaching all the skills that you're going to need to navigate the industry for what it is boundaries, even with like your family members and stuff, um, how to make informed decisions, the cascade of interventions, like basic birth, um, knowledge to like how your body actually works, all the hormones that are involved, how to best support those hormones, the different stages of labor, like all those things. And obviously like, I'm going to mention the Lord here and there because he walks with me through life and literally everything that I do, but it's not Bible-based.
So I, he asked me to add a Bible-based thing to that course that would be available to all my students. So that lives in there still to this day. And it was birthed from my fifth birth experience of me having to do that work in real time.
And I didn't really have anybody to walk through that. Like even my midwife, like just didn't understand. She's super new agey.
Obviously she's serving her license at the end of the day. So she was like, okay, we got a clock on this thing. And of course I was doing things with my Holy spirit and there's no better one to do it with.
Um, but I am just so honored that he asked me to create a resource to help other ladies do this work. So I'm going to give you a quick rundown of it right now. It's not a full-blown method.
It's more of a posture. And I wrestled with that for a little bit. Cause I'm like, well, it needs to have a full method and I need to like map it out and blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, no Taylor, you need to listen to the Lord and put your perfectionism to the side for a minute because the Lord's asking you to do something here. It's based off the scripture reference, Luke 10, 38 through 42. If you want to look it up yourself, but here's Taylor's version.
Okay. Jesus and his disciples were traveling. They came up to a village where they met a woman named Martha, who opened her home to them.
Her sister's name was Mary. So when they got to the house, she's sitting at the Lord's feet, listening to what he's saying. But Martha is distracted by all the preparations that had to be made for dinner time and all that stuff, like hosting, like in her hostess mode.
Right. And she literally came to the Lord of Lords, King of Kings and said, Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work all by myself. Tell her to help me.
And he's like, Martha, Martha, you are so worried and so upset about so many things, but very few things are actually needed. Indeed only one. And Mary has chosen what is better.
And I will not take that away from her. Could you imagine like, I'd be so humbled so fast, but how many of us are being Martha's? We spent our entire pregnancy doing all the preparation work, stressing out about what's going on the baby registry and what's named the baby and all the birth prep stuff. And don't get me wrong.
The prep is incredibly important, but if we're so consumed with the preparation work that we don't even leave time to sit with the Lord. And if we don't sit with the Lord first and foremost about things, that's where we're being a little bit of a Martha and trying to control things and trying to prep our little way to success, whatever we think success is. Um, but choosing Mary's method is quite literally the better way.
So stay at the Lord. And the scripture quite literally says she sat at the Lord's feet, listening to what he said. And I'm sorry, I can have all the knowledge in the birth world and all of the resources available to me.
And if I'm not listening to the Lord, I'm doing it wrong. Now, I believe that there's a balance here that we need to find. It's like, okay, we're birthing with faith and surrender.
We also want to prep because we don't want to go in blind. We want to utilize the resources and the information the Lord has given us. And honestly, that is pretty much what good stewardship looks like.
And that's honestly probably going to look different for each one of us, right? Because we're all in different walks. We all have different convictions. We all are in different spots with the Lord.
We all have different birth knowledge and we all have different birth experiences that we're planning. So it's like, this is going to look different. And I wish I could just give you a step-by-step and give you all of the things and make it super, super easy for you.
But I am going to give you a little stewardship framework. So, but first I want to talk about stewardship because I see so many moms take this little Mary method concept to the extreme, right? And it's not that they're learning from me. It's just like, we trust in God.
We trust that everything will unfold the way it needs to be. We trust that God brought us to the perfect provider and all of those things can be true. And he's given us resources and information and people and tools and so many things to utilize, right? The Lord just doesn't want us sitting on our hands, waiting for everything to fall in our lap.
That's quite literally like not how it works. Biblically stewardship means faithfully managing what God has entrusted to you. And in birth that looks like, you know, I prepare wisely and I trust deeply.
There's a verse in Proverbs 21 that says, the horse is prepared for the day of battle, but victory belongs to the Lord. So my job is to prepare the horse. God's job is victory, right? So I'm preparing for my birth experience.
I'm utilizing the resources he's given me. I'm reaching out to the people that he's put in my life to help me. I am preparing my team for that day.
I am learning all the skills that I need to learn in order to navigate that for what it is. And God's job is the outcome. Like that's, that's quite frankly, none of y'all's business.
Another Proverbs verse. I love Proverbs. You always catch me in Proverbs.
I get my little butt handed to me in there, but I love it. Um, but it says in Proverbs 16, it says, commit your work to the Lord and your plans will be established. So commit them, you know, do all the work and make the plans and, but also hold it with open hands, right? Say, Lord, if this is not your will, you can take it.
You can change it. You can morph it into whatever you want to do. I'm doing the work that I know I need to do.
Like faith is not passive. Okay. Surrendering is not passive.
It's aligned action. The Bible tells us faith without works is dead. Faith is not sitting there and trusting the Lord to put everything in your lap for you here.
Here's your perfect, beautiful birth experience wrapped in a bow. You're welcome. Can he do it? Absolutely.
But is that how God operates? How he tells us that he operates inside his word? No. Now that we've got some better understanding and some scripture to back it up, I want to talk to you a little bit about what stewardship can look like in your birth experience. I came up with a little stewardship framework to help you just keep moving without getting overwhelmed because I know birth prep can be a lot of work and doing what the Lord adds another layer to it.
Um, so basically we're going to talk about four different areas where you can move forward in, um, as you prepare your mind, your body, your spirit, your team, all the things. So first we're going to talk about heart, then head hands and home. And we're going to go in that order because I think that they build upon each other.
And the heart is where we're going to start because that is where I think that we're going to find steadiness. All the real preparation starts in your heart. If your inner world is insane and noisy and every single conversation that you have with another woman about their birth experience feels like pressure and you're all of a sudden doubting your plan and second guessing things, or maybe you're letting your last birth experience dictate how you're showing up for this one.
When all of that is so messy, it is so hard to even hear the Lord. But when your heart is anchored, the room can literally be swirling around you like a literal tornado and you can still hear the Lord. Scripture promises peace that guards your heart and mind.
It promises a peace that surpasses all understanding. It promises perfect peace for the one whose mind is stayed on him. It promises courage because he's with you.
Our strength comes from the Lord. Peace isn't the absence of intensity. It's the presence of God in it.
So obviously if we're going to be in an insane situation, wouldn't you much rather be there with the Lord who goes before you, who knows literally all the things, who is the most equipped to help you in that situation. So this is the area where we are majorly seeking the Lord. And that's another reason why it's first.
We want to seek the Lord first in everything that we do. Birth is no different. Now, practically this looks like prayer, speaking with the Lord, talking with him about things, bringing things to his feet.
It looks like your heart posture. Are you surrendering to the Lord? Are you seeking him first? Scripture, seeking God's promises, speaking them over yourself, your body, your baby, your birth. I have a new freebie, which I'll tell you more about in just a minute, but I have birth prep with Jesus.
You can grab it in the show notes. It has 12 scripture-based affirmation cards. So you can start speaking these promises of the Lord over your experience.
There's also some journal prompts in there. Then there's a bunch of other stuff too, but I really like to prayer journal personally. I have ADHD.
So sometimes prayer, I'm all like, Oh, then I started thinking about my grocery list and all that. I'm like, Oh my gosh, sorry, Lord. So sorry.
Let me get right back on track. So when I'm bringing a very specific thing to the Lord, I like to just write it down because that helps me stay focused on what I'm talking about. That helps me really reflect on things.
It helps me to be able to go back and see, see what the Lord has done. Right. It's like, gosh, I brought this to him six months ago and look what he's done.
He's so, so good. You can even go back through and like highlight little one-liners that you can turn into affirmations or turn into little breath prayers to use while you're in labor or, um, while you're navigating a difficult conversation or whatever, just like, just remind yourself like the Lord is with you and he is good and his promises endure forever and all of the wonderful, beautiful things. And I got to touch on praise and worship too, because honestly, that is my favorite way to spend time with the Lord.
Um, prison worship girly at my church and everything. So I have always loved that connection with him praising, like he's already gone before you and done it because he has and worshiping him just because of his goodness, his grace, his mercy, all of the things he gives us that we could not ever even be deserving of, but he shows up for us anyways. And he is so good for that worthy to be praised.
So some practical things you can do, honestly, the birth prep with Jesus resource is great. It's got journal prompts in it. It's got devotionals in it.
It's got, um, the scripture based affirmation cards, but also sit with the Lord, ask what the Lord wants you to do in this area. And he will be way better than me to tell you what to do, right? I mean, it's a great resource. He asked me to make it.
I put everything in there that he told me to, and I think that he's going to utilize it in a big way and so many births, including mine and maybe yours, but I really do want you to seek the Lord on what to do in this area. And I believe he wants you to do that too. Next we have the head and this is your decision engine, right? Wisdom is preparation plus humility, not control.
And we already know we can't control birth. We know that about birth already. And when God's the one in control, we know that even more scripture tells us that if we ask God will give generously.
And in Proverbs, there's a lot of stuff about wisdom and Proverbs. There's also a lot of stuff about fools. If you want to check that out, some of us be acting like a fool up in here, myself included, but in Proverbs three, it says to trust and step, not just to trust, but to actually make decisions, to actually take action on things in a hospital birth experience.
Wisdom is going to sound like you asking questions that can help turn their policy into a partnership with you. So here's some practical things to help you make wisdomful decisions. Is that a word? Wisdomful wisdom-based.
I don't know. Let's make decisions with wisdom. That's how we're going to say it.
First is one of my favorite tools. That is so simple and so easy. It's using your brain and it's an acronym.
It's B-R-A-I-N. What are the benefits? What are the risks? What are the alternatives? What does my intuition say? What does your Holy spirit say? And what if I do nothing or nothing right now? What if we watch and wait? These are things that you can ask yourself, but also asking your providers, your nurses, your support team, whatever that looks like, and just running through things quickly so that you can make an informed decision in the moment. You can quite literally run this in 30 seconds between contractions, right? Practice asking these questions in your prenatal appointments.
Practice asking these questions when you're just with your partner hanging out, like, hey, let's do some quick little rehearsal for the big day. Use your little brain. Use it in everyday life.
Practice it so that it's second nature by the time you get to that delivery room. The next thing I want you to do is I want you to check your provider. This is going to be the most important question that you ask, and you can do this at your very next appointment.
I urge you to do it. You can book a focused one-on-one visit. If you need to, I need you to ask, can you walk me through how you support an unmedicated birth from triage to labor, to pushing to afterbirth, like the whole process, walk me through how you personally support an unmedicated birth experience.
You are going to be listening for a process, not just little, oh yeah, we absolutely support unmedicated birth experiences. Okay. How tell me, because if you can't tell me how I don't believe you, honestly, listen for any red flags and listen for any green flags.
So things like we don't allow or routine induction pressure, like if they're literally already talking about induction at your 27 week appointment, that's a, that's a major red flag. If they're super inflexible about their monitoring or their IV policies, if they are joking about unmedicated births, Taylor, they would never do that. Yes, they do.
Okay. Literally they roll their eyes to say, oh, we'll see. Oh, okay.
Good luck with that. Oh, well, first time moms, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like that kind of stuff happens all the time.
If they won't share their practice statistics and share that information with you, these are all major red flags. And I would urge you to consider reassessing the situation, but on the other hand, we've got green flags. These are things that we want to see.
We want to see shared decision-making seeking you out and making you a part of the process, not just saying, Hey, here's how we're going to do things because this is just how we do them here. If they're comfortable and open to intermittent monitoring, a good provider should already be informed on the fact that continuous monitoring does not improve birth outcomes. Statistically, you are more at risk for interventions.
If you choose continuous monitoring, another green flag is if they're on board with a movement friendly flow for your birth experience, where you're not just going to be sitting in bed the whole time. If they're offering and educating you on non-drug coping mechanisms, if they have a doula positive culture, these are all green flags. Even if you don't choose to have a doula being open to working with somebody that you quite literally hired just for you.
And just to support you, that's a green flag. And then the last thing I want to touch on in the head area is making informed decisions. And the process that I teach my students is super simple.
You inform yourself on all the decisions that need to be made. You inform yourself on all the options for each of those decisions, and then you weigh the risks and the benefits of each option, apply it to your specific situation and make a decision that you feel great about. I'll put the birth plan guide in the show notes for you that has all of the decisions that need to be made surrounding a typical birth experience, including the ones that you need to make for your newborn.
Next, we have hands. Labor is physical, it's mental, it's spiritual, it's all the things. And I really hate to break it to you, but you're not going to rise to the occasion.
You're going to fall to the level of your training. And this is where the physical prep comes in. Not just for your physical body, but also for your mind.
Practice these things in advance so that they are second nature by the time you get to the delivery room. You can practice with your partner, you can practice by yourself, your doula, whoever's going to be your birth partner that day. You guys can go through different labor positions together, you can do some coping mechanisms like double hip squeezes, practice those with your partner.
You can even like mock some contractions and like doing your breathing exercises and stuff like that. Some people will do like a wall sit for a minute or hold a piece of ice for a minute so that it's like this mental game of like breathing through this uncomfortable moment. This is where your mindset is going to come into play.
Speaking those scripture-based affirmations over yourself. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Practice advocating for yourself too.
You do a little role play and your partner's like, hey, we need to check your cervix now. And you're like, oh, you need to ask my consent first. So many options to physically and mentally prepare for this experience.
Last we have home. And this is just referring to your environment. And I know a lot of you are not birthing at home.
A lot of you are hopefully going to be laboring at home though. And I mean, the hospital starts with age two. So hospital home, it's interchangeable here, but it's really all about the environment.
Your environment is so important. The room matters so much. A calm room keeps oxytocin flowing and decision-making clear.
When oxytocin is flowing, labor is progressing. When your body is not in adrenaline shock, your endorphins are flowing. That's your natural pain management system.
The Lord says he will fight for you while you get to keep still. So we're going to build a room that reflects that. Upon arriving to the hospital or birth center, wherever you're birthing, honestly, I would outsource this to your partner, but set the tone with just a quick little, honestly, 10 seconds of a little room brief.
Hey, we're planning a mobile unmedicated birth. We're planning intermittent monitoring, consent-based checks only. We're going to be doing a variety of pushing positions, and we're going to ask for anything that we need.
Please keep checks at a minimum. Then you have your environment. If you're going to the hospital, there's not like a ton you can do here, but you can keep the lights low, the door closed, whatever possible.
Have everybody keep their voices soft and hushed. You can have music, you can have, and do like two different playlists. You can have one praise, one worship, one calm, one powerful, whatever the vibe is, and whatever you're feeling, you'll have that ready.
You can have your affirmations taped to your bag or to the little baby bassinet or something, something that's not needing to be accessed by your team. Don't tape them right over the contraction monitor, okay? Have your little boundary scripts ready to go. Hey, we're going to ask for checks.
Please knock, keep voices low. If baby looks great, we're going to do intermittent monitoring today. A hep lock is fine.
Please hold routine IV unless we decide different later on. Your partner's job here basically is to run interference, guarding the vibe, watching the clock, feeding you, giving you water, pressing your hips, all the things. Make sure your partner knows exactly what is expected of them.
If you have multiple people supporting you, make sure everybody knows what their specific job is. Those are the four areas where we're going to start stewarding things well, heart, head, hands, and home, all while choosing Mary's method and truly sitting with the Lord in all of this prep. That's all I have for today, but I have a couple of quick reminders.
The Birth Prep with Jesus freebie is in the show notes for you. You can download it straight to your phone. It's got lots of wonderful resources inside to help you do this work with the Lord.
On Friday, inside the Birth Prep Lounge, we are doing power hour as per usual, and I am talking all about how to prep with Jesus. The link to join the lounge is in the show notes. Oh, I like that.
The link to join the lounge. And I'm also going to put the link for the Birth Prep course in there as well, if you want some information on how to enroll and all the things that are included in there, everything you need for birth. I also have a postpartum training in there and a newborn crash course, the Mary method, even a whole thing all about birthing after trauma.
So check that out and DM me if you have any questions at all. I know it's an investment on your part, not just monetarily, but also with your time and energy. As with anything, I want you to make an informed decision here.
So if you need more information, please reach out to me. And one more thing, if you are loving the podcast, please consider leaving a review. This helps more mamas find this information.
Okay. That's it for real. I love you guys.
I'm praying for you. And I can't wait to chat with you again very soon until then as always happy prepping.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
