Sometimes the light is made more brilliant by the contrast of darkness.

Was your last birth a scary or stressful experience?

When this is the case, and you find yourself expecting again, you may be anxious about the past, and even more nervous about the future.

Your prior fear and anxiety can play a role in the way that your current pregnancy and birth experience unfolds.

Every cell in your body is like an electric hologram - and the feelings we experience are now understood to be frequencies which permeate our physical form.

Fear is a frequency, and so is love, trust, and joy.

We can talk about living in the moment, but when the spectre of a past birth is haunting your thoughts and feelings, it may feel hard to move forward.

You might be feeling like you're stuck on a treadmill or hamster wheel, running through the same thoughts and feelings.

Ultimately, this pattern of unhelpful thoughts is like tuning the “radio” of your heart to a station that plays all the tunes you don’t want to hear. This can result in a manifestation of those very fears and worries.

Strong feelings, whether positive or negative, act as a magnet, pulling similar experiences toward us.

It’s an attraction of harmonic frequencies.

What we pay attention to aligns us with receiving more of whatever brings us those type of feelings in our lives--resulting in more of the same.

Homeopathy and other vibrational medicine explains this as “like attracts like”.

Think of your feelings like a beacon or radio signal, continually attracting experiences, people, and situations that are in alignment with your unique signal.

We may not be able to go back and rewrite the past, but we can change the way we think and feel about it.

If you had a prior experience that brings up feelings of sadness, fear, shame, or worry, try to locate a place within that memory where there might be a bit of extra room to focus on feelings of gratitude, forgiveness, love--or any emotion that uplifts you instead of brings you down.

Perhaps your partner was not as supportive as you would have liked, for example. Instead of feeling stuck in anger about this, you can find an opportunity for gratitude.

You're now more aware of your partner's potential limitations and comfort zones, and perhaps this knowledge can lead to you having some critical conversations with them - or even enlisting additional support from another source, like a doula or childbirth education class.

Perhaps you feel that you were bullied into unnecessary interventions by your care providers. I certainly felt this way after my third birth. That feeling crippled me and undermined my self-worth, for far too long.

But in the end, I was able to transmute that feeling to fuel my passion and determination, to fight for a better birth experience in my future.

For me, my trauma lit a fire inside me to learn all I could about birth, and why birth is the way it is in modern America.

Through my personal pain, I have come to feel thankful for my negative experiences surrounding birth--because that darkness gave contrast to what I knew birth could be instead.

Don't let your fears of the past define your NOW. Use the power of gratitude to transform your pain and fear into empowerment for the future!

Courses | Services | Consults: RethinkBirth.com

MORE ON HEALING TRAUMA:

How to Have a Gentle Cesarean

Depression During Pregnancy

freeing yourself from past pain and fear - on…

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial