Let me tell you a secret. Birth affirmations, they don’t work! You will never hear a Hypnobirthing Coach tell you that! Let me explain to you why.

When you think of a birth affirmation, you probably picture a note stuck on the wall, saying ‘I am strong’ or ‘I can do this’.

Every day both positive and negative affirmations cross through our thoughts such as, ‘I am going to eat healthily today’ or ‘I am frightened of giving birth to my baby’.

I see lots of mother’s buy a readymade printed pack of birth affirmations, thinking it will make them believe in the birth affirmations and start to change their way of thinking. These words are not their words, they have no true meaning to them.

I also see mothers write down what they want to believe. These are usually created from the thoughts the mother doesn’t want to believe, so they are changing their negative thinking into positive thinking. You are probably thinking, surely this works? Isn’t this what everyone does when they practice positive thinking? It doesn’t quite work like that. The problem with this is it is like trying to swim against the tide. This is very tiresome, and you will find you haven’t actually moved anywhere.

By doing this, it will just cause more thinking, because you are trying to change thinking with thinking. Now that’s a bit of mind gymnastics! More confusion and less clarity.

When people do affirmations, such as ‘I can do this’, your thinking becomes a little voice in the back of your head and says “no you can’t”. You end up getting into a fight with it and that little voice is then getting stronger and stronger so it dominates your way of thinking and wins.

This is creating our perception, our experience and our own words and thoughts create our actual world.

We all create our own reality. Our words create our world. Everything that happens is because we create it. Our language creates our reality, both internally and externally. Our language is the structure of our unconscious, the words we use create our conscious awareness. This creates our feelings and how we feel, which creates our experience of the world.

Our thoughts become our world. We live in the experience of our thinking.

An affirmation is a way of saying something to convince ourselves that it is true.

As part of my Hypnobirthing Course, I encourage mothers to write their own birth declarations, not birth affirmations.

By writing a declaration as opposed to an affirmation is a way of agreeing that in this moment, I am choosing this to be true, right now. By choosing something to be true helps bring it into the experience.

If you would like to explore this further contact me for a conversation.