Let's take a breathing break to connect with our body and to connect with baby.
So find a comfortable seat and in this guided meditation you can be sitting or you can be lying,
Whatever is comfortable for you.
So as you begin to notice the breath,
Just relax the body,
Find yourself settling into whatever space or support that you've chosen and bring your awareness to where you feel the movement of the breath in your body.
Maybe if you've had a busy day or maybe your thoughts have been a little scrambled,
You might be breathing into your upper chest and we want to take that breath deeper and lower to use our diaphragm.
Diaphragmatic breathing is what allows us to come into our parasympathetic nervous system,
Which is our rest,
Digest,
Our healing room of our body.
So as you relax baby,
Relax belly,
Imagine when the breath comes in through your nose,
Over the soft palate,
Down the back of the throat,
Deep down into the lungs.
Imagine that breath is coming right to baby as you expand that breath and then allow the belly to relax as you exhale everything out.
But let's put a color to our breath.
Maybe imagine it as a smoky color,
Maybe it's your favorite color or maybe it's white,
Whatever it is.
Think of that as a bright beautiful cloud of color and as you inhale that breath in through the nose and allow that to expand deep into the belly,
It just swirls around baby,
Nourishing,
Giving energy to baby,
Providing just a sense of a warm comfy blanket around baby.
And as you exhale it out,
Just imagine that any stress or toxins or anything that you have surrounding baby and your body is just that we're just letting that go.
But as we take that inhalation,
Feel that breath going deep down into the belly first and then allow it to expand into the ribs,
Into the back,
Into the chest.
And then as we release that breath,
It comes from the chest first and the ribs and the back and then the belly.
Let's take a few breaths like that.
It's called a four-part breath.
We inhale,
Take it to belly,
Ribs,
Chest and back.
Maybe a slight pause at the top of the breath and then guiding the breath out from the top to the bottom.
And as we exhale that breath,
Maybe giving that baby a squeeze as if you're hugging baby.
Try to activate those transverse abdominus muscles where we're just kind of hugging and squeezing baby as we squeeze that breath out.
And then release and relax as we let that inhale come in.
Exhale.
At the end of that,
Give baby a little hug like we're just drawing the hip bones together.
Always relaxing on the inhalation.
But now we're going to let that go and have a sense of what's happening in our pelvic floor.
Visualizing a diamond.
Our two sitting bones,
Our pubic bone,
Our tailbone.
We have this diamond shape.
We have this hammock of muscles here supporting baby.
But this time on our exhalation,
We're going to relax the pelvic floor.
And on our inhalation,
As we take that breath in,
Because the pelvic floor slightly lowers,
We're going to do a gentle contraction.
But on the exhalation,
Really focus on relaxing the pelvic floor.
And this is birth training for when baby comes.
Because as we exhale the breath out,
Making sure that the jaw is relaxed,
We release the pelvic floor muscles so that baby can easily and smoothly arrive and move through the birth canal.
So inhaling,
A gentle lift,
Contraction,
Pulling those four points of the diamond together.
Whatever you need to visualize here.
But on the exhalation,
Widening and spreading.
Maybe even finding a mantra of opening or release or whatever word is meaning to you for allowing baby to gently and calmly come through the birth canal.
So let's do that a few more times.
Contracting,
Bringing those four points together on the inhale,
And releasing and letting go on the exhalation.
Feeling a widening and a spreading of the pelvic floor.
And you can do this whenever you want to practice it.
Anytime you need to take a little break.
Connect with baby,
Connect with body,
And prepare for your baby's birth.
Sending you peace,
Love,
And light.
