For Birth
Move and flow through labour. Invite balance, suppleness, softness, spaciousness, and ease. Influence the ligaments, muscles, fascia, and soft tissues surrounding your uterus, abdomen, back, pelvis, and hips. Move better and feel better in pregnancy. Create space in your belly for your baby to orient for birth. Easily expand your body (and heart) in birth. Make the physical shifts from pregnancy to birth to postpartum so much easier.
To Soften the Soft Tissues
Soft tissues in the body (muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia, connective tissue, nerves, blood and lymph vessels, and more) are meant to be soft! They can become rigid, stiff, taut, unsupportive, or carry tension for many reasons…
Tension and stiffness in the soft tissues isn’t helpful during birth; it adds to discomfort, increases length of labour, and impacts the baby’s position and experience of birth. So it is important to work with the soft tissues and ideally get to root causes of what’s causing tension or stiffness (such as lifestyle, emotional causes, trauma, poor nutrition, lack of movement, repetitive and unhelpful postures or movement patterns, stress, scar tissue, injury, or something else).
Bodywork is one of many ways to bring balance, softness, suppleness, oxygen, nourishment, extensibility, motility, optimal tone, and grounding to a mama’s soft tissues. It allows for baby to better situate in the uterus and creates a sense of ease and lightness in the body.
For Fascial Flow & Freedom
Fascia is a live, dynamic, 3D tensional network that connects everything to everything else within your body. It falls in layers, is all encompassing, links brain and body, is integral to the nervous system, and loves movement and touch…
One way to think about the superficial fascial layer is to imagine the surface of a lake. Imagine the fascia is like the liquid layer that lives and flows just beneath the skin. Healthy fascia should be mobile, hydrated, dynamic, well nourished and receptive to movement and gentle pressure. Contrast this with a pond that is dense, sticky, muddy, and lacks fluid motion. Moving through such resistance would require more force.
Interacting with the body in a forceful or heavy way can produce a protective response in the nervous system and tissues. Bodywork is not forceful – it is more like molding of clay on a potter’s wheel; the clay responds best to intentional, slow, gentle, coaxing, and shaping in skilled hands.
Bodywork for birth inputs movement, pressure, and length into the fascial proprioceptive network and it alters the body’s sensory and motor systems. It improves tissue health by enhancing circulation (blood and lymph flow) and it helps the fascial body become more responsive and adaptable.
The ease and suppleness achieved through bodywork creates possibilities for the maternal body to morph, yield and flow around the baby, who can then also move down and out of the mother’s body – free and unhindered – as childbirth unfolds.
to Open the Bony Pelvis
Modern obstetrics has perpetuated the myth that the maternal pelvis is a fixed, rigid structure categorized into only four subgroups. In truth, the birthing pelvis comes in all shapes and sizes…
The maternal pelvis is a resilient, dynamic, and springy frame that opens up in various dimensions during birth (depending on the location of the baby). It is made incredibly flexible by the cocktail of hormones that floods the body at the onset of labour.
Additionally, because the pelvis is encased and enveloped by soft tissues, it can be influenced by the soft tissues of the body. If the soft tissues are stiff, the pelvis will have a harder time expanding as baby moves down and out. If they are supple, pelvic expansion will be more easeful.
Mindful bodywork helps the bony pelvis expand by working out tensions in the soft tissues that attach to the pelvis. It also ensures the joints of the pelvis, low back and hips have some play and wiggle room during birth.
To transform through Touch
Touch is our very first language. Through this sense, we make sense of our world and can thrive. Touch is the tactile form of connection; and the longing for connection is hardwired into our neurobiology as embodied beings…
Safe and caring touch is therapeutic and healing (all the more so if we’ve known harmful touches through our lived experiences); and through relational touch, we can feel settled, be witnessed, and given space to be and become.
For all these reasons and more, bodywork for birth is an extremely powerful modality. It speaks directly to the nervous system and promotes co-regulation, grounding, and safety within the body. A sense of safety is necessary for birth to unfold physiologically and for a baby to be born in love.
Bodywork for birth offers the anchoring and support that’s needed for you to expand and take up space. And most importantly, it primes your system for the expression of oxytocin – which is the key hormone of touch, of bonding, and of birth.
Bodywork for birth is designed to restore physiological equilibrium to the pregnant pelvis and uterus. It helps ease the accepted woes of pregnancy, creates more “room in the womb” for baby, and thus influences the baby’s positioning in utero.
Women have reported easier births, less pain in labour, decreased interventions, and increased connection with their bodies and their baby. Bodywork can be offered prenatally or during labour/birth.
It can help to:
Bodywork for birth is designed to restore physiological equilibrium to the pregnant pelvis and uterus. It helps ease the accepted woes of pregnancy, creates more “room in the womb” for baby, and thus influences the baby’s positioning in utero.
Women have reported easier births, less pain in labour, decreased medical interventions, and increased connection with their bodies and their baby. Bodywork can be offered prenatally or during labour/birth.
It can help to:
Birth is about your
Growth & Expansion
on so many levels
Birth is about your
Growth & Expansion
on so many levels
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, bodywork is within the scope of practice of physiotherapists. Bodywork is also within the scope of other health professionals such as registered massage therapists, osteopaths, chiropractors, etc. I’m so glad that healing touch is a modality that can be offered through many disciplines.
Physiotherapy includes many treatment modalities such as education, sensory/motor re-training, manual therapy, electrotherapy, application of physical agents, exercise prescription, etc. It tends to be quite active and participatory in nature.
Bodywork focuses on the therapeutic touch aspects of physiotherapy care and usually focuses on the external body. It is a powerful modality where direct and intentional interaction with the body’s tissues has immediate effects on the nervous system and fascial network.
Bodywork also involves the giving and receiving of touch, “reading or listening” to the body, and the recipient attuning to whatever arises in her psyche and soma. It tends to be less “active” in nature and require more patience as we wait for the body to respond to the specific touch input.
At The Mama’s Physio, a physiotherapy session may include elements of bodywork. On the other hand, a bodywork for birth session is a full 60 or 90 minutes of hands-on work with the soft tissues.
I’d love to be able to make guarantees about turning breech babies or babies who may be lying in other positions in utero. However, that is the choice of the baby as he or she interacts with the landscape of that specific womb.
Rather, I approach a woman, her baby, and both of their bodies with open handedness and gentleness. I seek to work with physiology rather than with force, and I don’t place pressure on myself, the woman, or the baby by demanding a specific outcome.
Bodywork is about creating balance in the pelvis and uterus, and inviting suppleness into the soft tissues surrounding the entire region. If a baby is positioned in a specific way in the womb, it is often due to tensions or imbalances in the tissues influencing the uterus. Thus bodywork offers an opportunity to change tensions, create space, and restore balance. Once this happens, babies will often move into areas of newly created spaciousness and re-orient in utero.
But sometimes that reorientation doesn’t happen; and if this is the case, we can respect the interior wisdom of the body and baby, trusting that there is a very good reason – even if we do not yet know or understand it.
An ECV (External Cephalic Version) is a procedure that is done by an OB who places hands on your belly and attempts to manually rotate your baby into the “right position” before labour begins. It’s usually offered for around 34-36 weeks if baby isn’t head down (vertex) by that time. EVCs can range from quite mild to quite forceful in nature and the success rates in research studies seems to vary widely. Please read more about ECVs on this excellent Evidence Based Birth article.
The goal of bodywork for an ECV would be to help soften, balance, and prepare the body to be more receptive to the procedure and make it a little less forceful on the maternal tissues and the baby.
So if an ECV is on the menu, I’d suggest that:
1) You ideally receive body balancing and bodywork prior to 34 weeks. It may be a one time session or it may be multiple sessions.
2) If this is not possible, then book at least one 90 minute bodywork session as close as possible to the scheduled ECV (within 24h or less). Your birth partner is highly recommended to attend this session as well so I can share some techniques.
3) Whether or not the ECV was “successful”, please return afterwards to help your body integrate the procedure and to help settle your nervous system and settle your baby. If the EVC was successful, gentle bodywork post ECV can encourage your baby to stay in the new position.
I’d highly suggest a 90 minute session, especially if it’s your first time getting bodywork. The time goes by surprisingly fast…plus it feels utterly luxurious for you and your baby.
It can be a little tricky to find a 90 minute time slot in my online booking system – so please text me to set this up.
Note: for an additional fee, bodywork sessions may also offered outside of regular work hours, and/or within your home.
create space within for an expansive & easeful birth experience
Bodywork for birth is offered in-person in London Ontario for women with low risk normal pregnancies who are:
This is a 60 or 90 minute session for strategic, intuitively led, hands-on bodywork and body balancing for pregnancy, labour, and birth.
Birth partners are welcome and encouraged to attend.
Based on effects, it may be recommended to return for one or two shorter bodywork sessions.
This link will take you to The Mama’s Physio online booking page via Jane.
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love from the
mama’s MAILBOX
Monthly-ish emails you’re actually excited to read! Get real talk on birth and bodies, first dibs, and more.
We respect your inbox. Unsubscribe any time.
The Mama’s Physio – 408 Queen’s Ave, London, ON, N6B 1X9
© 2013-2024 THE MAMA’S PHYSIO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED