Train Your Brain for a Positive Birth | Tracy Donegan

Today, we talk with Tracy Donegan, founder of the GentleBirth app (https://gentlebirth.app). She is also a doula and doula trainer. She tells us how she became a doula, including how she started the first doula service in Ireland, her home country. While teaching a hypnosis for birth program, she felt drawn to the unexplored, neurological approach to understanding birth. She describes the GentleBirth program as encompassing the traditional approach to childbirth education, while combining it with neuroscience and meditation. She talks about how the course involves the partner, emphasizing the important part they can play in the birth space. In every aspect of the course, the aim is to develop mental resilience and mental regulation to ensure the best possible outcome with every birth, for both the mother and the partner. She also talks about how affirmations, meditation, and breathing techniques are used to improve sleep and other aspects of self care during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. She explains the importance of a birth education course not only for preparing a mother for the birthing experience, but also for parenting, which is “when the real work begins.” We talk more about hypnosis and meditation, and discuss how the course can be for medicated, unmedicated, and induced births. We also discuss the “Labor Companion” feature of the app. We talk about the new science of pain perception, and how we can help our body process the different sensations of birth.

• 1:15 Tracy’s Story and the Beginnings of GentleBirth 
• 5:17 How the GentleBirth app Works 
• 29:44 How Hypnosis and Meditation are Involved in the Course 
• 33:48 Other Features of GentleBirth; Pain Perception

"If you come to a GentleBirth class, you learn all about the physiology of birth, you learn comfort measures, but you also spend a lot of time learning about your brain, and how to use it to the best of your advantage. It’s like a muscle that we’re training.” 5:40

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