Learn your body

Learn your body - learn what it feels like, learn what your normal is

This is something that I wasn't taught in grade school. I doubt that it's taught now, but trusting your body is incredibly important in your life. Western society teaches you to not trust your instincts and your body, and I think that is a short coming in our medical care. It's hard to believe that for so long, we've been taught to ignore the natural signals and needs of our own bodies. Our bodies have undergone centuries of evolution to get us to this point, you'd think that we'd have some inherent abilities to tap into. Animals know when things are wrong, and they generally seek help. So why would it be any different for us.

I want to share some of my experiences that I might have missed entirely if I had not taken the time to develop a deeper understanding of my body.

I can't be thankful enough to have had a deep and clear understanding of what my normal pains, aches, and overall body sensations truly feel like. This awareness has made a significant difference in how I recognize and respond to changes in my health. If I hadn't known this going into pregnancy, I'm not sure that I would have clued into a lot of the things that I went through early on. For starters in my first pregnancy, I felt baby kick at about the 10-week mark which is pretty early, and it was a magical feeling to know that there he was. 

I knew I was pregnant about 2 weeks after conceiving. I knew what normal period camps felt like. I knew how my breasts normally felt during my cycle. When I was just under a week out of my normal period and my breasts became extremely sensitive (this was not normal at all), I knew I was pregnant. I will say we were trying to conceive, so I was hyper aware and looking for any sign. I do think now being through it once, I can recognize the signs if we weren't trying to conceive but I became pregnant.

I was confident when I went into the doctor knowing something didn't feel right. It turned out that I was having round ligament pain. At the time, I didn't fully understand what it was, but I could definitely tell that something was certainly off.. I remember doctors writing it off that it was no big deal, or that the pain was quick and would go away. But let me tell you it was hard. Hard to walk much less breathe for about a week and a half. I was later informed that. This would probably come back in my 35th week of pregnancy. That was accurate. Fortunately, having gone through it once and learning how to cope made the second time less painful. I can go into more depth on this in a separate article. 

Your body is amazing and is capable of so many things.

Another thing in my last week of my third trimester I knew I was going to have baby within that week. It's so hard to say why I knew this. I just felt it in my core and sure enough I started to have the contractions 5 days out from when he was born. The contractions grew in intensity as the days went on and I started to have other symptoms. I remember people talking about the intense need to nest and I had that. I had this feeling that I needed to get everything buttoned up because things are going to change quickly and I was right. It's crazy how your body just knows.

I remember when I was delivering our baby the nurses would tell me that a contraction was coming, to get ready to push. In the beginning I couldn’t tell or pace them out. But by the end I could tell before the machine would. I could feel when I needed to push and when I needed to stop. I felt incredibly powerful and in-control in those last few moments of labor. I know this is not the case for all women, and that’s why I share this. I think becoming in tune with my body prior to labor allowed me to have this.

I read a a lot of books while I was pregnant and one quote stuck out to me. It was Bridget Teyler, she has a course called Built to Birth. It was from one of her YouTube video and she says that that ‘you were born to do this’. I never actually took her course. I just watched a lot of her videos. And just being around inspirational things like this gave me the confidence that I could do this. That I could deliver our baby and that yes, it would be a new experience, and I might have fears about it. But at the end of the day I could do this. My body would help me know what to do. And for the most part it did. I just had a hard time getting out of its way. 

If you take one thing away from this know that your body is amazing and is capable of so many things. You simply have to get out of its way.