"Trust your body", a nonsense or a motto to live by?

“Trust your body”: An idea often disputed when it comes to giving birth, because ‘birth doesn’t always go to plan’.

But tell me this.. do you doubt your ability to breathe/ digest food/ heal a cut/ pump blood etc? For the majority of people these things happen without us ever questioning our body’s ability to do them.

SOMETIMES however, we may catch a cold that makes it harder to breathe, we might have IBS or something in our physiology might malfunction. Pollution or smoke might affect our breathing, dangerous objects might hurt or harm us or something in the environment we are in might interfere with the functions of our body.

It’s pretty to easy to accept those things as normal. To simultaneously trust that your body knows exactly what to do, whilst accepting that sometimes, it might not work as expected.

So why is it so impossible to do in birth? Why has the idea of trusting your body become weaponised as an ideology of the ‘cult of natural birth’.. why can we not believe both that human bodies were beautifully designed to facilitate birth.. and that sometimes our environment, decisions or genuine pathology might mean it doesn’t work in the way that it’s meant to?

‘Trusting your body’ means LISTENING TO IT.

We are not used to doing that! How often do you need a wee, but delay for 2 hours because you’ve got ‘stuff to do’? How often you get to the end of the day and down a pint of water because you’re so thirsty, you had just ignored that need all day? How often do we feel tired or run down, burned out or unwell but ‘get on with things anyway’ (either our of necessity, FOMO or stubbornness)?

You can trust your body to tell you something ‘isn’t quite right’ in the same way you can trust it to do it’s job well most of the time. The 2 are not mutually exclusive.

So know this- you are allowed to trust your body.

Even if most birth stories you hear make you doubt it. Even if your previous experiences of birth have left you unsure.

Learn about what leads to intervention. Learn what is in your control. Learn how your body works and which totally routine aspects of birth ‘care’ might undermine it. And trust that if you need support, medicine or intervention- it’s yours for the taking- as some of us genuinely will need!

To learn more about all of this, join our online course for just £40/$49.