Friday, February 8, 2008

Calm Birth

I was excited to get a nice copy of Calm Birth from Bookins. The subtitle is "New Method for Conscious Childbirth." I was really excited about it, because I'd never heard of it before. I read SO many books and so many about birth, that I love the thrill of discovering something new and delving into a new level of birth information/ideas. I settled down to read it last week and quickly found that I could not get into it. At. All. I *rarely* meet a book that I can't read and unfortunately, this book was one of them :( I ended up skimming quickly to the end and nothing ever "hooked" me back into it to give it more of a chance. I just simply didn't like it and didn't find that it had anything to offer me. It was supposed to be about meditation, visualization, and energy medicine. It seems esoteric, impractical, and irrelevant. The book hardly talked about pregnancy and birth, but instead about your "life vase" and things like that. I'd be interested to know if anyone has "successfully" used the approach and found it helpful in labor and birth? Even the transcripts of interviews at the end were not interesting and made little sense.

Generally, I read an entire book literally cover-to-cover--I read all of the author acknowledgments, everything! So, it was weird of me to realize, "I don't want to keep reading this book."

I think this may be the first totally negative review I've posted here.

For whatever reason, the book DID make me think about hypnosis as a method of childbirth preparation and I feel interested in looking into those approaches more, since that isn't something I'm familiar with. There is Hypnobirthing (I have this book, but haven't ever read it yet), Hypbirth, and Hypnobabies (I'm interested by their homestudy option in particular for next time I have a baby--why not branch out and "test" new ideas?!).

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