Bailey Counselling Therapy

07/12/2025

& Barbara Becker on simplifying

05/28/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/1ALV7hGdVJ/?mibextid=wwXIfr

This was my experience. Labour felt too fast. Like my body couldn’t hold it.. so intense and overwhelming. Took me a while to do the work to integrate the experience.

While a speedy labor might sound desirable when you’re thinking ahead to birth - as any mama who has had a ‘precipitous labor’ can relate - it can also feel intensely overwhelming - and even traumatic, especially if you’re not prepared for that reality.

Most women who go into labor spontaneously will experience a warm-up period that gets their body and mind ready, slowly, over hours and days, throughout various early labor stages.

Precipitous labor jumps right into the intensity + speed of active labor, sometimes right into the depth of transition - skipping over not only the mental warm up but the oxytocin buffer that evolutionarily has been developed as natural pain management.

A short labor can feel overwhelming and scary - like a freight train moving through you, while you’re trying to grab onto the handrails! This isn’t unsafe for you or baby - it’s just moving FAST!

Key: Stay calm, trust your body, and use your skills like comforting positions and deep breathing techniques.

If you’re trying to get to the birth center or hospital and feel like pushing (or pooping!)

* Try hands and knees or elbows down with butt up in the air to take the pressure off + pant like you are trying to keep a feather up in the air.
* Laying on your side with your knees drawn up can help.
* Blow like you are extinguishing a candle to reduce the intensity of the push - you can’t stop it per se, but you can ease it a bit.

The good news is these births often go really well. Your mind just needs to catch up to what your body is doing! Sometimes easier said than done - with some need to process it postpartum.

Friends saying “You’re lucky that was so fast!”? Well.... it’s actually totally valid to feel that the experience was overwhelming - or traumatic - and you’re the only one who gets to make that call.

What were your births like? Were your labors fast? Long? How did that feel to you? How did you integrate and process this postpartum? Love to hear your stories in the comments!

For the most comprehensive birth prep course - taught by a Midwife-MD join me in BirthWise - the Mama Pathway complete birthing course - deets at the link in bio.

📸

04/29/2025

Anyone wanting to come to our multi-stage parenting group? Come out for coffee, company, connection.

04/10/2025

Sometimes we all need a few reminders on how to support ourselves with anxiety. Anxiety is a normal part of being a human.. it lets us know that something is amiss or needs attention.

04/10/2025

Look at this exciting zine..
“The form of someone’s body doesn’t necessarily determine what that body means, how it
works, or what it can do.”
Mira Bellwether

12/10/2024

Ways to spread some love this season..

12/04/2024

This moment here and now is perfect. In its imperfection and transitional nature. Take a moment now to soak it in.

02/09/2024

How to keep your relationship fresh and engaging? learn something new about your partner while holding the familiarity of your connection. It can even spark desire.

Maintaining a sense of mystery and surprise helps counteract the routine and repetition that can sometimes lead to a decline in desire over time.

When you learn something new about your partner—whether it’s funny and surprising or vulnerable and deep—you experience a stimulating contradiction: “rencontrer” and remembrance. (Unsurprisingly, it takes me a little French and a little English to describe it best.)

“Rencontrer” is a meeting with the new. Remembrance is the comfort of recognition. Experiencing your partner as known and familiar, and yet still elusive and mysterious, creates a highly Erotic tension. Sharing new stories is a great way to evoke this.

My latest newsletter explores ways to infuse more novelty into your relationship, featuring suggestions inspired by prompts from "Where Should We Begin: A Game of Stories." Engaging in fresh conversations and asking new questions takes us to new places, ensuring your journey together is ever-evolving. Dive into the details in my newsletter for a deeper connection filled with surprises.

https://bit.ly/3Sv2K91

02/09/2024

As the Buddha described life, he spoke of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, often described as “the eight worldly winds.” It’s just how life is. There is no one who experiences only pleasure and no pain. There is no act that elicits only praise and no blame. Appreciating this fact is not a call for apathy or depression. We can recognize the truth of things, accept them as the inevitable fabric of life, and understand that the best way to work for change is not to be freaked out, or in denial, or anxious with the ups, lest they dissolve, and plummet with the downs, fearing they won’t. Equanimity implies a posture of dignity even in a whirlwind of change. It implies being able to breathe. It implies complete presence. It implies being able to come to peace. If we take the time to reflect on the inevitable turnings of life, it will build our equanimity. If we practice fully experiencing the joy of certain moments without fearfully clinging to them, it will build equanimity. If, as Joanna Macy says, we look at the pain and keep breathing, it will build equanimity. All of it will build a quality of radiant calm that is intricate, shifting, alive.

01/08/2024

Dear family, I will be quiet here until February — going deep into the writing cave. As we begin this new year, and devastation continues to rain down on Gaza, this is my wish: Remember you will be an ancestor one day. The choices we make now are not like soap bubbles that disappear but sound waves that reverberate far into the future. And so even when the night becomes hopeless, dare to sing in the dark. A song of love. As you cook dinner or call Congress or attend the vigil or talk to the kids — what do you need to keep showing up with your whole heart, and all your courage? I need rest. I need solitude. I need sisterhood. I need beauty. I need joy. May we give that to ourselves, and to one another, without apology. Even seconds at a time. So that we can speak and act not from endless reactivity, but from our deepest wisdom.

I love you, family. I love us. In a world that wants to shut down our humanity, we are the revolution.

Follow Revolutionary Love Project ✨
___

1. Call Congress daily for ceasefire. Script is pinned.
2. Donate to Oxfam International for aid to Gaza.
3. Support Standing Together, the grassroots Palestinian-Israeli movement for a shared future.