Birth preparation with acupressure - a personal experience report

• Why acupressure only from SSW 38? The birth is imminent!
  
• Here's how I used acupressure to prepare for childbirth starting at 38 weeks gestation
  
• Calf relaxation: support the bladder and relieve cramps
  
• Neck pillow for loose muscles to evening & morning
• Breathing, focus & co.: What else helped me besides acupressure
  

Preparation for birth begins with knowledge about the pregnancy. Whether it's acupressure to prepare for birth, a course with a midwife, medical tests, yoga or long conversations with people you trust: When a baby is expected, things change and everyone deals with it differently. If it is the first time that one creates new life oneself, many enter a previously hidden world according to their feeling. A new preoccupation with one's own body and often also completely unknown sensations pave their way over many months until the birth.

In this article I share my very personal experience with birth preparation through acupressure and with the ShaktiMat. This is my story, it doesn't have to be yours. But you may feel invited to take something from it if you like.

"Above all these things, don't forget that no one knows your body and the life growing inside it better than you do."
- Antje Wickboldt

Why acupressure only from SSW 38? The birth is imminent!

During pregnancy, the body becomes very sensitive to physical and emotional influences. For this reason, acupressure can also trigger significantly stronger physical reactions in people like me, who already have a lot of experience with it, than one knew from one's own non-pregnant body. Because pregnancies are so extremely individual, it is therefore important to always coordinate well with the midwife or doctor whether certain exercises and ideas that you would like to try out can be helpful or perhaps even unfavorable for your own situation. Such an agreement does not mean that the other person may or should decide about your body, but it gives you the opportunity to make a better informed decision yourself.

Let the calves sink deeply to the tips - a relief!

An acupressure mat and pressure on individual acupressure points strongly stimulate the body. Both can stimulate labor for some people during pregnancy. This is the reason why there are no official recommendations to use the mat during pregnancy, because there is a lack of complete studies on how often premature labor can be induced.

That is why I started intensive daily use of the ShaktiMat only after the end of the 37th week of pregnancy, because from that point on my child was welcome to me at any time. The lowering contractions, supported by the combination of acupressure from SSW 38 and walks, helped my pelvis very much to widen in time and let the child slide deeply into the birth position.

For all the exercises shown I used the ShaktiMat Orange.

Here's how I used acupressure to prepare for childbirth starting at 38 weeks gestation

Below I would like to share with you which exercises have helped me personally the most. For less personalized tips, feel free to check out our article Acupressure and Pregnancy, which goes into more general detail and summarizes a few specific ideas for acupressure points during pregnancy and childbirth.

In preparation for the birth, the ShaktiMat became like a good friend for me, waiting for me every day and giving me the signal: Now it's time for me and the child in my belly. I did not let a single day go by without acupressure until the birth. Not out of pure ambition, or because I had written it into a plan, but simply because it did me so much good.

Calf relaxation: support the bladder and relieve cramps

Let the calves sink deeply to the tips - a relief!

Daily yoga (between 5-40 minutes was all right for me there, depending on the shape of the day) also helped me a lot for a good birth preparation. My favorite exercise was clearly the deep squat, which I have practiced since the beginning of pregnancy for about one to two minutes daily.

Neck pillow for loose muscles to evening & morning

In addition to the acupressure mat, I also used the neck pillow very intensively every day - I even started using it earlier, around the 35th week of pregnancy. Due to the change in weight distribution and the softening and tilting of the pelvis towards the end of pregnancy, I often experienced a pulling pressure in my neck.

To counteract this, I leaned my neck against the neck pillow every morning and evening for about 5 minutes, sometimes longer. The advantage is that this not only relaxed my neck, but also my jaw muscles, which can be very helpful for the birth. Not without reason is an often-heard midwife tip: Loose at the top = loose at the bottom!

Even with the neck pillow, I sometimes modified the exercise for me so that I performed an active massage by gently turning or rocking my head back and forth. This is really pleasant, especially after a long day, and it helped me a lot because I was still physically very active until the end of my pregnancy and I worked a lot in the garden.

Support the pelvis - Active acupressure

Initially without a mat, but with my hands, I also supported my pelvis and rump daily with pleasant pressure. For this I placed my hands, as you can see in the picture, so that my thumbs could press into the soft upper tissue of my gluteal muscles as well as further up on the hip and pelvic bones.

My acupressure to prepare the pelvis for birth was always varied: I kept looking for the tense spots.

I did not stick to specific acupressure points, but felt for tense or painful areas every day (often even several times a day!). Here I started with gentle pressure, while I slightly bent my knees with my legs a little more than shoulder-width apart and let the pelvis circle first five times around to the left, then five times around to the right. After that, I looked for the next tense spot and repeated the exercise for as long as I felt like it. The closer it got to the birth, the more time I spent with this exercise, because it really gave me a much lighter feeling in the pelvic area and, according to my feeling, also seemed to support the deeper sliding of the child.

The important thing for me was to always stand with my knees slightly bent to make room for the natural tilting motion of my pelvis and not work against it.

Acupressure from SSW 39 - direct energy downwards to the end: Stimulation of the feet

In both Indian Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, one hears a lot about the so-called flow of energies through the body. Under the birth and to stimulate its beginning, there was of course a very clear direction in which I wanted to direct my energy: downward.

So I started acupressure for the feet from the end of SSW 38, carefully trampling on the ShaktiMat while sitting on the edge of the bed at first, and applying a little more pressure each day until I could finally stand on the mat with all my weight.

It's better to start slowly, after all, the feet carry much more weight during pregnancy. This can result in a whole new intense feeling even for practiced ShaktiMat fans.

I always made sure not to overload myself and to do the exercise only as long as I felt comfortable. I never looked at the clock - I guess I did everything from 30 seconds to 8 minutes on the mat. I always opened the window wide for the foot exercises, put a blanket around my shoulders, focused on my deep breath and actively imagined how the flow of energy from my head towards my feet steadily caressed my baby. This may sound a bit esoteric, but it helped me a lot to prepare for the birth and to give space to all the processes in my body without tensing against them.

Breathing, focus & co.: What else helped me besides acupressure

Besides the physical support of my body so close to birth, breathing and the emotional focus on the upcoming event were very important for me. There are many breathing exercises that are advised for birth and I personally didn't feel that you should just "memorize" them. Instead, it helped me to consciously choose situations where you can try out which way of breathing you find yourself responding to positively. For example, if you are sitting in the bathroom with constipation, you can use this situation excellently to practice letting go through your breathing with different techniques you know.

For me personally, the breathing of choice was the following:
I breathe deeply into my belly and consciously imagine that the entire sphincter muscles are completely released when I inhale, so I am open downward. I maintain this feeling of openness and do not tense up again. On the exhale, the abdomen then pulls inward and upward (as if trying to suck up the navel) and from the upper abdominal muscles are simultaneously pushed downward in a gentle but focused manner. I repeat this exercise as long as I can concentrate well. As soon as I notice that I am getting tense or that my focus is drifting, I stop and continue practicing another time.

Daily yoga (between 5-40 minutes was all right for me there, depending on the shape of the day) also helped me a lot for a good birth preparation. My favorite exercise was clearly the deep squat, which I have practiced since the beginning of pregnancy for about one to two minutes daily.

I also find it helpful to really take time every day (for example, in the morning and evening) to prepare yourself emotionally for the fact that an existential and unique experience lies ahead of you. Every birth is individual. I liked to sit cross-legged or in the side position with my hands on my belly and feel the movements or the calmness of the little life and actively tried to allow whatever thoughts about birth, the postpartum and becoming a mother came up. For the most part, I delighted in the fact that thoughts of anticipation dominated - but of course that is not always the case. If something seemed unresolved, I jotted it down in my mind for later or spoke it out loud directly in the situation. Afterwards, I discussed any fears or unresolved worries that arose with a trusted person or read up on some topics again if I didn't feel informed enough.

During your pregnancy and birth preparation, you may come across well-intentioned advice, read articles like this one, or get news from a pregnancy app. Above all this, don't forget that no one knows your body and the life growing inside it better than you do. You decide what is right for you. You decide what your path is. And no one can tell you what to accept for yourself from all the information, what steps to take next, what to feel good about. You decide.

We wish you a wonderful further journey towards birth.

Your Anni & your Shakti Mat Team

If you would like to share your thoughts on the topics of acupressure and acupressure mat for birth preparation and give other expectant mothers tips about it or ask questions, feel free to leave us a comment or visit us on Facebook.