Finding Your Way Home; The Secrets to True Alignment

Short - Hypnobirthing & Neuroplasticity with Charlotte Mindel; how shifting your thinking can revolutionise your experience of pain

• Anthea Bell

Share episode

Gorgeous Listeners, welcome to this week’s episode of Finding Your Way Home,

In this week's Short, we explore the profound significance of the birthing process and why a "Conscious Birth" experience is so vital to the wellbeing of both mother and child. 

We're joined by Charlotte Mindel; a Pre and Post-Natal birthing Coach, who's mission is to place power back into the hands of women giving birth. Charlotte works holistically with mothers and their families to support all elements of the birthing experience - from education on the physiology of pregnancy / birth to awakening internal awareness, building positive mind-set and ultimately, offering parents the agency to choose the sort of birth that's right for them. 

In Charlotte's view, Western birth has become a deeply disconnected experience - both for the expectant mother and within a wider society that isolates and systematises the process and prescriptions. Her focus is on connecting mothers back to their intuition, growing their resources and the self-permission to follow a path that's truly authentic. She sees birth as a marker of the person - and therefore, as an immeasurable tool to find deeper personal alignment. 

In this powerful excerpt we explore not only the nature and benefits of hypnobirthing but how shifts in thinking can revolutionise our experience of pain / sensation - in each and every day that we're willing to stay with, be curious, and follow the messages emanating from the body. If you're someone navigating discomfort, diagnosis or simply wanting to take greater agency in your felt experience of life, this is the episode for you.

To find out more about Charlotte's work:

Find her on Instagram: @embodied.birth.and.motherhood

W: www.charlottemindel.com 

Stay connected with the podcast:

Thank you for listening; it means the world to us. We'd be so grateful if you could rate, review or share this gorgeous episode with someone you love. That small act brings us to new ears and eyes - it builds the movement of health and connection that FYWH is built on. 

For more information and upcoming news on the podcast, follow us on  @ab_embodiment and our website. 

And to explore working together more deeply:

  • Join our free newsletter for insights, events and self-healing resources.
  • Apply for an Early Bird place on the Embodiment Coaching Certification 2025 - taking your work as a Practitioner to a new level of depth, ease and impact. 
  • Secure your space at our beautiful retreat in Costa Rica this Autumn. 6 days of sacred ceremony, moving you into the body, into the heart and through the emotional / historic blocks that have held you back. Prepare for a depth of connection you have never felt, in one of the most magical landscapes in the world. Be with us...

Sending love, wherever this finds you,

Ax

Anthea:

welcome to Finding Your Way Home, the secrets to true alignment. I'm your host, Anthea Bell, movement teacher, mind body coach, and lifelong spiritual seeker. This is a podcast about the depth, weight, and profound healing power of connection between mind and body, spirit and soul, and from one human to another. Together with an incredible range of inspiring guests, we'll explore just what connection and alignment mean. How to get there in a world full of the temptation to conform, and how great challenge ultimately can lead to life changing transformation. Get ready for groundbreaking personal stories, conversational deep dives, and a toolkit of strategies to build not just your inner knowing, but your outer world. Let's dive in.

Charlotte:

There are certain tools that are specifically hypnobirthing and then most courses, including the one that I developed, will go beyond that into antenatal education because actually there is this combination of knowledge and trust and intuition that come together to form power. You know, I'm certainly not of the belief that knowledge is power, end of statement. so much comes from our body, the wisdom that's stored within us that, you know, it's not just about knowledge that can only get us so far. But when it comes to birth, having a really good understanding of what physiological birth is, having a good understanding of what our options are, how to inquire about the risks of a certain intervention or certain procedure or test all of that stuff is just a new language when you're pregnant and preparing to give birth. So it's helpful to understand that, um, you know, what processes your body's actually going to be going through. So that's more maybe the antenatal education side of things. When it comes to hypnobirthing, it originated from the idea that women can practice self hypnosis that would support them in getting into a extremely relaxed state. physiological birth, for it to unfold beautifully requires the utmost safety within your body. So you need to feel as a mammal would need to feel safe, private, undisturbed, unobserved. And so what the relaxation of hypnobirthing tracks support a woman with is getting into a deeply relaxed state so that her nervous system is relaxed, her body can produce, floods of oxytocin that are going to support those uterine surges or contractions and everything can flow as needed. I guess just touching on the nervous system stuff, if we're thinking about the autonomic nervous system, when we're in a fight or flight response. So when we experience some threat or fear, one of the key things aside from the release of adrenaline, which is super key when it comes to birth, because it actually blocks the flow of oxytocin, which we need for our uterus to be able to contract. So that's major. But aside from the flow of oxygen through the blood to our extremities and takes it away from our organs so our uterus which is working so so hard suddenly doesn't have this flow of oxygen to it so staying in our parasympathetic nervous system is super important and that's I think what the primary function of hypnobirthing relaxation audios is for. They've also developed to support the nurturing of self trust, which is a really key part of a woman's pregnancy, a woman's antenatal experience, to develop trust in herself, to allow her body to go through something which in a first time pregnancy is going to be brand new, but in, in any birth is going to be a new and unique experience. So I know there's a number of Practitioners including myself now that will also create audios that will support the mindset shift into a trusting mindset so I like to think of our belief systems as wardrobes, And within our wardrobes, we've got our clothes and the clothes represent all these little bits of evidence that we've gathered throughout our lives to create a specific belief, And if you've got a wardrobe that has a big label on it that says birth is painful and pain is unmanageable, and you've got all these bits of evidence from things people have told you, from the TV, from stories you've heard, whatever it is, then in order to change, that belief. Well first of course we've got to be willing and we've probably got to consider as well what we'd like to replace it with, but we can start to do that through repetition and we can either use audio to do that or we can use affirmations which are another tool that's used within hypnobirthing. So an affirmation for anyone that doesn't know is a positive affirming statement of identity. So it usually starts with I am, but it could also start with I trust, or I am choosing something like that. and when we state I am, we are committing to that way of being. I loved what you said earlier. We don't manifest what we want, we manifest what we are, right? And it's exactly the same with birth. If you want to be calm, decisive, confident, trusting in your birth, you have to live in that state in your pregnancy. That's how you call that in. And it's exactly the same in motherhood. If I want to be relaxed, spontaneous, humble... I I have to be those things. I can't just think about them and hope they exist in the future. I have to think to myself, when my daughter does something that is not in alignment with what I believe she must be doing or what I need her to do to comply with my belief system, I have to think to myself, What would a relaxed mother do in this situation? What would a spontaneous mother do in this situation? And I have to choose change in that moment. I'm going off on tangents, but hypnobirthing is essentially a series of tools that support women in getting into a very trusting and relaxed state in her body, which in principle and independently is A really helpful and wonderful thing to do in your pregnancy. Wear... I feel it falls down is that if a woman, as probably 95 percent of women who become pregnant in the UK will engage with the system because there are other alternatives, you can choose not to engage with the NHS, NHS, you can choose you know, go with an independent midwife, you might want to free birth and have no assistance, no midwife, you might want to have a birth keeper who's not registered with a midwifery council. So, you know, there's lots of options, but the majority of people will go through their standard and routine care. They'll attend midwife appointments, they'll have scans, they will expect to either attend a birth centre, a labour ward, or they'll ask for a home birth team to support them. at home. But either way, they are very much within and connected to a system. A system which plots women onto grafts, gives them a certain amount of time to give birth before they're trying to augment that birth with synthetic medication and speed it up and rush the process. And what hypnobirthing cannot do for a woman, it cannot Change her good girl, compliant, conditioned way of being.

Anthea:

Oh, what a statement.

Charlotte:

It's not a judgment. It's not a bad thing, I see it myself. It's, it's so much easier when my daughter complies with me because then we can just get to where I think we need to be going or do what I think we need to be doing. It's just no wonder that we've been brought up in this very compliant fashion. It's just been passed down through the generations that girls are good and sweet and compliant and don't upset anyone. And... The way that manifests in the system is that a woman might have this sense that she doesn't want something but she's worried about being judged or letting someone down or being difficult and so she doesn't speak up, she doesn't have that voice and that power to be able to stand up for what's right for her and the dissonance that occurs between this doesn't feel right but I can hear myself saying yes okay That's, that creates trauma in that gap. and for a woman to go into her first days of motherhood in trauma has a lifelong impact on her and her baby, on their attachment, on their connection, on their well being. this stuff follows us throughout our whole lives. And so, in answer to your second question, I guess through my own recovery, through having become very self aware, self connected through practicing that process of taking stock, taking inventory, really understanding what was going on for myself. Hypnobirthing was like the cherry on the cake for me in my pregnancy because I'd already been practicing meditation for years. I'd been leading meditation groups at the company I was working with before I got pregnant, you know. I'd used affirmations to change my whole perspective on how I felt about my body. these were tools that I was very familiar with and just, um, really aligned with my way of life. Already. And so that alongside the education piece really helped me. But what really supported me in my birth was that connection to self that I had developed before I came across any of the birth education stuff. And that's why I expanded into birth coaching because I think women need more, especially with the state of the system as it is today. the deeper inner work with women to really look at their fears, like really look at what is going to stop them from being able to speak up for themselves. Beyond that, I mean, what's going to stop them from making choices that feel really right? for them. We know that home birth is the safest place for most women to give birth. It is going to be the place where they are most comfortable, most safe, most undisturbed. And yet the home birth rates in the UK are shocking. They're like between one and 4%. And so that's so many women taking themselves off into this clinical environment that in itself for most. People induces some sort of fear induces us to hand our power over and listen to the experts and comply, just by nature we're going to someone else's space we're not in our own. and I know one thing, and I'd love to hear your take on this actually because I love talking about this topic is, This culture of blame fear of taking responsibility because people think if they take responsibility and make a decision that they may feel is really right for them. If something goes wrong in inverted commas, they will be blamed and they could never live with themselves. and I love to hear what you think about this idea of Taking personal responsibility, radical responsibility and blame, and kind of how it manifests in people's lives and stops them from living their fullest life as well.

Anthea:

Such an amazing question. I suspect that could be a podcast in and of itself. In relation to what you're asking, Charlotte, I think it's a very astute observation. It makes me reflect on how we deal with discomfort. You and I have both had rich, abundant experience of pain. And pain probably in every sense imaginable, whether we're talking little t trauma, big t trauma, whether we're talking about really just the emotional context, physiologically, both you and I have experienced that in many different ways. And mine. Also included a 10 year span of what I consider to be chronic pain at the time. And one of the things that I noticed in what you were sharing about this natural quality to home birthing, and this clinical environment of the medical system, is that generally our understanding of the medical system, particularly within the UK, is that it's something that sits away from us, that is run by experts, that we have a right to because we pay for it minimally in our taxes. And... As you say, the danger is that we hand over a huge amount of power to something that we really don't understand. I don't think it was until the NHS strikes that anyone really had quite a sense of, gosh, just how downtrodden are the people that are providing us these services. So we put things on pedestals. I know that in every single area of my life, every single area of my work, And of course, what that does is disconnect us from our own intuition. So that totally feeds back to what you're sharing. I think the other problem is that we have come away totally from the idea of a natural organic body that knows what it is doing. The number of people that come to me in chronic pain and what they want, what they want is to go to a doctor and the doctor will give them a scan of their spine, an MRI showing you an image of your spine at a very particular moment. The client will have absolutely no idea of the context of what most MRIs would show on most normal non pain experiencing people. And the studies on this are fascinating. The people who have the quickest recovery. This is not always the case because belief has a huge impact as does lifestyle contentment, which is my favorite detail of all of these studies, that people's happiness within their life had a huge impact on their physiological recovery because you're essentially getting out of the way and allowing a body that naturally knows how to heal within the course of six months to do exactly that. And I should say just for the purposes of this example, most people have a disc herniation of some kind. There is no way that you get to age of 40 or 50 and not have that, especially if as Charlotte and I crossfit and running are your things. So there's that. But what most people will want is they will actually want to have physical evidence. They want physical evidence of the intervention, so the people that scored the most highly on pain dissipating were people that were given, let's say, a portion of a disc. And this is studied in placebo tests. It's, it's fascinating. It's fascinating. So in none of that process, let's say with the example of pain, are you connecting into pillow pain? this is how I feel about you. This is how I label you. This is how I ostracize you. This is how I numb you. And I deal with this in the clinic day after day after day, whether people are talking about physical pain or emotional pain. And one of the things that you're making me reflect on, I've never been a mother. Um, and I can't imagine physiologically the discomfort of that experience in one sense. And at the same time, as you're explaining with this real rise in hormones that are literally designed to surge, to allow you to do it. to make it possible, that everything is set up internally within your natural environment. In theory, if you're in good physiological and holistic health, to be able to do this thing, the same as we are set up physiologically to respond to our cycles. in a way that makes sense rather than pushing through them and living our exercise routines or our lifestyles in a way that is fundamentally very masculine in the things we're recommended to do. Fasted exercise, HIIT workouts first thing in the morning. This denaturing of people, not even just women, this denaturing of people and this tendency to live up in the front of our brains, not in a useful manifestation sense, but in a adrenal problem solving way, it is such a huge proportion of the problem from my perspective.

Charlotte:

I love that you brought it back to pain actually, because this is a conversation I've been having a lot recently, the normalization of epidurals, the ability to numb from our birth experience completely, and actually I've been having some wonderful conversations and listening to some wonderful conversations from women who explore and have their own experience of hearing about the baby's experience of birth. And this is something that actually, I think, Most children, were we to give them space and understand how to talk to them about it between the ages of about three and five would be able to talk to us about their experience of birth. It's also something with the right energy healing practitioner that you might be able to tap into yourself and have memories of your own experience of birth, but essentially. a baby has been living in their mother's body, they are deeply connected to their stress, their joy, their fear, their happiness, whatever it is, they feel it all and then we have this epidural and suddenly we've been having all of these surges, these big sensations and then it just stops and you can't help but think this conscious baby Do they just wonder what's happened? where has that connection to their mother gone? What's supposed to happen now? And of course, you know, beyond that, the consequences of an epidural tend to render a mother immobile. Require her being on, continuous foetal monitoring, the idea of that to me is so stressful, like continually hearing your baby's heartbeat, the beat of your uterus contracting, just being on a bed, having things around your belly, that idea to me feels really Entrapping, and inevitably it usually leads to a cascade of interventions for one reason or another, either a woman requiring an episiotomy, um, where they need to cut her to make more space. A assisted delivery with forceps or ventouse, which is a little suction cup that would go on top of the baby's head to help pull them out. And all of these things because she's no longer able to move her body as her body needs to, to create space for her baby to come out. So she is now at the hands of someone else who needs to tell her what they think her body needs. This isn't that scientific, just because a woman is 10 centimetres dilated, maybe she's a woman that needs to be 11 before her body's ready to give birth, you know, just because there are these average numbers it doesn't mean that is then box ticked, woman's ready, let's tell her to push and the next thing you know she's got a third degree tear or something and, this normalisation of epidurals. is because people are so afraid of pain. And I'm just getting so curious about this, actually largely because I've been on a bit of a journey myself this year. I, I have had. A scenario where since January, my back has periodically been going into spasm and it's both really pain, painful and really debilitating. and, I have been learning what it is like to go into that experience rather than rejecting that experience. and, when I reject it, this is what happens. I become furious. I'm like full of anger and rage because I'm so powerless over this thing that's happening in my body that is stopping me from getting on with things in my life and I can't change it and I couldn't prevent it and I'm so angry. I'm so angry at my body. I'm so angry at myself and, you know, inevitably all that anger is just putting, more of that energy back into my body that tensing And it's actually for me through seeing a wonderful craniosacral therapist who I really connect with over the, their understanding of the nervous system and understanding that My nervous system has just been so contracted from years of emotional and physical trauma through injury, through violent bulimia that I was inflicting on myself. And yes, it's... It's an illness, but still I have to take some responsibility for that. You know, the amount of contraction that is in my neck and in my head and across my shoulders, what I've come to experience is that when my Back now does decide to seize up. Firstly, and this is a very new realization because it happened to me only on Sunday, and I realized how quickly I am to blame myself in quite a punishing way for what's happened. I saw the osteo on Monday because It was just totally locked up and he suggested, that there could just be something happening in one of my organs, in one of my bowels and that's, maybe triggered my back to seize up, you know, he's seen people that have got a urinary tract infection and the only way that it's shown up is in their back, And I was like, Oh. Maybe I could never have prevented this, maybe it's not something I have done to myself, and it was like this amazing realization. But something else he's taught me, is that when my back is sore, to go down the feminine route, not the masculine route, and that's been the biggest realization. Not to stretch, not to pull things more, but to be still, and to breathe, and to connect with actually what's happening in my body. a few months ago my back was sort of threatening me. I could feel the early tingles of something happening and he suggested that I lay down with a pillow under my head and under my knees and I just breathe and I become aware of what's happening in my body. And if there were any... Places of tightness or contraction just to see if some space. Wants to be breathed into those areas, if not fine and I realized I had all this tension in my neck that hadn't been aware of and actually I started breathing into it and suddenly I could feel it in my ears there was pain in my ears and I was breathing into that and eventually my whole body relaxed and actually on that occasion it didn't manifest into anything worse my back cleared up very quickly and it was this real acknowledgement that actually, my back is, is holding me and there could be something going on elsewhere in my body but the first time I become aware of it is what's happening in my back and then I zoom in to focus on that and forget about the rest of my body. Coming back to birth, I think That we are shown these depictions of how intense and how painful birth can be, and don't get me wrong, birth is intense, of course it is, you're birthing a baby, it's this magnificent event, but actually what would it be like to go into that sensation, to get really curious about it, to see what it actually feels like in your body, how does it make the rest of your body feel? Something I started doing is, I don't necessarily have cold showers but when I first put the shower on the water's cold and I'll put part of my body in the shower and in my mind I'll imagine these rainbow glitter sparkles under my skin where the water is and of course then I'm not recoiling at this cold water I'm like oh rainbow glitter sparkles It's just thinking about sensation in a different way and I think that's so important when it comes to birth and this idea of pain and these beliefs that we have about pain, like, what would it actually mean to really connect with the sensations in our body so that we don't fear pain, if anything, we just look forward to being really curious about. what birth feels like in our body. It's like flipping the story. it sounds so similar to so much of the work that you do as well, rather than running and avoiding, what if I came home to this?

Anthea:

Gorgeous listeners. Thank you. So. So. much. For your ears. I hope. You enjoy today's. today's. episode. To find. More about our. Featured guests. Have a look in the show. Notes.