Calm Birth® is a form of childbirth preparation that uses proven mind/body and breathing techniques to help create an atmosphere of calmness that decreases fear, pain, and complications for both pregnancy and childbirth.

Many medical centers now use this program with good results. Parents and babies benefit from using the method whether they have natural childbirth or use of epidural or cesarean birth.

The three main methods Calm Birth® teaches are:.

THE PRACTICE OF OPENING
Allows the parents-to-be to experience a remarkable access to the development of their unborn child

WOMB BREATHING
Women learn to breathe into their energy bodies to reach full potential in childbirth and also to enrich the child

GIVING AND RECEIVING
Teaches how to transform the energy of fear, anxiety, and tension into light in your own body - and breathe it out

The preface to the program states, "When pregnant women practice meditation, an empowering sense of safety and wholeness is generated from the inside.

The Calm Birth® method was developed to give women direct ways to raise the quality of health in childbirth whether or not medical interventions are applied". These methods have been shown to lower the impact of interventions and also lower medical costs and risks.

Christiane Northrup, MD, in her best-selling book Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (2006), recommends two childbirth preparation programs, Bradley and Calm Birth®.

She says of Calm Birth® (p. 481):

"I wholeheartedly endorse the Calm Birth® program. This work is at the heart of healthy and empowering childbirth - an experience which has the power to transform and uplift a woman's relationship to her body and her child for life. Calm Birth® is preventive and empowering medicine at its best."

This is a very powerful program, and I highly recommend it. The organization offers a CD called Calm Birth, as well as a postnatal program called Calm Mother.