If you’re pregnant, send this to your partner! If you’re the partner, keep reading. I’d love to suggest one of the best, most thoughtful, lasting gifts you can buy for Mother’s Day.
One that’s effect will ripple out a hundredfold in the years to come.
It isn’t a gift you can wrap…
Ready?
Invest in a doula.
Yep. A doula. Birth support that you can rely on. Postpartum support that will genuinely nourish you.
Studies show having a doula present at your birth reduces chances of unwanted interventions, lowers cesarean rates and significantly improves the way families feel about their birth, even if it didn’t go to plan.
Starting off with support and nourishment means that will set you up in parenting.
Starting feeling supported, listened to, respected and nurtured is a heck of a lot better than feeling emotionally exhausted, ignored and violated.
So find a doula in your local area
Message them
And give your partner the gift of genuine support. She will remember it for a lot longer than flowers and chocolate, I promise!
And if your local area is Helensburgh, drop me a message. I’m offering 15% off 2 doula support packages booked by the 31st of March – payment plans are available.
Flowers wilt, chocolate melts, doulas bring both, along with the support that impacts you for life.
New beginnings. Momentum. Goals. Big leaps. Bold moves. All the things.
But what if you’re pregnant?
What if you’re stepping into a season that asks you to slow down in order to keep up rather than speed up?
What if you’re in a space right now where everything feels too big, too much, all the changes and fears, all the hopes and dreams, and the idea of stepping back feels impossible. If that’s you, I hear it – its HARD. Especially with so much unknown. But this baby brings medicine. Their fire is growing in you, so slowing down is vital, for both of you.
The Truth About Fire Horse Babies
Fire Horse babies are special.
The last Year of the Fire Horse was 1966 — and in places like Japan, it was surrounded by deep superstition. There was a long-held belief that girls born in a Fire Horse year would grow up to be headstrong, fierce, and difficult to marry. So much so that birth rates dropped as families chose to avoid having babies that year.
Let that sink in.
An entire generation feared because of their potential fire.
Learning this now, I can’t help but feel that Fire Horse babies are not something to fear — they are an essential ingredient in a changing world. The very qualities once labeled “too much” are exactly what we are being called into now: courage, independence, conviction, heat.
Maybe the world has always needed them, but now more than ever.
If You’re Pregnant Right Now
Being pregnant in a Fire Horse year might mean you’re feeling everything more deeply, and I truly believe that that’s not weakness – it’s your inner wisdom surfacing.
Pregnancy cracks us open. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Spiritually. It strips away what no longer fits, heightens intuition, amplifies truth. We can be incredibly creative, and especially sensitive, things that serve us long after our babies are earthside.
It’s not meant to be easy, but it shouldn’t be lonely or destructive either.
We are social mammals. We are designed for community. For touch. For shared stories. For being witnessed as we grow the next generation inside our bodies.
If you’re questioning everything: good. You should.
The systems surrounding birth and motherhood are not serving women the way they should. Many of them exhaust us, rush us, silence us. So think carefully about who you want in your space when you birth. Who holds your nervous system steady? Who honors your intuition? Who sees you as wise and trustworthy? That choice can change everything.
You deserve to be nurtured. You deserve to be held. You deserve to feel safe as you openthe portal and birth your earthling, whatever that looks like for you.
The Fire Horse Runs, But that is not all
Yes, the Fire Horse runs. It carries momentum. It brings heat and acceleration. This is something social media keeps showing us. But horses are also deeply attuned creatures. Their electromagnetic field is 5 times stronger than ours, which means they amplify what’s already present.
So if your pregnancy is asking for stillness… for rest… for self-compassion… The Fire Horse isn’t fighting that.
It’s doubling down on it.
Momentum doesn’t always mean speed. Sometimes it means depth. Sometimes it means small, consistent commitment. Sometimes it means rooting down, and trusting that the rise will come.
The Medicine of a Fire Horse Baby
Reading all this, and sitting with it, I believe that if you are pregnant right now, your Fire Horse baby may be the medicine you didn’t know you needed. And honestly, medicine you probably don’t want right now.
Because medicine isn’t always comfortable -it stretches us, burning away illusions, demanding growth, and asking us to trust.
Can you trust yourself in ways you never have before?
It’s hard and we resist the unknown, we seek the comfort, even when it holds us back – and these new babies are gently, but firmly (or in some cases wildly!) forcing us to stop, slow down, take the bitter pill and wake up. It feels icky and hard, but the lessons will ripple well into parenthood.
The work you do now — even the quiet, invisible work of resting when the world says run — will pay dividends in the months and years to come.
Fire Horse energy isn’t just about chasing the horizon.
It’s about becoming strong enough to hold it.
So let the energy grow with your baby… lean in, and reach out – seek support, stay the path. I hope your fire horse baby brings all the joy, strength and fierceness that was feared all those years ago – because goodness knows we need it!
The way a baby is born impacts them on some level for their whole life.
The way they are born. The people around them. The environment they enter this world into.
Baby’s born into war carry that, (if they survive) into the life they live and it physically alters the DNA of their decendants. This has been heavily weighing on my mind this week, as we watch the events in the middle East unfold- with little to no voice given to the reality birthing women and babies are facing.
Baby’s born into immense privilege carry it too… though not always in the ways we might assume. Privilege often equates to a certain amount of resources over and above others. In the birth world, it’s a little more nuanced than that.
Assuming that you’re birthing outside of a war zone then; what impact does the environment of birth really have? It matters deeply, not just for babies but for mothers and partners too.
We cannot prepare for the future without embracing the meaning and the relevance of the baby’s perspective on life.
-Michel Odent
We know that mothers birthing in supported environments where they feel safe and nurtured pass this information on to their babies. The same is true for mothers who birth in conditions of big T and little t trauma. From hospitals to birthing centers to home births, the space you birth will shape everything from the medical interventions used to the emotional atmosphere surrounding your birth. After numerous conversations about why thinking about this as early on as possible matters, I thought I’d write a little on it.
Choosing where to give birth is a deeply personal decision. The assumption that everyone has the information and resources to choose the way they want is one I just cannot make. Socio-economic factors come into play, race, ethnicity and culture too. In the UK (at least at the time of writing in 2024), you can legally choose where you birth, and that choice can absolutely impact the way your birth story plays out.
Ultimately, its your choice, so get informed! There are far too many women told they can only birth in hospital when truly they do have other options. Equally, if the idea of birthing anywhere outside a hospital gives you shudders, then planning that ahead matters.
I want to preface the next few passages by highlighting that ultimately I believe every single baby comes earthside in the way they need to, with their unique birth resourcing them in various ways.
What are your options?
Hospital, Birth Centre, Home. I won’t chat freebirth, that’s for another day.
Hospitals are the high tech options, sold to us as high safety, but also the space where the highest levels of birth trauma exist. Hopstials are supposed to be safe – and when they work, they are a blessing. More and more though, especially for women who have no or low ‘risk’ factors the hosptial birth story isn’t a happy one.
Hospitals represent the standard choice for childbirth, they are normalised in the media we consume right from childhood, and other spaces are considered ‘alternative’ or even a little radical. There are an array of medical interventions and expertise available, with health care professionals and a full range of technology on hand to monitor baby and mother throughout labour. There’s access to all sorts of interventions and pain relief options, and of course surgery.
While a cesarean birth can be lifesaving; for many of us in the birth world, we can see that it is the interventions prior that snowballed a healthy birth into an emergency. The conveyor belt system of induction and cesarean births is all a bit too neatly boxed up; and it takes away from the rite of passage birth physiologically is.
Hospital births are often a ticket to the trauma train because procedure trumps real life experience, and women are often gaslit, ignored, or violated. Circling back to babies, this also means babies are being ignored, assaulted and sent the information that the world is scary and unsafe.
Birth is nearly never an emergency, but sometimes it is. If you need to prioritise safety with medical resources, then a hospital birth is a blessing.
If you don’t… Read on.
A birth centre/midwife unit:
Birth centres are often described as kind of like the middle ground between hospital and home. They’re quieter, often offer a pool, can have the lights dimmed and try to be as warm and cosy as possible. Most birth centers will try to encourage birth to be as intervention free as possible, and I’ve heard of some beautiful birth stories with supportive staff in them.
However, with the ever increasing agenda to streamline birth (and yes this is the agenda), more birth centres are being closed or told they can’t operate fully because of staffing levels. Midwife units cannot support birthing women if they aren’t supported themselves; which means being able to access these is getting harder. Added to this is the fact most of them are for babies being born physiologically with little / no risk, and will turn away women who don’t their box.
This isn’t without reason, birth centres aren’t equipped to navigate emergencies or complications, and so err on the slide of caution. Birth centres can be some of the most beautiful, supportive and nurturing spaces, and midwives often go above and beyond to make them so… but they need to be given the resources for that to happen.
Home births:
For a healthy woman, the first intervention in birth and labour is leaving home. This is something I learned only after my 2nd child, and having had both hospital and home births myself, it is something I wholly believe to be true. As a woman, I know my homebirths were far more positive than my hospital ones, and I only got here through research and experience.
As a doula who wholeheartedly supports informed choices, I will never tell a potential client where to birth, but I will absolutely encourage you to really think about what that means to you.
Homebirths are growing in popularity, becoming something many mothers return to. I don’t see this as a a coincidence, it is a remembering. A remembering that sovereign birth is something we all have the right to. A return to reclaim the power of birth. Homebirths are in the comfort of your own space, so autonomy comes more naturally. You aren’t entering someone else’s space, they are visiting yours as a support system for you.
You can choose the environment, the lights the music etc, and if you decide you want to transfer, then that’s okay. It’s a choice you make. For first time mothers, there’s evidence to say that home births are far less traumatic, bonding feels easier and healing is quicker. Because in your space, generally speaking you feel safer, therefore all these processes don’t need to be big and hard, they can flow with ease. You can take breaks, chill out, zone out, and rest without interruption or inspection. There’s a reason mammals find/create dark quiet spaces for birthing, it is a primal instinct to do so. Humans like to think we are different, but hardly so.
Before I sign off, I have a question for you. Did you birth in more than one of these settings? What were your experiences of thr difference ? If you feel called to and safe to share, get in touch. I’d be honoured to hear from you.
I’ve been thinking about birth plans a lot recently. About how we approach them as a society, how women are often told one of 2 things – that they must make one for their team to be on the same page, or not to bother because nobody’s going to read it anyway. Birth is treated like a ‘to do list’ activity, with no real consideration of the humans it involves.
I’ve been thinking about how these 2 polarising options presented to mothers-to-be are focusing on how birth plans are impacting other people. They are either necessary for autonomy and choices to be honoured- but are they? Or they are a hinderence and going to be ignored. Neither of these give any consideration into how a pregnant woman (and their partner) is impacted by creating these plans.
So who is a birth plan for truely, if not for the person who’s body is actually going to open and bring life earthside?
Heres my twopence.
Your birth plan isn’t for your team. It isn’t pointless. It doesn’t have to be meticulously planned. Your birth plan can be scribbled on a notebook, voice noted into an app, created with deliberate and careful care, or anything in between.
Whether you’re planning a freebirth, home birth, hospital birth or an elective cesarean, making a plan is one of those things that comes up as a “must do” while you prep for birth, and yet nobody really explains why. It’s for you. It’s for your partner if you have one. It’s for your baby. Because in making a plan, setting intentions for how you want the story to unfold and talking about it, either in your head or out loud, you are communicating with your baby, letting them know there is a plan.
When you change the way you view birth, the way you birth will change. ~ Marie Mongan
We (individually and collectively) can’t control every little thing that’s going to happen, because the nature of birth is that it is unique and out of our control every single time. That said, when we don’t plan, then we don’t really know what we want. In birth, and in life, it’s important to know where our boundaries are.
If you don’t know what you want, then you don’t know what you don’t want.
When you make a plan, you get to decide what is a non-negotiable, and what you’re willing to be flexible about. You get to prepare for this immense transition, and stand in your power through it. In the same way that athletes visualise their win, you can visualise the birth story you want to create with your baby. By doing this, you’re energetically telling the universe that this is the plan- even without writing a single thing down.
I will always say, write things down. When you do, the neurons in your brain form stronger pathways, and your intentions are built with stronger foundations. But even if pen never touches paper, even if not a single plan or intention is spoken out loud, just by visualising it, you’re on the way.
Okay Rohana but is 1 birth plan enough? What should I include? What happens if I want to have a water birth or a home birth and then things change? What if I’m planning a cesarean? Where do I start?
I asked myself all of these questions and more when I was planning my most recent birth. I had made birth plans before, but this one was a freebirth, so I wanted to be extra resourced. I thought long and hard, I journalled, I visualised, I made lists and researched a lot… and I ended up with 3 plans. For me, 3 was enough, for someone else, it might be more.
From those plans, I’ve created this checklist for you, so you can spend more time in the zone of creation and build your support bubble, and less time fretting about whether you’ve thought about everything.
Mostly I tell clients that if they’re making a plan, 2 – 4 plans is best, not to just make the 1. Why? Because there is so much possibility and I’m the kind of control freak (in some areas of life) that needs to prep for the various scenarios ‘just in case’. Creating 1 ideal, everything goes right plan, and 1 emergency plan is the minimum… then there’s the option to flesh out interventions, changes and variations in the middle.
It might like a lot of work, or like youre considering all the ways things could go ‘wrong’, but actually youre taking your power into a situation, where if anything less than your ideal plan happens, you are still sovereign and prepared. It means you’re not throwing your hands in the air or just hoping for the best. It means you are advocating for yourself and for new baby, and if your birthing within the system -regardless of the way you intend to birth- this advocacy is an immensely important muscle to be flexing right from the start.
So, should you make a birth plan – the short answer is yes.
The long answer, is you should make multiple, with different scenarios and different supports. You should advocate hard, and build a foundation of cheerleaders who will hold space for you and nourish you while you labour. You should make your plans in a way that feels good… in a way that is a kind of self care exercise, and a way that bonds you and baby even more. You should share your plans with those who’ll be around, and talk to baby about how you want them to arrive. Make many plans, and resource yourself to aim for the number 1.
I shared about my birth plans yesterday, but before that, I shared a little on my socials about it, in relation to our home ed, life and preparing for baby. One of the things that got picked up was about our placenta plans, which I fully get, because I have absolutely had alllllll the reactions going when people find out I not only keep my placentas, but I consume them!
The thing is, family isn’t always going to get it. Friends won’t either, but it’s a little different.
Our families are meant to be our safe space, the habour for our ship to dock in, as a friend so beautifully put it chatting the other day. They are supposed to be the people we turn to for support and encouragement… but more often than not, that isn’t how it works.
It used to bother me. I felt like I should appease people, and I was big in my fawn response around pretty much everything, but especially parenting as a new mum. I thought I should take all the advice and listen and implement and try and do things the same, so that we’d be more connected… or something like that. Rohana from back then had a lot of shit to sift through.
Now, I love being challenged and standing my ground. It feels shaky as hell, and I will have a felt sense reaction to it sometimes, but the more I’m challenged, the more I get to see why I choose the life I choose, and why I feel this way. I’m not mad or even affected by this particular issue, because though I was called ‘weird’ I actually love being weird. I love knowing that I am making choices in full autonomy and modelling that for my kids too.
So, when family doens’t get it, do we change, or do we hunker down and get clearer on our reasoning? The latter serves our mental health and relationship to ourselves so much more!
Navigating these situations isn’t always fun, and though I quite enjoy it now, I absolutely didn’t years ago… so if you’re reading this and resonating with the fawn and the discomfort, here’s some things that helped me a lot:
7-11 breathing (a winner in many many life situations)
Nadhi Sudi pranayama (my favourite)
Journaling … either free journaling where i brain dump on paper/in a book OR using prompts.
Voice noting myself – this has been one the most underrated healing techniques I have ever used.
And, watching my kids… anchoring myself in our life, and thinking about the life I am building for them. Watching them and reminding myself, I am the parent, and I am the one who has to live and answer to life choices later on, so what hurts my heart the least? I do that.
Until tomorrow, just 5 days left! It’s zoomed!
With love, Rohana x
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