Pregnancy & Birth · Digital Book
Birthing Booklet
A guide to optimise a new mother's birthing experience, blending
Traditional Chinese Medicine with the physiology of birth.
I wrote this for the women who sit across from me in clinic, weeks out from labour, asking how to actually prepare. Not the hospital bag list — how your brain switches off to let your body do what it already knows, how to breathe through a contraction, and what your choices really are.
This isn't a manifesto against medical care. It's a map — of the physiology, the choices, and the questions worth asking before you're in the room having to ask them.
Where Western birth physiology meets Chinese medicine.
Throughout the booklet, Traditional Chinese Medicine sits alongside the clinical facts, not separate from them — the Ren Mai and pre-birth acupuncture treatment explained next to the cascade of intervention, so you understand both how your body prepares for labour and how each choice in the room affects it.
What's Inside
Primal Brain
Why your thinking brain needs to step back for labour to progress, and how to help it.
Chinese Medicine in Birth
The Ren Mai, pre-birth acupuncture treatment, and what TCM is shown to support through labour.
Breathing
Ujjayi, Brahmari, and the five-phase contraction breathing exercise.
Birth Choices
The cascade of intervention explained plainly — induction, syntocinon, epidurals, pethidine and caesarean.
Active Birth
Upright positions, water birth, and birth hormones.
My Birth Preferences
A fill-in template you can bring to appointments and your birth.
11 Questions to Ask Your Obstetrician
Including the cascade of intervention questions most women don’t think to ask until it’s too late.
Support, Bonding & Consent
Support person tips, the oxytocin window, and your rights around vaginal exams in late pregnancy.
Who it’s for
Women preparing for a first or subsequent birth who want to understand the physiology of labour, not just survive it. Equally useful whether you’re planning an unmedicated birth, a hospital birth with an open mind, or simply want to walk in informed — any setting, hospital, birth centre or home.