It’s always a pleasure to soak in the wisdom of my friend and colleague Dr. Sarah Buckley and her groundbreaking work on how “our hormones are our helpers” in childbirth.
I had the pleasure of spending a few days together with Dr. Buckley in Bali after she was a guest teacher for our 2019 Eat Pray Doula retreat.
Together we filmed a series of videos about Hormones, pleasure, and birth with the help of our wonderful cameramen husbands.
The National Partnership for Women says “By routinely intervening in labor and delivery in ways that interfere with innate biological processes, the country’s maternity care system is missing opportunities to provide better care and use resources more wisely.”
I could not agree more! When you understand how nature provides this wonderful hormonal cocktail to support safe, gentle, and pleasurable birth, it allows you to consider your birth options in entirely new ways. I hope our video series will guide you to a new understanding of how you can prepare for your own birth or support your partner, friend, or clients in more ways to flow their hormones and enjoy nature’s hormonal cocktail.
Your Brain, Birth and Pleasure: Mother Nature’s Superb Design
Dr. Sarah Buckley discusses the positive feedback loop of hormones in childbirth. Learn why birth is designed to be the best first date ever to fall in love and get ready for a lifetime of parenting. Understand how to have an ecstatic birth, how to set up a birth environment according to the science of our brains and why birthing a baby requires the same environment as making a baby.
About Dr. Buckley
Sarah Buckley is a New-Zealand-trained GP/family physician with qualifications in GP-obstetrics and family planning. She is the mother of four home-born children, and currently combines motherhood with her work as a writer on pregnancy, birth, and parenting.
She is also a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland,, where her research is focused on oxytocin and the autonomic nervous system in labour and birth, and the impacts of interventions.
Dr Buckley’s work critiques current practices in pregnancy, birth, and parenting from the widest possible perspectives, including scientific, anthropological, cross-cultural, psychological, and personal. She encourages us to be fully informed in our decision-making; to listen to our hearts and our intuition; and to claim our rightful role as the real experts in our bodies and our children.
Her bestselling book Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering: A Doctor’s Guide to Natural Childbirth and Gentle Early Parenting Choices, published by Celestial Arts/PenguinRandomHouse (US, 2009), builds on her acclaimed first edition, published in Australia as Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering: The Wisdom and Science of Gentle Choices in Pregnancy, Birth, and Parenting (One Moon Press, Brisbane, 2005, available as ebook here ).
Dr Buckley has an ongoing interest in the hormones of labour and birth, and this has culminated in her groundbreaking report Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing (2015 Childbirth Connection, a program of the National Partnership for Women and Families). This report, available for free online, has been described as “…one of the most revolutionary and influential publications on maternity and newborn care ever issued.”
Learn more about Dr. Buckley – https://sarahbuckley.com/