GOLD Learning Speakers

Bringing the practices of mindfulness to our patients and ourselves can significantly impact our patients' relationship to pain and fear in labor, birth, and life. In this hour long presentation, participants will have an opportunity to experience a mindfulness practice and learn ways to implement mindfulness in childbirth and parenting. Participants will be exposed to how mindfulness meditation can decrease stress during pregnancy and beyond and hear about mindfulness skills for working through pain and fear in childbirth. Further, participants will learn how to encourage mindfulness life skills for parenting with wisdom, kindness, and connection from the moments of birth, as well as how mindfulness skills may be implemented as a way to disrupt intergenerational patterns of suffering. In particular, this presentation will offer concrete ways to bring mindfulness to the contractions of labor, and to the space in between the contractions of labor. The potential for separating "pain" from "suffering" using mindfulness practices will be explored, which can be applied to labor, and of course, to life. We will examine the research around mindfulness based interventions, the relationship between perinatal stress and outcomes, and the potential that mindfulness strategies have for reducing health disparities.