The practice of Yoga is an effort on your part to change. The ability to change from knee-jerk reaction to chosen response in any given situation. This mindset works especially well when applied to your labor and delivery.

Yoga and Buddhism both teach that your mind is the misery not the world. Your mind is generating the suffering not the world and not this contraction.

During Labor your brain is having a knee jerk reaction to a bodily sensation and attaching emotions to the sensation. The bodily sensation of your uterine muscles as they contract around your baby and your emotions about how this sensation feels in your body.

Your instincts are “knee-jerks”— the first responders— and they will always act fast to try to “save your life” even when you are not actually in physical danger.

Contemplative practices, such as Yoga, help one take a step back, and form a chosen response to stimuli.

Knee Jerk Reaction: That hurts, I’m afraid, run away. OR

Chosen Response: I feel the physical sensations my labor, it is a powerful and challenging sensation, to be sure.  But I understand where these sensations are coming from and why they are happening so... I can relax around my contraction and let my body do its work.

Buddha and Patanjali were contemporaries so a lot of their aphorisms overlap and as it turns out current neuroscience backs them up. They may not have known anything about brain chemistry but they were spot on about how the brain works to generate misery and spot on about how to relieve it.

Yoga is NOT an adjustment to fit yourself better into society but an adjustment to (with) the very fact that you do exist at all. It is an adjustment with the WHOLE experience of being alive. OSHO

And nothing says "ALIVE" more than Birth.