Grounding Techniques for YOU as The Doula
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Transcript
Welcome to doula tips and tips. This podcast is a place where we answer one question about doula work, both to support you and to help you support your clients. I'm Kaylee Harrod. I've been supporting families in this perinatal space since my oldest was born, 12, nearly 13 years ago.
I am a birth and postpartum doula childbirth educator, La Leche League leader, and a doula coach. I love guiding and supporting doulas as they work out their doula business. It is a tremendous joy to be trusted in this way.
Thank you for joining us on this journey. Today's episode is a little bit different than usual. We are going to, we're going to do some grounding techniques and we're going to do them right here in the episode because I think we as doulas kind of get a bad rap for taking a shit, taking shit care of ourselves, right?
And I am currently learning about this myself. Self -care is not always something that has come easy to me. It's very easy for me to put the needs of others ahead of myself. And I think that's true for many of us as doulas because it's simple.
It's kind of in the nature of our work to do that. And therefore it's really easy for people to, for doulas to really kind of think about themselves last. And that is to our own detriment, but also to the detriment of those around us.
It is not helpful the way that we maybe think it's helpful to put our own needs on hold all the time. So, so I want to share with you a couple different modalities for grounding or resetting, right? And these are simple things.
So these are things you can do right now as you're listening, but also you can like do them in the bathroom when you're at a birth and you're like needing a little reset. You can do them when you're with a postpartum client.
If you're just chilling with the baby, right? Like these are things you can tap into and use all the time. So the first is a breathing technique. This is one that I teach to clients and there's a couple different ways to do it.
I think the idea is to breathe in for less time than you're breathing out. So to breathe in for three or four and breathe out for six or eight. I personally like to breathe in for four and out for six.
That feels like a good amount for me. When I do this, I try to breathe in through my nose and breathe like with my back really straight. My shoulders pulled back and then breathe out kind of loudly like.
So what that looks like for me is that my cheeks are kind of blown out. My lips are loose, right? Like similar to how we would have someone breathe in labor. So I want you to try that. I'm going to count for you for three of these breaths and I want you to take a second to do that.
So I want you to breathe in two, three, four, and then breathe out two, three, four, five, six. Great job. Breathe in two, three, four, and breathe out two, three, four, five, six. One more time. Breathe in two, three, four, breathe out two, three, four, five, six.
Okay. So that is called calm breathing. It should kind of calm you down. It might take more than three of them, right? Like you might need to do it for a bit. but it is an intentional way to bring your focus to your breath, to have a moment of mindfulness and to kind of refocus whatever is going on that's making you dysregulated, right?
The next thing I want you to try is jiggling and I know that sounds super fun but there is actually loads of research on shaking your body around and that can be like kind of jumping up in place that can be like wiggling your arms and shoulders, it can be wiggling your butt and your back.
I don't know if you heard my voice that I'm doing these things as if you can see me as I'm saying them but it is really powerful to jiggle and I teach this to clients like every client I work with jiggles at some point and they love it honestly like I don't think I've ever had a client not love it even to the point that I had recently a single mom that I was supporting and her best friend one of her best friends who is also supporting her is my past client and she um she she's like has Kaylee done the jiggles with you yet and my current like the current client who was pregnant was like what are you talking about and Lindsay's like it's gonna be amazing the friend client you know she's like just wait till she jiggles you so that's you know something I'm proud of my ability to jiggle but when you're jiggling yourself what you're thinking about is keeping your body super loose now you might want to do this in a space where no one's around or you don't feel self -conscious or not maybe in front of your children if they're teenagers because they're going to tell you you're cringe that's what my children tell me um I personally take that as a badge of honor like to be cringe to my teenage children what a dream right like goals mom goals all day anyway what you want to do is relax your muscles and I'm going to use a term um that my kids you oh why am I missing that term now it is don't remember it.
It's basically where they play a video game that looks like the characters don't have bones. Oh ragdoll, they have ragdoll like oh I don't know the word I can't remember the phrase but they move around like ragdolls right so their arms are floppy their legs are floppy they like trip over themselves they like roll in a circle if they fall down that whole kind of thing it is quite hilarious to be fair but what I want you to do is like loosen everything up and jiggle and anything that's loose on your body should jiggle so like your muscles right your boobs your butt your belly like whatever it is that's loose on you should jiggle and do this as much as you need to it's there's also some research around doing this with your tongue sticking out with your mouth wide open just in like your shoulders and your neck just in your booty when you're sitting down like kind of jiggle your hips around there's all there's a wrong way to do it like jiggle jiggle to your little heart's content and the only thing you're looking for is that it not feel bad like it should feel good or weird or good and weird or whatever but it shouldn't feel bad it shouldn't be painful it shouldn't feel stressful it shouldn't be bad in any kind of way any any way you classify that so so the first is the breath work calm breathing in for four out for six is what we practiced jiggling anything and everything all the things really the third is opening up your hips now everyone can do this differently but my favorite way to do this is to dangle from a sink and I know that sounds just crazy but when I teach people to squat and labor I talked to them about how I don't want them to engage their butt or their legs in order to avoid that they have to be hanging from something like they have to be holding themselves up with their arms so what I do is I hold on to a kitchen sink and I sit back towards the floor so I'm like in a squat that's kind of folded down so my booty and my feet are right next to each other and I'm hanging from my hands so it literally feels like if I let go of my hands I'm gonna fall backwards onto the kitchen floor because that's the thing holding me up now my feet are flat on the ground they're well planted right like it's not like I'm not stabilizing a little bit but I'm not holding myself with my legs and my butt when you're in that position you can then sway side to side you can kind of release each hip you can do some moving around and see what feels good the other way to do this that's a little less dramatic is to do a butterfly sit so sit on your butt like you're gonna sit cross -legged put your feet together and your knees as wide out as you can now if your knees don't go flat on the floor so I am a hypermobile person my knees sit straight on the ground when I do this but if that's not the case for you you probably want to put pillows under your knees so that they are relaxed because you don't want to feel like you're getting stretched open too far that will be painful and I don't want that for you the purpose of this is to be relaxed right so opening up your hips is important for releasing stored trauma for kind of unsticking stuff that seems stuck and so that's the third thing that I want you to do the fourth thing that I want you to do is to cross the midline of your body now when I say cross the midline of your body what I mean is bring parts of your body that are from one side to the other side so like taking your right arm and crossing it over to the left side of your body some ways that people like to do this is putting it over their head so they're kind of like dangling it on top of their head some people give themselves a hug some people do like instead of doing jumping jacks they do like crisscross jumps where their legs are crossing across their midline I haven't heard someone today a counselor today talk about crossing their eyes and doing it that way and I was like who would have thought but that's apparently another way to do it but any kind of crossing the midline awakens your brain a bit and like gets you out of your stuck space.
Like it pulls you out of some mental patterns. This is like a trauma technique, it's also a technique for codependency and things like that. But when we're thinking about self -regulation this is one of those things.
The last thing that I would encourage you to look into is some form of tapping. Now there's lots of research on this again but there are various ways to do it. So EFT is one kind of acronym that stands for some of the tapping that people do.
There are other ways where they just kind of hug themselves and do some tapping, but some form of tapping can be really really helpful for trauma regulation. So I would love to hear from you if you use any or all of those and how they go for you.
Like how do you like them and how do they feel in your body and how do they feel with your emotions and do they feel safe and do they feel helpful. And I really want to encourage you to start incorporating a better self -care routine.
Like whatever you're going through when life is hard, when life is easy, we need to take care of ourselves no matter where we are. And doulas teach that so well to our clients and often do not practice what we preach and that is not okay.
It's just not sustainable to not take care of yourself. Okay so I'm going to welcome you to join me on this journey of self -care and more than like showers and coffee right. Like I'm talking about like really intentional body regulating things and you can throw in some affirmations, you can throw in some movement, you can throw in some dance like you do you right.
Like you throw in whatever you'd like. If you're feeling a little down about yourself I want you to go look up a song called Magic Room by Heidi Rojas and just listen to it and listen to it as a song to you.
It is honestly glorious. It's so encouraging. All of her music is but this song in particular is my favorite by far. So I want you to go listen to it and then let me know what you think. All right I'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the doula tips and tits podcast. If you learned something today or had an aha moment we'd love for you to share that on instagram and tag us at harrad doula so we can celebrate alongside you.
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It is not medical advice or business advice. Please consult your own medical or legal team for your own needs around your health and your business. We'll see you again soon.
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Quote from the show:
“Today's episode is a little bit different than usual. We are going to, we're going to do some grounding techniques and we're going to do them right here in the episode because I think we as doulas kind of get a bad rap for taking a shit, taking shit care of ourselves, right? ”
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Kaely Daily is produced by Kaely Harrod of Harrod Doula Services
It is sponsored by The Birth Prep Blueprint Childbirth Class
Music by Madirfan: Hidden Place on Pixabay
