Self-Help Feature: Permission for Self-Love by Eva Behenská #motherhood #parenting #excerpt #parenting #selfhelp #nonfiction #rabtbooktours @RABTBookTours

 

The optimal guide to getting back to your own Queendom after having a child

 

Guidance & self help, child birth, parenting, motherhood, body image, self love, self care

Date Published: May 16, 2024

 

Giving birth is a true miracle, our bodies are amazing and nothing compares to holding your baby.

But often once we have given birth, we often forget to prioritize our own well-being. Our bodies went through a tremendous journey and should have time to recover and heal. This book will help you take charge of your own postnatal recovery, to be the best version of yourself so you can look after your baby in the best possible way. From candid prenatal advice, birth advice to postnatal care of your body and mind including healing your vagina to exercising your body, everything is covered.

Having gone through postpartum depression and the lack of available information, Eva has created a tool that can help you navigate this delicate path of becoming a mom, being a partner and above all being you in all your authenticity.

“Let this exercise be your joyful daily practice."

Eva is the creator of exercise programs tailored specifically for women after giving birth. The goal of her work is to make exercise a joyful daily practice. As a trainer and instructor, she found her passion in healthy movement by encompassing full body acceptance and true expression of self-love through the connection of body and mind. Eva connects exercise with psychosomatics, which she considers to be the source of all physical ailments. Eva believes in teaching wholehearted acceptance of each woman's unique body. To listen to our body, is to understand our body.

 

Introduction

Before opening the first chapter, let’s mention a couple of notes that can help you understand this book's meaning. It all depends on what stage of life you are in right now. There are three possibilities. First, you are pregnant and getting ready for childbirth. Second, you have already delivered, so your baby is in your arms. Third, you are a man interested in what is going on within the female body. In that case, you are “Mr. Awesome.” congratulations to your significant other; she is so lucky.

In the prenatal stage, you should focus on physical and mental preparation for birthgiving. Overall, the mind and body condition during pregnancy will influence childbirth. I recommend having a birth attendant or a doula who will introduce you to all the aspects of giving birth.

Don’t underestimate the importance of consultation and communication with somebody experienced.

In the second case, you experienced the best thing: your baby was born. You can’t influence the delivery of your baby because it already happened, but you can still focus on your body’s after-birth recovery to ensure everything goes well.

A couple of words about the author - me:  I am not a physical therapist or a birth attendant. I am a Pilates Teacher-Trainer and a Movement Therapist. In practice, I started focusing on pregnant women and those who just delivered because there wasn’t enough information. I needed new knowledge when I was pregnant, which was hard to find. I gained fifty-one pounds and suffered from post-delivery depression, mainly because my body didn’t work as described in the books I read. I went through the same amount of uncertainty and worries you probably do now. Everything can be unpleasantly new, and you don’t recognize your body just because you moved to another level. You became a mother.

The impulse to write this book is the need for more literature about post-delivery time. The bookstore shelves are full of books about how to get pregnant, pregnancy, or delivery, but there is a minimal amount of text on what to do AFTER giving birth. It feels like when the baby gets out of your body, everything gets back to normal. The opposite is true. When you deliver, it’s just the beginning of a giant rollercoaster.

A little disclaimer to this book, I use terms like “vagina, vaginal entrance, or pelvic floor” wherever necessary.

This text's advice and observations will help you understand and seize your body and mind. The body won’t function well if not connected to the mind. Everything is in your head. Therefore, we will focus on the somatic method and the actions of the body related to it. Somatics is a practice that utilizes the body-mind connection to learn how to find and work with any problem within the body.

All the advice and observations are from my head and practice. Of course, I was influenced by many books I have read and many bodies I have worked with.

About the Author

After many years of putting my body through suffering at a dance conservatory and in theatres, I decided to approach my body in a new and different way. My first impulse was practicing Pilates which grew into compensatory methods. I became more and more interested in the mind-body connection which led me to discover psychosomatics. Since I myself went through a complicated postpartum period where I felt amazed but also betrayed by my own body and my uncooperative mind, I started focusing on working with women in the postpartum period. Out of this experience and the desire to help as many women as possible, this book was born.