Here’s the catch: I had done a lot of intellectual preparation. I had the information I needed to convince my brain that birth was a natural process that women had navigated for centuries, and that other mammals also experienced each and every day. It didn’t need to be managed, only trusted. Like so many women and birthing people, I had turned childbirth preparation into something cerebral. For people like me – reluctant Type Aers who believe their love for yoga, the arts, and all things healthy, organic, and plant-based makes them *almost* Type B– I was falling into an old pattern of thinking that, as long as I studied enough, as long as I had become a relative expert on the physiology of natural birth, then a beautiful and stead journey of hope and transformation would gracefully bring my baby into my arms.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that the work I had done, for the most part, was really only scratching the surface. I had done the work of external preparations, but had only begun to scratch the surface of internal preparations.