Are you will­ing to embrace change in the face of great pain? Receiv­ing the mes­sages in pain – whether that pain is phys­i­cal or spir­i­tual — is one of life’s great­est chal­lenges, and run­ning away from it is one of life’s great­est temp­ta­tions. Stay open, and you will receive exactly the insights you need to live your best life.

If you know a time more resplen­dent with change than preg­nancy, please tell me. As a mid­wife, it’s hard for me to imag­ine any­thing match­ing it. (Note: The photo in this post was taken moments after my son was born at home.)

Preg­nancy, labor and birth are intensely spir­i­tual and phys­i­cal all at once. As such, they are also apt metaphors for life. For any­one read­ing this who is not preg­nant, con­sider that you are ges­tat­ing ideas and dreams all the time, and it may take a mid­wife (read here, a trusted friend or coun­selor) to help you give birth to them.

Here’s the thing: Most of the instruc­tions given to preg­nant women (and any­one ges­tat­ing big dreams) are inad­e­quate – not least because they encour­age women to focus on the lit­tle things related to their preg­nancy and miss the big picture.

When I’m in clinic, I spend most of my time talk­ing with preg­nant women about what’s nor­mal and what’s not. I also try to give them a big­ger mes­sage: preg­nancy is the “new nor­mal.” When you’re not preg­nant it’s not nor­mal to feel nau­se­ated, dizzy, and, most of all, in pain. But when you’re preg­nant it often is. That’s the bot­tom line, and it’s unlikely to change.

Notice that I said pain and not some­thing else, like dis­com­fort. I remem­ber when I was preg­nant think­ing that if I hadn’t known that such mul­ti­fac­eted pain was nor­mal, I would have gone to the ER and pre­sented my com­plaints with a hope for a cure. But there is no cure. There is sim­ply the will to bear it. You either have the will to dig in and pre­pare for more or not.

That may sound fright­en­ing, but what I mean is that women are strong, incred­i­bly strong. And yet even in a world full of amaz­ing women ath­letes, entre­pre­neurs, and even astro­nauts (not to men­tion bil­lions of moth­ers), most of us don’t know how strong we are until we ges­tate another human being.

Maybe if more of us knew our strength ahead of time, we would pre­pare more and become even stronger. Ide­ally, we would behave like peo­ple in training—Olympic ath­letes, or seri­ous appli­cants for the space program.

And yet, even for those who have trained for years, actu­ally per­form­ing – whether in a sta­dium or on the space shut­tle – remains the ulti­mate chal­lenge, achieved under unique and unpre­dictable circumstances.

My best sug­ges­tion for any­one is to go into birth with a clear vision of what you want, and sur­round your­self with peo­ple who sup­port your vision.

I chose to have a home­birth with my mid­wife, a dear friend, attend­ing me. As we talked about prepar­ing for the birth she asked me what my great­est fear was. I told her that I was haunted by the story of one of my fel­low stu­dents in mid­wifery school: She too had planned a home­birth with a mid­wife, but after many hours of labor at home she ended up in the hos­pi­tal with an epidural and for­ceps delivery.

Long after the birth I asked my friend about her birth expe­ri­ence. She offered that if she could have changed any­thing it would have been to lis­ten to her mid­wife more. She remem­bers hav­ing been almost par­a­lyzed by the pain of labor and only able to sit and rock on the floor as her mid­wife implored her to move and try other positions.

I told my mid­wife, with my hus­band and doula and best friend in atten­dance, that I was afraid I would also suf­fer the same fate. How­ever, since there is a lot of anec­do­tal evi­dence to sug­gest that the more a woman states what she does not want in child birth, the more likely it is to hap­pen, I kept my birth plan sim­ple. “I know what I want. My sup­port team knows what I want. I will do what my mid­wife says.” That was it.

Was it any sur­prise that I came up against my great­est fear? After a fairly short labor (12 hours) I was fully dilated, but then, after push­ing stren­u­ously for two hours, I didn’t make much progress. So far every­thing had gone accord­ing to plan, but absent any more progress I knew I would soon be tak­ing that ride to the hospital.

At this point my mid­wife told me to get into a squat­ting posi­tion. In my exhaus­tion, I told her, “After the next con­trac­tion.” When the next con­trac­tion came and I said that again, I glanced up just at the moment when all of my sup­port peo­ple looked at each other as if to say, “Here it is: the thing she feared.”

And then the vision I had for my home­birth, the one they had sup­ported me in, took hold. In the next moment they had taken me in their arms to sup­port me in a squat. I found the posi­tion bet­ter for push­ing, and although it took another hour, my baby was finally born.

Instead of fear­ing the pain and run­ning from it I heard what it was telling me – this way isn’t work­ing, you must make a change.

If your mind and body are pre­pared, the pain you feel in labor – and the effort to embrace it, move toward it, and work with it – can be trans­muted into a gift that informs the rest of your life.

It takes enor­mous courage to stay with pain long enough to hear what it has to say.

Usu­ally it will ask you to make big changes in your life. This can be scary, and yet, if you can do it, you’ll tap into some­thing pro­found and mag­i­cal that reminds you of your true power.

Tap into it and you’ll achieve your vision for your best life.

by Stacey Curnow