While hospitals often offer Childbirth Education (CBE) classes to their future clients, taking an 'outside' Childbirth class is usually more in-depth and may educate a mother or couple about relaxation and coping methods, risks and benefits of pain medication and other common interventions, birth options and choices.

    In my classes, which I like to call Childbirth Empowerment Classes, I also focus on effective communication and learning skills, skills which a parent will use for the rest of their parenting lives. As a student of Childbirth International's Childbirth Educator Program, my classes are interactive and participatory (no long lectures you and your partner fall asleep during!), non-judgmental and unbiased towards any specific kind of birth, use evidence-based information and are fun!

    Classes are for first time parents, or for parents expecting subsequent babies, and are available in group format as well as private. VBAC moms and teens are also welcome to classes, and information specific to such cases are supplied.

    In addition to Childbirth Empowerment Classes, I also offer classes in Calm Birth. Based in mind/body medicine and meditation science, Calm Birth is modeled on the medicine-meditation program of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in pain management and immune enhancement. The program offers three proven meditation practices applied to childbirth for the first time, teaching women how to use their innate healing capabilities.

    Calm Birth, a New Method for Conscious Childbirth consists of mindfulness-awareness meditation practices that help women and their womb child to prepare for birth. All births benefit from the Calm Birth program, no matter what kind of birth a mother has. From natural childbirth to cesarean section and everything in between, Calm Birth is a gift that I am proud to bring to the Central Indiana community.

"I wholeheartedly endorse the Calm Birth program. This work is at the heart of healthy and empowering childbirth - an experience which has the power to transform and uplift a woman's relationship to her body and her child for life. Calm Birth is preventive and empowering medicine at its best."  ~  Christiane Northrup, M.D., FACOG, author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom and Mother Daughter Wisdom

    You may also visit Calm Birth's website.