Bliss Baby Yoga Director Nadine O’Mara shares how her role as a yoga teacher has been greatly enriched by becoming a doula and why the two work so closely together in supporting birthing women and their partners. This is the 2nd part of this interview by Ana Davis.
Nadine O’Mara has been teaching prenatal and postnatal yoga since 2007. She found she loved working with pregnancy and birth so much that she went on to train as a doula and childbirth educator in 2015.
Bliss Baby Yoga founder Ana Davis had a chat with Nadine about her experiences as a professional doula over the last ten years.
This is part two of a two-part series of interviews that we hope you enjoy. You can read Part One here.
Ana: Being a doula means being on call, and you’re often called out to attend a birth for hours in the middle of the night; having to leave your family and drop everything to support your doula client. So, why do you do it? What are the joys and rewards of being a doula?
Nadine: I love being a doula for a number or reasons. As Director of Bliss Baby Yoga and as a long-term prenatal and postnatal yoga teacher and teacher trainer, being in the birth room as a doula gives my work authenticity. It makes everything I do in the prenatal yoga room relevant.
Also, it’s those moments of ‘aha!’ that I love. Every birthing woman or person is different and that means different things will suit them in terms of support tools/ techniques. Sometimes, there’s a tool that I’ve learnt somewhere along the way and I’ve never really used it in a birth before, and then I end up using it and my client loves it, it works beautifully for them! This is like a lightbulb moment for me, it helps me understand birth even more.
And then there’s the adrenaline rush you get during and after a birth. Especially if it was a really powerful and beautiful birth. I think you get addicted to that rush! Particularly when you get home from a birth and you know that you were able to help—that you were able to really help turn things around for a couple. Especially if it was a long labour and they were feeling totally overwhelmed—they tell me they wouldn’t know what they would have done if they hadn’t had me as their doula.
Ana: How can a doula support not only the birthing woman/person but also the birthing woman’s partner?
Nadine: There’s such a beauty in supporting not only the women, but the men too. It’s normally the mum who decides to hire the doula. I don’t think the dads realise until they’re in the birth or approaching the birth and then they are so grateful to have a doula along. Especially if it’s a first birth, the dads are very relieved when I arrive—to have me guide them. And because it takes the pressure off them. They don’t have to be the only person supporting their partner.
Ana: Ahhh, of course, a doula is also there to support the dad/partner.
How have you sourced your doula clients over the years? Was it that you readily found clients through your prenatal yoga students or have you had to actively advertise your doula services?
Nadine: It’s pretty much flowed. I’ve never advertised as such. I’ve sourced all my clients, either from my prenatal yoga classes or through the birth education workshops I’ve run. I find that’s another wonderful way that the prenatal teaching crosses over with the doula-ing. You create a relationship and a confidence your students and they naturally ask you to be their doula.
Ana: So, you originally start out knowing them as your prenatal student, then they become your doula client, and then potentially they come back to your mums and bubs classes or your postnatal classes. You must have really rich relationships with these women because you’ve really gone with them on a deep level?
Nadine: Yes, that’s right! I will have been on a journey with them for a year: if they come to me at the beginning of their second trimester, at 12 weeks, they are with me for six months of prenatal yoga and doula support. And then they come back with their baby after six weeks, and they are with me until their baby’s crawling (about 6 months). There have definitely been tears and sadness when we finally have to say goodbye. It’s longer than you would maintain a relationship for a normal doula client because you’ve got that extension of the yoga after. It’s part of the reason that keeps me teaching postnatal yoga as well—that relationship with the mums and getting to know the babies on the other side too.
And of course, it means a more sustainable way of maintaining an income in the work I love since these ways of supporting pregnancy, birth and postpartum have a synergistic effect. The doula role supports my prenatal and postnatal yoga classes and vice versa.
Ana Davis is a doula (trained by Anna Watts at Celebration of Birth), yoga teacher and yoga teacher trainer specialising in women’s yoga. She is the founder of Bliss Baby Yoga.
Bliss Baby Yoga offers a comprehensive Online Holistic Doula Training with Anna Watts from Celebration of Birth as lead teacher and Bliss Baby Yoga’s Director and experienced Doula and Childbirth Educator Nadine O’Mara , and Doula & Bliss Baby Yoga Senior Teacher Rosie Matheson as co-teachers.
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