change your vocabulary, change your experience | no. 21

I first discovered hypnobirthing well after I'd had my first child. I loved how many women claimed that simply changing the vocabulary around the birthing experience greatly positively impacted their labor. It's been a while since I've thought about hypnobirthing, having been out of the pregnancy game for a few years.

The concept came to mind again through playing with my daughter. We travel for my husband's job and live out of hotels and air bnb's 10 months out of the year. We dream of owning a homestead or something similar one day; basically a simple self-made home with land and solitude. For now, we are practicing being content and grateful while we wait for those doors to open up.

While playing pretend outside of our hotel, my daughter and I were pretending we were sheep farmers. I stayed in character to be able to convince her to come inside for dinner and found myself saying, "Come on! Let's go back to the cottage for a homemade dinner by candlelight and get our rest for herding the sheep tomorrow." She giggled and willingly followed me in.

As I said those words I realized I felt quite happy and grateful for our apartment-style hotel room. Just by calling it something I wished it to be, I found it wonderfully pleasant. That's when I realized that hypnobirthing really does tap into something legitimate. Just by changing our vocabulary, we can change our experience.

Now, some of you may be thinking: that's called lying to yourself. It's a hotel room, not a cottage. You're just ignoring what's real…

Sure, that's one way to look at it. However, most of our life is comprised of how we feel about our situations, not necessarily the truth of the situation itself.

When hypnobirthing uses new vocabulary, it does so to attach new emotions to the stages of labor. I heard a great phrase from a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast where he said something like this, 'If I curse at you in a language you don't understand, you will feel nothing. I could say the most hurtful things but because you haven't ascribed meaning to those sounds, you don't have any strong reaction to what I say. When you detach the feelings you have ascribed to the sounds of our words, you free yourself to choose love.'

Ultimately, I believe this is what changing our vocabulary can do. Changing "hotel room" to "cottage" even briefly freed me up to feel that maybe I just have negative emotions attached to my perception of the words I use, not my actual situation.

I've put this into action lately in more than just words. Not only is it fun to think about wherever we live as a homestead or cottage, but I've also realized that changing the words even slightly has freed me to believe that I can do the things I want to do in a homestead right now.

Just this week living in a studio hotel room, my daughter built a bookshelf with my husband and we filled it with homeschooling supplies and her toys. We are propagating boxwood clippings in a clear plastic container by the window, our air plants and a few potted plants are thriving above our beds. My sourdough starter is active and the fresh English muffins, naan, and pancakes I've made are ready to be eaten. There is homemade jam in the fridge, and a hydroponic countertop garden started on our little sliver of a counter.

I share these details to prove that many of our "cannots" in life are actually just "unbeliefs." We limit ourselves in our minds and say we can't do that when really we could, we just don't want to work through the creative means to make it happen for our situation.

Some people get to have access to everything and do exactly what they want when they want it. I'm finding that the more effort and creativity I have to put into my passions, the more rewarding they are. If changing a few of my words to shift my perspective helps me accomplish those things, that seems a simple thing to do for living a better life.

Try it out yourself! Change one word that has negative undertones to something that carries happier notes and see how it changes your perspective. Let me know below if you've tried this and how it worked for you!

~ m