From Fear To Love - Book Review



Title: From Fear To Love
Author: Red Miller
Pages: 288
Rating : 5/5


If you are pregnant and wish to read a book on pregnancy and labour, this is one book that you shouldn't miss! As the blurb in the back of the book says, this book is for pregnant mothers who wish to experience the healthiest, most joyful and nurturing birth experience possible. It helps you to identify your fears and discover the secrets they hold to empower and transform your birth experience, develop a self nurturing plan that will enhance your body’s ability to nourish and grow a healthy baby, work with your pain guides and increase your capacity to cope with the intensity of labour, minimise birth interventions, inspire your birth partner to step up and play an active role, and understand your unborn baby’s wishes to create the ultimate birth team.

The book is divided into three sections - Blossoming (Pregnancy), Opening (Labour), and A Whole New World (The Fourth Trimester/Newborn phase). The first section talks about pregnancy, building your birth team in place, trusting your intuition, self care, visualisations, affirmations, embracing fear, communicating with your baby and nutrition. The second section talks about your baby’s needs, birth interventions, stretching and preparing to open, early labour and setting the stage, labour, pain and the tools to cope, birth partners, birth and surgery. The last section deals with postpartum, using your intuition to respond to your baby’s needs, breastfeeding, newborn care, postnatal healing and working through the challenges.

In every chapter, Red Miller combines her experience and knowledge to point us to evidence based facts and guides us to make informed choices and decisions based on our body and its needs. I like how there’s a small ‘Do’ list at the end of every chapter, which summarises the important points and helps in taking note/identifying the most essential matters at every stage of pregnancy, labour and postpartum. Each chapter also has small snippets from moms/dads about their experience on something related to what Red is talking about in that chapter. While reading the book, it almost feels like Red is talking directly to you rendering a personal touch to the book and helping you to focus, analyse and put things in the right perspective.

A few chapters were definitely eye-openers to me - one of them being ‘What Does Your Baby Want?’. It visualises birth from the baby’s perspective and it gave a whole new outlook to how you see it. The chapter on Nutrition is another one of my favourites. It prompts the reader to understand and know more about the food you eat, the importance of having a balanced diet and evaluating your food intake. The book also speaks a lot about self care and self-love, something that we almost tend to forget in this biggest journey of our life, especially during the fourth trimester when we have a newborn to attend. These chapters gives you a lot of easy ‘do’ ideas to help you make time for self-love and how you can look after your healing body and process your experience of birth.

This book is definitely different from other pregnancy books - it's simple, guides you to basic facts that you need to be mindful of and will definitely help you in birthing without fear. It is sure to leave you more informed, less fearful and more confident of yourself and your body. It definitely is a must read for everyone, spouse included - irrespective of whether you are pregnant or planning for a pregnancy.

The book is available for sale in Amazon. You can also find a kindle version here.

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