Conscious Birth & Wellness

10/08/2026

Labour came on in the middle of the night.
This first-time mama didn’t want to disturb anyone, so she laboured beautifully on her own for hours before waking her mom.
By the time I arrived, she was very deep in it. Back-to-back contractions. So much pressure. And we were looking at rush-hour traffic, construction, to drive to the hospital. I got stuck in it on the way to her!
I took one look at her and knew we were at a decision point.
I asked her:
Do you want to try to get dressed, get into the car and risk having this baby on the way there? Or can you trust yourself enough to stay here and birth your baby at home?
She chose trust.
And 15 minutes later, this beautiful little girl was born.
Her mama birthed her with so much instinct, so much strength, and honestly, very little help from any of us. We were there to support her, but she did it.
And this sweet baby arrived alert, content, calm, and completely herself.
The most beautiful reminder that sometimes confidence doesn’t look loud.
Sometimes it looks like a woman realizing, in the middle of labour, that she already knows what to do.

10/07/2026

What if your posture isn’t just posture?
When I assess someone through Body Ready Method®, I am looking at alignment, movement, compensation and where the body seems to have fewer options. BRM itself frames alignment as a tool for awareness rather than something that means your pelvis is “wrong” or needs to be fixed.
But my BodyTalk background makes me curious about another question too:
Why did your body organize itself this way in the first place?
Think about little kids. They run, jump, squat, climb, fall down and get back up all day. They have enormous movement variability and very little history in their bodies.
Then life happens.
We have injuries. We sit more. We protect painful areas. We go through stress, grief, fear, trauma and experiences that teach the body to brace, guard or compensate. Over time, those adaptations can become our normal.
So when I notice ribs that habitually flare, a pelvis that consistently shifts, a jaw that grips or one hip that does not move like the other, I am not only asking, “Which muscle is tight?”
I am also interested in what the body may have been adapting to.
Sometimes it is purely mechanical. Sometimes an old injury changed the way you move. Sometimes pregnancy itself has changed your centre of gravity.
And sometimes the holding pattern seems connected with something emotional or experiential the body has been protecting around.
For me, alignment is not about making your body look perfect.
It is information.
A Conscious Alignment assessment gives us a way to work directly with the physical body and create more movement options. BodyTalk gives me another way to explore why some of those patterns became necessary in the first place.
The goal is not perfect posture.
It is a body with enough adaptability to respond to pregnancy, labour and life without always having to fall back into the same compensation.
If you’re pregnant and curious about what your posture, movement and compensation patterns may be telling us, a Body Ready Method® assessment is where we can start. We look at how your body is organizing itself now, where it may be working harder than it needs to, and how to create more options for pregnancy and birth.
Book it online or in person. https://bodytalk.janeapp.com/locations/conscious-birth-wellness/book #/discipline/20/treatment/13

10/06/2026

Surrogacy Reason # 2:
I want to learn what it feels like to be deeply held while I walk into something I know may bring old things to the surface.
This time, I am entering pregnancy from a completely different place.
I am in the most loving, supportive relationship I have ever known. I have a man beside me who is genuinely excited to do this journey with me, who wants to care for me through it, and who can see that there may be growth in it for him too.
That matters to me more than I can probably explain yet.
I often describe myself like a buffalo.
Buffalo walk into the storm.
They do not spend their energy running away from it. They turn toward it, move through it, and come out the other side sooner.
That is how I see parts of this surrogacy.
I know this journey may hold up a mirror to my own conception story, each week I spent in the womb, my birth, my postpartum beginning, and then my own experiences carrying, birthing and mothering my sons.
I am not going into that alone. I will be held by my man.
I will have weekly support with my soul therapist, Wendy Anne Walker.
I will have weekly support of my BodyTalk practitioners and the other care I have intentionally built around pregnancy and postpartum.
And I have asked for that support to continue through three months postpartum.
Pregnancy is not nine months. Forty weeks is ten months.
So for me, this is thirteen months of intentionally practising something I have spent much less of my life practising: receiving.
Receiving care before I am depleted.
Receiving support without having to earn it.
Receiving help without immediately trying to repay it.
Allowing someone else to hold me while I move through something important.
I do not expect this journey to erase the past.
That is not what healing means to me.
But I am deeply curious about what can happen when I walk back toward some of those old mirrors from a completely different place — older, more conscious, better resourced, deeply loved, and no longer doing it alone.
That is another reason I said yes. And of course, giving a deserving momma another child she could not otherwise have.

10/05/2026

Pregnancy and motherhood has a way of bringing things to the surface that you thought you had already dealt with.
You can understand intellectually that you are safe and still feel your body responding as though something is about to go wrong. You can have a supportive partner and still feel suddenly abandoned when they seem distracted. You can want help and, at the same time, find receiving it much harder than simply doing everything yourself.
Those are the moments that make me curious in my BodyTalk work.
Not because every strong reaction means there is some enormous trauma hiding underneath it, but because sometimes the intensity of the response does not quite fit what is happening now.
So I start asking different questions. Where did your system learn this? What did you learn about depending on other people, receiving support, being listened to or belonging? Was this something you experienced yourself, or are you living inside a pattern that has existed in your family for much longer than you realized?
That is the beginning of my new three-part series.
Part One, “What If This Fear Didn’t Start With You?”, explores active memory, prenatal experience, inherited family patterns and the ways our bodies can keep responding to stories that are technically over.
I wrote it through the lens of pregnancy and preparing for motherhood because that is where I see these patterns surface so often. But this is not only a pregnancy conversation. It reaches into fertility, relationships, parenting, the way we receive support and the things we continue expecting even when our lives have changed.
And I want to be really careful about one thing: becoming aware of an old pattern should not become another impossible healing assignment. We do not need to look at hardship only in terms of what it damaged, either. Sometimes part of the work is also recognizing the strength, awareness and capacity that developed because we had to move through it.
You do not have to heal your entire family line before you can move forward. You can begin with what is actually showing up now.
Read Part One here: https://consciousbirth.ca/2856-2/
If something in the article makes you recognize a pattern in your own life, this is exactly the kind of thing I explore in BodyTalk sessions.

What if this fear didn’t start with you? Leave a Comment / BodyTalk, Mental Health, Pregnancy, Prenatal Consciousness / By Joanne Yanke Active memory, prenatal consciousness, inherited family trauma and the stories our bodies may still be carrying By Joanne Yanke, BodyTalk Birthkeeper — Part 1 ....

10/01/2026

Every baby has a conception story.
And creating this post made me realize how much my own story has shaped the work I do.
I was conceived into a pregnancy my mother did not want. I have spent a lot of my adult life exploring what that beginning may have meant for me — particularly around belonging, being wanted, receiving, taking up space and feeling safe in relationship.
I don’t believe one experience explains an entire person. Human beings are far more complex than that.
But I also know our earliest experiences don't become irrelevant simply because we cannot consciously remember them.
That is one of the reasons I am so interested in the period before conception now.
What are the future parents carrying from their own beginnings? What is already happening emotionally and relationally around the possibility of this baby? What patterns have travelled through the family for generations? And what might be given some attention before another generation arrives?
This surrogacy has brought that question into my own life in a completely new way.
This baby is not conceived yet, and already she is being considered.
We are talking about her. Preparing for her. Thinking carefully about my health and support during pregnancy, what I may need afterward, what this experience will be like for everyone involved, and how we want to move through it.
I get to consciously relate to her before she is even in my body.
There is something incredibly meaningful to me about that.
Not because awareness can manufacture a perfect conception, pregnancy or birth. It can’t. Life will still happen.
But awareness means we can notice what is present.
We can have conversations.
We can tend to what needs tending.
And when the beginning was difficult — whether that was conception, pregnancy, birth or the early postpartum period — we can come back to those experiences later with curiosity and compassion instead of treating them as something that simply has to be carried forever.
This is a large part of why my work spans preconception, pregnancy, birth and the years that follow.
The story begins much earlier than we were taught to think it does.

09/30/2026

I’m medically cleared to be a surrogate.
Which means this is actually happening.
There are a lot of reasons I said yes to carrying a baby for someone else, and over the next while I want to share some of them because this decision is about so much more than gifting a baby for me.
So, Surrogacy Reason #1:
I want to know what pregnancy feels like when the woman carrying the baby is deeply supported too.
When I was pregnant with my own children, I was in an unhealthy relationship and did not feel deeply supported. I carried an enormous amount myself, and postpartum there was very little space for me to simply recover, be cared for and be mothered while I was mothering.
But there is another layer to this.
Through my prenatal psychology work, I have spent a lot of time exploring my own experience as a baby in the womb — being carried by a mother who was uncertain about the pregnancy and did not really want to be pregnant.
So this surrogacy gives me the opportunity to experience pregnancy in a completely different relational environment.
This time, I get to be deeply nourished.
The reimbursement fund means I can receive regular BodyTalk, manual therapies, good nutrition, pelvic-floor care, postpartum doula support, help at home and actual time away from work to rest and recover. I can build support around pregnancy instead of waiting until I am struggling and then trying to justify needing help.
There is adult me, learning what it feels like to be cared for while carrying a baby.
There is mother me, getting to experience pregnancy without carrying everything alone.
And there is the very early part of me getting to experience what it feels like to exist in an environment where pregnancy is wanted, prepared for, talked about and intentionally supported.
That is one of the biggest reasons I said yes.
Not because I expect this pregnancy to erase anything that happened before, but because I am deeply curious about what becomes possible when we create a completely different experience.
This surrogacy is a healing journey for me, as well as a great gift for the intended mother and brother.

09/29/2026

What if what you’re feeling is actually baby’s stuff?
In my prenatal BodyTalk practice, I’ve seen a pregnant woman’s pain, anxiety, nightmares and other experiences point less to her own experience — and more toward what baby may be experiencing or needing in utero.
One prenatal session really stayed with me.
A client was experiencing sudden extreme anxiety during pregnancy. As we followed it through BodyTalk, it didn’t map as hers. The session pointed toward baby needing more support in utero.
That changed the question.
Instead of only asking, “Why am I anxious?” we could also ask, “What is baby communicating? What support might be needed?”
I’m not saying every symptom is baby’s, or that every emotion comes from baby.
But I have seen enough in my work to stay curious about how much of what a pregnant woman experiences may sometimes be part of the relationship between them.
Babies are not passive passengers in pregnancy. They are developing, responding, adapting and participating in life in utero.
And the more attention we give to that relationship, the more we may notice when something feels like more than just “mine.”
The next time something feels out of character or doesn’t quite make sense, get curious.
Could this be something your baby is experiencing too?
Your BodyTalks, and your unborn baby is part of you. I help you listen.

09/28/2026

This placenta sustained an 11 lb 7 oz / 5.18 kg baby.
It is easy to think of the placenta as something left over after birth.
But it is so much more than that.
The placenta is a living interface between two beings.
The pregnant woman and baby are distinct, but they are in constant relationship. Oxygen, nutrients, hormones, immune signals and waste are being exchanged and regulated throughout pregnancy. The placenta is not passive in that process. It is constantly receiving, responding, adapting and communicating between both bodies.
Pregnancy is not simply one body growing another.
It is relationship. It is exchange.
It is constant communication.
Some of that communication we can measure.
Some of it we can feel.
And some of it asks us to get curious.
What changes when we begin to see the placenta not only as an organ, but as part of the relationship between pregnant woman and baby?
What changes when we remember that baby is not a passive passenger, but an active participant in life in utero?
Your body is communicating, and your baby may be too.
Prenatal consciousness gives us a way to pay closer attention to babies and support them in the womb.
The placenta is often treated as something that becomes relevant only after birth. But throughout pregnancy, it is a living interface between two beings.
It is continuously involved in exchange and signalling — oxygen, nutrients, hormones, immune signals, waste, regulation.
What interests me is what this reminds us about pregnancy itself: it is not simply one body growing another. It is an ongoing relationship.
That relationship begins long before birth.
Prenatal consciousness gives us a way to pay closer attention to babies and support them in the womb.

This is the foundation for a deeper question I’ll be sharing next: what happens when something a pregnant woman is feeling appears to be more about baby than about her?

Giving babies the best start to life begins with recognizing that they are already here, already experiencing, and already part of the relationship.

09/27/2026

This weekend brought a beautiful baby boy into the world.
I joined his mom at the hospital around hour 24, just as active labour was finally getting underway. I supported her as things intensified, and she continued progressing strongly without needing the Pitocin that had been discussed.
And then she did something I am still a little in awe of.
After about 30 hours of labour, she pushed out an 11 lb 7 oz (5.18 kg) baby — vaginally, without an epidural, no pain meds at all.
Her doctor and nurse couldn't believe the size of him. They were talking about whether this might be the biggest unmedicated vaginal birth they'd seen.
But what stays with me isn't a record.
It's her.
Her strength. Her resolve. Her willingness to stay with her body through an incredibly long and demanding labour.
I get to witness women do extraordinary things when they birth their babies. Not because birth always goes according to plan, and not because needing intervention somehow makes a birth less powerful.
But because there are moments when a woman discovers just how much capacity she has.
Welcome to the world, big lil' man.
And momma — you were superhuman.

09/24/2026

Fear in pregnancy isn’t automatically something I want to get rid of.
I want to know why it’s there.
Are you afraid because you don’t understand what might happen in labour? Then maybe you need better information.
Are you afraid because every time you ask a question, you feel dismissed or rushed by your care provider? That is a very different problem.
Did you have a previous birth, loss, medical experience, or something earlier in your life that taught your body, “This isn’t safe”?
Positive thinking probably isn’t going to touch that.
And sometimes you can know all the birth physiology, have the birth plan, practise the positions and still notice that your body is bracing.
That matters too.
I don’t think the goal of birth preparation is to become completely fearless. I think it is to understand what the fear is actually responding to so you can work with the right thing.
Sometimes that means education. Sometimes it means having a better plan or knowing your options. Sometimes it means changing who is supporting you. And sometimes there is something older that needs attention.
That is why I approach birth preparation the way I do.
Not just: What do you need to know?
But also:
What happens in your body when you think about birth?
Where do you tighten?
What are you afraid might happen?
And does that fear actually belong to this birth — or is something older getting stirred up?
Fear is information.
Before we try to make it disappear, I think it’s worth listening to what it has to say.
If this is the kind of birth preparation you have been looking for, comment BIRTHPREP and I’ll send you the details.