Be ready for discombobulating body changes and a busy mind

Relate to the lived-in, hardworking female body (including your own) with profound tenderness and respect

This is a time of such tumultuous physical (and psychological) change - growing a baby, birthing a baby, feeding a baby from your breasts!

Humans have distinctive anatomic features, given to us by stable genetic codes crafted through millions of years of evolutionary history, created first by our ancestral vertebrates, then the primates.

Yet within the contraints of the basic human form, we are amazingly anatomically variable. Our bodies and breasts as women are incredibly diverse. You can find out more here.

Are you able to practice celebrating the shape of your own unique and precious body? Can you cultivate a deep reverence and tenderness towards her, towards her imperfections, scars, and unique shape or sculpting, as she does her powerful, life-giving, transformative work?

Many of us have learnt to feel ashamed of our body, breasts, and belly regardless of how we are shaped. We imagine our mind is telling the truth when we stand naked before a mirror and it says back at us: “You're weird.” Our brains can become preoccupied with judging our own nipples, breasts, and bellies relative to every other woman’s imagined superior nipple, breast, and belly shape!

Because I don't want to participate in the comparative tendencies of both our own minds and the culture around us, you'll see that I talk about petite or delicate breasts not small breasts, and generous breasts not large breasts. I try to remove the comparative tone when choosing adjectives to describe our marvellous anatomic diversity as women.

Be ready for the often unhelpful, ever-vigilant busy-ness of the post-birth brain

If your mind is like most women's minds in contemporary societies, you can expect it to tell you many negative things about your body's shape, texture, and appearance once you are pregnant or have given birth to a baby.

You can find out about how the brain works postbirth here.

It's normal for our brains to want to tell us how we 'should' be improving our body. Minds particularly generate a lot of unhelpful thoughts when we're exhausted or stressed, and we usually can't stop these miserable thoughts streamimg forth. We have to let unhelpful thoughts play like a radio in the background. On a bad day, we might have to let them flutter and squawk around like a noisy flock of galahs. We can notice that they're there, tenderly accepting that our exhausted brain is likely to continue on generating such thoughts.

And then we behave towards our precious body in a way that honours our own dignity and gorgeousness, that celebrates our own utterly singular beauty through this time of child-bearing and breastfeeding. For the thousandth time in the last hour, we direct our attention back onto the small, cherished details of the present moment, speaking to ourselves with a profound self-compassion.

• You can find out about your brain's thinking processes after the birth of a baby here.

• You can find out why breast size doesn't predict how much milk you'll make here.

• You can find out what it helps to notice in the mirror when you're breastfeeding here.

• You can find out about the directions nipples look here.

• You can find out about breast-belly contour here.