Evergreen Hospital Medical Center

The Hypnobirthing Class through Evergreen Hospital is offered by an indpendent instructor who contracts with the hospital. She is not a medical professional but is a certified hypnobirthing instructor. This four-session class included lots of practice, instruction and videos of labors and births where the women used hypnobirthing (a few too many videos, I think). Class materials also include a hypnobirthing book, CD and supplemental materials. These were very worthwhile. Hypnobirthing involves learning deep relaxation and visualization techniques specifically focusing on birthing imagery. If you are already familiar with self-hypnosis or proficient at deep relaxation, the class might be redundant (although it still may be helpful to have the specific imagery and information related to labor and birth). Otherwise, it was well worth it. I learned much more about labor and birth from this class than from the hospital's standard "Labor and Birth" Class. more

My husband and I were very disappointed with this class, offered through Evergreen Hospital. The class consisted of reading assigned chapters from the birth and newborn book by Penny Simkin (which is given to all patients at Evergreen) and summarizing them in class. The one part of the class that we did find helpful was the last 10 minutes where we would practice different labor positions. The rest of the 2 hours could just have easily been spent reading the rest of the assigned book. I'm sure there are more hands-on and informative birth classes out there. more