Birthing affirmations

I designed some “birthing affirmations” as printable posters. There’s lots of birthing affirmation images on the internet …but here’s some more:

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JPEG, PDF

 

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These images are all my own work I and release them to the pubic domain (CC0 if you like)

Birthing affirmations?

We’re having a baby soon, in case you didn’t gather that. So we have these messages pinned up around our living room. The idea of these birthing affirmations comes from the “hypnobirthing” classes we went to. A friend recommended hynobirthing. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew my wife was nervous about the pain of childbirth, and could do with all the help she can get.

Affirmations were one things we learned about. It’s a pretty simple idea really. Use positive language. Tell yourself positive things over and over again, and stick up eye catching messages around the house to continuously remind you.

Even though you conciously know that the messages might not necessarily be true, they can work their way into your subconcious, through repetition. It also works during labour, giving you something positive to look at and focus on (hopefully!)

Affirmations are also part of the “hypnosis” bit of hypnobirthing. A voice on a recorded hypnobirthing track can plant these positive affirmation messages in your subconscious, but this works best while in a state of deep relaxation, close to sleep. …or so the theory goes.

Missing Maps talk: OSMLondon & Mapping your own neighbourhood

Recently we celebrated one year of “Missing Maps” events. These humanitarian OpenStreetMap mapathon events have been very successful, packing out venues in London every time, with enthusiastic new mappers, who bring their laptops and perform remote armchair mapping of far off lands.

We’re successful at getting new mappers involved, and as we teach them, we drive up the quality of the basic data, and also help some of them to become quite advanced mappers (only some. That’s the long tail curve after all)

Meanwhile the OSMLondon pub meet-ups remain successful too in their own way. I’ve been organising them for years. Going back through the history of OpenStreetMap we’ve always had our merry band of OpenStreetMappers meeting in pubs, and doing London mapping.

I’m very keen to promote more cross-over. These newly recruited humanitarian mappers are yet learn about the joy of on-the-ground survey-based mapping. Mapping your own neighbourhood is the OpenStreetMap way. It seems like a vital missing piece of the puzzle really, if these new mappers are to truly integrate and be a part of the OpenStreetMap community.

So given a speaking slot at this special OSMGeoWeek Missing Maps event, I had a go at explaining those things… while also talking about pubs a lot! Here’s the slides and Continue reading “Missing Maps talk: OSMLondon & Mapping your own neighbourhood”