I also gave birth using hypnobirthing. To whoever the "beware" commenter is--you are not informed. Hypnobirthing is self-hypnosis. I wouldn't even call it hypnosis, but maybe just because to this day I find the idea of 'hypnosis' to be, frankly, a little weird. It is just relaxation. I bought a CD that leads the self-hypnosis: "breathe in...breathe out..." and "think of a happy safe place, like your favorite garden, imagine yourself there..." and "relax your head, now your neck, now your arms...." You know, that kind of thing. I didn't actually end up using the CD during the birth because I had practiced it so many times at home that I could do the slow breathing and head-to-toe relaxation on my own. Instead I just listened to a CD of some of my favorite opera music.

I had a heavy dose of pitocin but even then I didn't really feel pain. My husband was very supportive but a little incredulous. I asked him if he could just do a little pressure massage on my lower back, which did feel uncomfortable, but not noticably different from the typical pregnancy backache I'd been feeling for months on end. I couldn't feel him so I said push harder, and harder. Finally he said he felt like he was beating the heck out of me and just physically couldn't do it any harder. He tried on my upper back (much, much lighter he says) and I said "OUCH!" Even as I was practicing the hypnosis, I never really believed the advertised 'mental epidural' but, well, there you have it. The delivery was similarly smooth. The nurses couldn't believe that I was completely calm, even joking with them in between contractions.

I was someone who occasionally wondered if I ever even wanted to have children because of a lifelong fear of the pain of childbirth. In fact, it was only the extremity of my fear that drove me to consider something I thought to be as "out there" as hypnosis. But I'm about as happy a hypnobirthing customer as they come.

With all these wonderful success stories I have enjoyed reading, I think it is worth echoing the sentiment from the original post, that nobody should ever feel like a failure if it doesn't 'work' perfectly for them. There are many different definitions of 'work.' And certainly hypnobirthing shouldn't be seen as some kind of perverse I-had-less-pain-than-you contest.

To further expand on the idea that there are different definitions of hypnosis 'working,' I'd like to point out that the skill of self-relaxation was just as useful after the birth as during it. I've used it when nursing was occasionally painful in the first few tries, when I was very nearly going to just lose it when my colicky daughter just wouldn't STOP CRYING, when I had to have blood drawn recently, when I need to quickly refocus and destress at work...the list goes on and on. This is a skill you can use for the rest of your life.

I agree that some of the more overt and especially more group-oriented practices (e.g. group post-game prayers), are potentially troublesome in their clubbiness.

But as far as players thanking God or Jesus in the post-game interview, and other such individual displays--what do you want them to say? "I did it all myself! Every success is attributible to my personal greatness!" That's awful. Maybe you don't believe a specific God exists, but thanking him, or thanking "luck," or whatever cosmic force may be, is a substantially less obnoxious response than just taking all the credit for themselves. Or maybe you'd prefer they thank their sponsors? Would commercialization be any less offensive than a slightly awkwardly-overt religious message? Who can forget poor Ralphie's heartbreak over decoding a message from his radio hero, "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine." ("Ovaltine? A crummy commercial?")

Sure, most of these players could do more, a lot more, to practice a Christian behavioral ideal in their personal lives. But they could also be doing a lot worse than making token acknowledgements of something greater than themselves. For a 20- or 30-something for whom it really would be easy to slip into feeling like there is nothing greater than themselves, I, for one, think their attempts are...well, 'admirable' is probably too strong a word...how about-- nothing to get worked up about!

On most internet sites I frequent, I have a gender-neutral user name (I am a woman). On occasion, when a comment necessarily reveals my gender (something I neither hide nor go out of my way to emphasize), quite often someone replies with a comment saying they had assumed I was a man (presumably based on previous comments in the same thread, or my writings elsewhere on the blog).

I am always surprised to read this, and am intensely, intensely curious what it is about my writing style or comment content that makes people assume that. I also find it curious that when my gender is revealed only in the most tangental way, such as the use of "my husband" in a comment of several paragraphs of substantive thoughts, that so often people respond not to what I had to say, but respond simply to express their shock that I am a woman. What about my gender is not only momentarily "eh, who'dve thunk" interesting, but so remarkable that they bother going completely off topic in order to comment on it?

Strange, very strange. I am very interested in reading others' experiences, and hope that more research is done on this topic.