If you haven't read part 1 of this post, you may want to hop over there first to learn about this cycle and how it corresponds to labor and birth.

The focus of this post is to explain further why the bottom, full moon side of the circle is so influential over birth.

Let's first go back to the 24-hour cycle where you see midnight at the bottom and noon at the top. As you can see, these two states are opposite one another in nearly every way - light and dark, hot and cold, awake and asleep. The other difference in these aspects of the cycle is how you function within them, in other words, during the day you are active and using up resources to live your life, then during the night, you close your eyes, as if stepping out of your surroundings so that you can recharge and restore your body and mind. When you have hopefully recharged to full capacity, you wake up with the sun ready for another day.

When it comes to pregnancy and birth, the extent to which the bottom recharging portion of the circle is recharged is related to the health and strength of your pregnancy, and this relates directly to the timing of the onset of labor.

Here's how. If you are able to recharge and restore your body each night, you feel rested and ready for the day ahead, but if you have a poor night of sleep, you will feel tired the next day. The extent you feel the fatigue from a poor night of sleep depends on how often this happens, if you usually sleep well and it was one difficult night, it will only affect you minimally, and you can catch up with a good night of sleep the next night. However, if you have night after night of poor sleep, you will fall further and further behind in recharging and restoring your body and the impact begins to accumulate and stress your body physically, mentally and emotionally.

During your pregnancy, if you are recharging and restoring your body night after night - through sleep, healthy diet, the right amount of exercise - then you will be ready for labor around the expected time of your due date. If on the other hand, you are constantly on the go, frequently under-slept, not eating the right foods, or over-exercising, you are going to impact your body's vital resources and this will effect your ability to go into labor on time, which can present as pre-term labor or post-date pregnancy, depending on the extent of the exhaustion.

To avoid this problem, look to the moon, her message is to use the time of the full moon to recharge and restore, that means sleep a good sleep, eat nourishing foods, and revitalize your body with smart exercise choices, this is how the moon influences your birth, acting as your guide and constant reminder of how to care for yourself and your growing baby.

Wishing you sweet dreams!