What I learned from training in Optimal Maternal Positioning and why it changes what I can offer in the birth room

There are things you can read about birth and things you can only understand by being in the room. Optimal Maternal Positioning sits somewhere between the two. It is a body of knowledge that makes intellectual sense when you encounter it, and then makes a completely different kind of sense when you feel it in your hands.

I recently completed the OMP live workshop, and I want to write about what it gave me. Not as a course review, but as an honest account of what shifted in my understanding of how birth actually works in a body.

OMP was developed by Ginny Phang-Davey over more than two decades of clinical practice across hospital, home and birth centre settings. At its core it is a framework for reading and responding to a body in labour, using biomechanics and an understanding of pelvic dynamics to support labour progress, reduce the need for intervention and give a birthing woman more options when things become complex.

What struck me most when I encountered it is how grounded it is in the physical reality of birth. Not in theory or ideology, but in the specific mechanics of how a baby navigates the pelvis, and what a practitioner can do in real time to support that navigation. The positions, the protocols, the pressure points are all connected to a coherent understanding of what is happening inside the body at each stage of labour.

Before OMP, I understood birth positioning in the way most doulas do. Upright is better than lying down, movement helps, the pelvis is not a fixed structure. All of that is true. But it is general. OMP gave me something more precise, a way of reading what the body is asking for at a specific moment and responding with a specific intervention rather than an intuition.

The live workshop format mattered. There is a quality of understanding that only comes through hands, through practising the protocols on another body, feeling the resistance and the release, learning what the difference between them means. Reading about the pelvic side-lying release is not the same as doing it. Watching a demonstration of abdominal sifting is not the same as feeling how it works. The workshop made the knowledge embodied in a way that online learning alone would not have reached.

What I came away with is not a set of techniques I will now apply systematically to every birth. It is a more sophisticated way of seeing what is happening and a wider range of responses available to me when I need them. The difference between a position change that is reactive and one that is intentional is what OMP addresses. Between guessing and knowing. Between hoping something helps and understanding why it will.

This matters for the women I support in ways that go beyond the clinical. A doula who understands the mechanics of what is happening in a labouring body can explain what she is doing and why. She can help a woman understand her own experience, what her body is working through, what a particular position is trying to achieve, why the baby might need her to move in a specific way. That understanding is not separate from the emotional support a doula offers. It is part of it. Informed women feel less afraid. Less afraid means more able to labour.

It also matters in a hospital setting, which is where most of the women I support will give birth. When labour slows, when interventions are being considered, when the room is moving toward a decision that the woman may not fully understand, a doula who can offer a positioning intervention grounded in biomechanics is offering something the system respects. Not as opposition to medical care, but as a genuine contribution to the process of labour that is visible and legible to the practitioners around her.

OMP is now part of how I work, woven into the doula support and acupressure therapy I already offer, and into the birth preparation I do with women and their partners before labour begins. It has deepened what I can bring into the birth room, and it has given me a language for the body's work in labour that I did not have before.

If you are preparing for birth and would like to understand more about how positioning and movement can support your labour, that is a conversation I would welcome.

— Sabah, The Line Between · Beaufort, VIC

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Sabah is a certified doula and acupressure therapist based in Beaufort, Victoria. Her practice, The Line Between, is rooted in the philosophy of matrescence, the profound transformation of becoming a mother that deserves to be held with knowledge, presence and deep respect. She came to this work through her own pre-conception journey and a deep conviction that matrescence is a universal feminine passage that every woman deserves to move through with community, language and care. She is also the founder of The Mother's Village, a monthly gathering circle for women on every part of the motherhood journey. She writes from the threshold as a practitioner, a thinker and a woman navigating this passage herself.

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