I am thrilled to announce that The Visualizing Birth Book will launch in 2025! The above image is a tentative cover as a graphic designer works on the project. The images included here are Xiaohong Zhang’s “Pregnancy,” written about on Visualizing Birth in this 2012 post and Wenji Billow’s “Pomegranate Baby,” featured when I wrote a review of the film In Utero in 2015.

Writing on the book is now complete and will include the most concise information I have culled over the past 15 years on how to use visualization techniques for pregnancy, labor and birth. As discussed in my Visualizing Birth bio and on my own website, I first discovered the power of visualization when writing my PhD dissertation on the topic of visualization, art and religion in medieval China. Chinese Daoists have used visualization for centuries as a form of bio-spiritual cultivation. Since the completion of my PhD and after actively using visualization myself in the births of both of my children, a topic I’ve written about in several publications (eg. the 2022 essay for Psyche Magazine, I saw my baby as a river flowing through me, and gave birth), I began to explore the use of visualization and research on it more broadly in the areas of  neuroscience, other religious traditions, philosophy, doula studies, and sports psychology. 

In addition to the techniques described, The Visualizing Birth Book will include a large number of images that pregnant women and people can use in their own practices as they approach labor and birth.

My 2018 book, Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology Between the Sacred and the Secular included extensive discussions on visualization, the book was produced by an academic publisher and its price tag was out of reach for most consumers. The Visualizing Birth Book will be priced at an accessible rate, and there will also be various deals and events related to the book as we approach publication in 2025.

For more information, follow Visualizing Birth on Instagram or Twitter. You can also sign up for the Visualizing Birth newsletter at: visualizingbirth [at] gmail.com.