Meredith and I fail Hippy Birth Class

Birthing classes seemed like a good idea at the time. But so far the thing we've learned the most is that Meredith and I aren't hippies and chanting nonsense at each other just doesn't work for either of us. OK, it hasn't all been bad, there's been a lot of drawing and that's been kinda fun. Occasionally we get a little information that is interesting and likely useful (the really useful stuff often leaves us feeling a little queasy), but mostly it's been story time, candle burning and a little drum beating.
Now right from the start there has been this total attitude that there is no wrong or right there, which seemed a little ambiguous, but kind of comforting in a touchy feely kinda way.
So when I was supposed to be chanting to her to encourage her to see her surroundings, to hear her surroundings, to feel them and smell them (all this is an effort to distract her from the mild pain of holding ice cubes) I looked her straight in the eyes and couldn't do it. But I was concerned, when she will be truly in pain, what am I going to say to her? Apparently talking to her about TV, music and bad fashion choices works better for both of us. And there is no right or wrong, right?
Wrong.
That evening she answered one of my parting questions with, "So that's why you two talked through that exercise?" But I didn't think too much about it because I was still kind of high on the no right or wrong thing.
So when we got to our class the following week the first thing she asks us is if we've been practicing our Distracted Imaging, or was it Delayed Gratification? Anyway, she was asking us if we'd been practicing the crap that we'd discovered didn't work for us. The answer was no.
So then she spends the first part of the class stressing that if we come away with nothing else, the Delayed Distraction stuff was the most important thing we should learn and we should practice it in our cars and at the grocery store.
So we're failing the most important part of birth class. I don't think we're doing all that well in puppetry and tribal drumming.