This month we’re sharing a personal blog from Kim at Birth.Body.Breath about the power of yoga. She offers amazing doula support, pregnancy yoga classes, post natal yoga classes, women’s yoga and hypnobirthing courses.
Yoga was a bit of a revelation for me in my own pregnancy journey. It’s why I’m here sharing it with you today!
Many people who join me for pregnancy yoga are hoping to ease out their aches and pains each week, maybe to stay fit and strong too. They definitely will. Pregnancy yoga is great for back ache, PGP, sciatica, leg cramps, even heartburn!
Some people have heard about pregnancy yoga specifically but not actually practiced any kind of yoga before. They might think it’s ‘just exercise’ and don’t realise necessarily is all these other amazing and POWERFUL mindset shifts the practice can bring.
Though there are huge physical benefits, pregnancy yoga goes much deeper….
I had practiced yoga for years before pregnancy – and always practiced a quite strong, masculine yoga. I enjoyed it’s strength and energy and drive, the focus on getting better, going bigger or deeper. Pre-pregnancy, I used exercise in general to bring myself a sense of control over my body, sometimes even as ‘punishment’ for eating ‘too much’ or ‘bad’ foods. Generally, not a healthy relationship with my body really!
But pregnancy yoga taught me a softness I hadn’t leaned in to before. I found that actually I felt better, physically and emotionally, by giving myself a break. Not pushing to do more but giving myself space to do less. Moving in a way that felt good, rather than a way I thought looked good.
My first pregnancy yoga class was during the heatwave of 2017. It was sooo hot. We stayed seated, did a lot of breathing, some simple hand exercises to begin. And I thought – this isn’t for me. It’s not hard enough. Yet the relaxation at the end was one of the most powerful things I had ever experienced. I’m pretty sure in that first week, I fell asleep to my teacher’s beautiful voice and I finally got the rest my body was craving. So though the movements were ‘too easy’, I returned the next week for more.
And it started to seep in. My body was changing. My LIFE was changing. All I needed to do was to accept what it was I (and my baby?!) needed right now. I started to learn I could treat my body with kindness rather than berating it. I could LISTEN to it and maybe it wouldn’t be giving me the message I wanted, but it was actually looking after me and my pregnancy. And when I started to listen in, it started to shout a little less loudly. I grew to recognise what a fantastic job it was doing – housing my baby, nourishing them, and came to understand I had to look after it in return and not just smash on doing what I thought I wanted to do.
Pregnancy yoga over the weeks started to cultivate this acceptance of what is. I say started, because I feel acceptance is a life-long challenge really. I wouldn’t say I have it down completely now even! It’s always a PRACTICE.
But it was enough to have a huge impact in labour. I finally had some relaxation skills under my belt, something I never had had before, so when labour started slowly, I could rest and relax and let my body do what it needed to do. Practicing observing my body in yoga and allowing it to be as it was, meant I didn’t need to do anything or solve anything as labour started. I could just watch it unfold – no panic. (This is totally not what I had expected to be like in labour by the way!) I wasn’t at the mercy of my body, or my emotions, but able to work with them. As things ramped up, I used breathing techniques to see me through each surge and was so much calmer and more grounded than I had dared to imagine.
And these skills were essential in new parenting. If I hadn’t started to learn them in pregnancy, the shock of life with a newborn would have absolutely knocked me off my feet. And to some extent it still did. But I knew how to slow down now. Being less physically active, taking things slower and more gently, was no longer new to me. I knew I needed to continue the kindness towards my body now that my baby had arrived.
Again, I didn’t have this mastered! I was still keen to get back to ‘real’ exercise…but I was able to let myself have a bit more space before doing that. I joined a post natal yoga class when my baby was 6 weeks old and it provided a space to tune back in with my body.
Post natally, it’s pretty common for our bodies to feel alien to us. Mine certainly did. They don’t ping back to pre-pregnancy size, shape or strength: they aren’t supposed to and they don’t need to. Life hasn’t gone back to then, it’s moved on, forward to something new. And even if our body did ‘go back to normal’, it has been very different for the past 9 months so it will inevitably feel different to what we’ve grown used to in pregnancy.
Post natal yoga gave me a time and space to come back to my centre. To find that despite the shifting landscape of my body and my life, I was still me in there somewhere.
The tools I’d started to learn in pregnancy yoga were refreshed and built upon in post natal yoga, and had a huge impact on parenting too. Coming to an observer state, just noticing how things are and not forcing them to be something else was HUGE when navigating breastfeeding challenges. Calming and grounding breathing techniques helped me keep level headed and stopped me from loosing my cool many a time during the witching hours of what felt like endless crying. And the stretches and shapes eased out some of those niggling post natal aches and pains.
The pregnancy-birth-parenthood continuum has taught me lots about myself and about life at large, and showed me there is so much more to yoga too! I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say the combination has changed my life!
If you want to feel the power of yoga on your journey, I offer pregnancy yoga classes, post natal yoga and women’s yoga classes in Bristol. All my sessions offer a chance to connect in with the other women in the space and back in with your body. There’s no Instagram yoga here – just a chance to move in a way that feels good each week.
Visit my website at www.birthbodybreath.co.uk for up to date timetables and booking.
Kim
