Get in Touch!
Get in touch with your body
Physically pregnancy yoga is a great way to bring awareness to your body as it transforms throughout the pregnancy journey. It helps to bring balance to the body by releasing any lower back tension, relaxing through the hips and pelvis, building strength through the lower body, and realigning the spine.
Through the pregnancy from week to week your body is continually changing which has a effect on your body alignment and body functions like breathing. As the weeks roll on your breath capacity will decrease, as your diaphragm will begin to be pushed up, creating more space for your developing baby and less room for your breathe. During pregnancy yoga, breath work is one of the main points of focus which can help to assist with creating some space within your body. Most importantly, the breathing exercises you’ll learn during pregnancy yoga can help to relax your nervous system, not only during your pregnancy but these tools are also important for your labour. The breath can allow you to surrender and is used to channel the mind, to keep you present, and to keep you calm.
Get in touch with your baby
You’re now sharing the space within your body with another being and getting onto your mat and taking some quiet time to connect with this being can be a wonderful experience. While physically you may be extremely conscious of the fact you're pregnant, mentally it can be easy to forget that in actual fact there is a bundle of life growing inside of you, that you can choose to connect with well before the due date and even before they are snuggled up in your arms.
Get in touch with yourself
Gurumukh in her book Bountiful, Beautiful, Blissful explains that yoga can ignite within you your own innate knowingness. Of course, each person is different, each pregnancy is different, each child is different; so often it is acknowledging and listening to that innate knowingness, that gut feeling, your intuition, that will help to direct you. This direction is helpful in life, helpful in pregnancy, helpful during labour and of course helpful when it comes to raising another human being who looks to you for answers and for guidance. Those answers sit there inside of you but it can be very easy to get distracted and to let the mind and what is sometimes perceived as “logic” over rule, even when deep down we realise we should have listened to what we already knew. Too often we find ourselves only responding to this feeling in times of crisis but with practice we can utilise this inner guidance to help us through the motions of life.
Get in touch with people in the same boat!
Best of all you are not alone! Joining a pregnancy yoga class is a wonderful way to connect with other mums to be. You may find that some of what you might be experiencing during your pregnancy is something someone else is experiencing too. It’s a great place to find people who can relate to the changes you’re enduring and who you can share some of the experience with.
Written by Nicole Ander