Birth.

Prenatal Yoga

What do you hope for from this practice for your body, your baby, your birth even?…

I often start prenatal yoga sessions with this simple question, guiding students to set an intention for their practice.

I teach an active style of prenatal yoga because I believe that empowered birth and motherhood require great strength and stamina in body, mind, and heart! Pregnant people are not injured or sick, they are training and conditioning for a major life event. My classes focus on physical stability, emotional integration, fostering community among students, easing common pregnancy discomforts, and holding space for you to open to more of your experience.

Pregnant people innately understand in body, mind, and heart the yogic concept of Oneness. Practicing prenatal yoga can be a sacred opportunity for you and your baby to connect with one another through movement, meditation, and chanting (baby loves your singing voice!). Deepen your partnership and loving bond as parent and child and start modeling to your family from the beginning the importance of health, self care, and self respect.

My goals as a prenatal yoga teacher are threefold:

1. to help you feel as strong, integrated, comfortable, and capable as you can in your shifting and changing body each day during pregnancy

2. to support your nervous system and protect your grounding so that you are capable of meeting your child’s birthing day with calm, deep trust in your experience, and a feeling of empowerment - no matter what kind of a birth you envision.

3. to practice prenatal yoga wisely thinking forward to best support the most efficient recovery postpartum.

Postnatal Yoga

Breathe out the to-do lists, the piles of laundry, the bottles to clean, the diapers to change. Breathe into your body in a way that lights up your spirit and reconnect to that inner spark.

—You don’t have to hold everything up. Let the earth support you. Come back to yourself. Make contact. You will notice both intense physical changes but also emotional changes from becoming a mother as you give yourself time to feel through and integrate the layers of change. Postnatal yoga focuses on activating and knitting together the deep core; opening the lungs, chest, and shoulders for nervous system regulation and emotional integration; and nourishing through deep and meaningful rest. After delivery, new mothers are often so busy caring for their babies that they forget to take care of themselves. However, the postpartum period is an important time to nourish, strengthen, and integrate. Postnatal yoga offers a chance for a mother to focus on herself, reconnect to the spark of her spirit, and heal the inter-generational baggage she may carry that tells her motherhood is martyrdom by prioritizing her health and self care as a role model to her children and her family.

In the practice of postnatal yoga, slow and steady wins the race.  Adopting a long term vision of your well being, pelvic health, and lifelong practice over the immediate urge to flip a switch and magically return to “normal” is an important aspect of postnatal yoga. If you wish to restore optimal function, alignment, and stability in the hips, core, and lower spine it is vital to step away from crunches, sit ups, deep back bends, arm balances, jogging, and high impact exercises that create pressure on the pelvic floor muscles and intra-abdominal pressure and allow yourself to be patient and curious in learning to activate the deep core and heal your center.  It can also be helpful and necessary for some new mothers to work closely with a pelvic floor physical therapist to restore the core.  Deep core embodiment and integration postpartum starts as a path of recovery but the journey from there is vast, potent, and limitless. The depths of inner strength that come from a mindful deep dive into rebuilding the deep core postpartum and integrating the depths of your soul’s experience in birth and motherhood can instill profound courage and strength. It can take your practice to new levels from what was possible before pregnancy.  Even after decades of yoga practice, it was not until I learned to activate my deep core muscles by rehabilitating my center after the birth of my first son that I gained the physical mastery and mental confidence to support handstand off the wall. 

Students can begin my 3 week Reclaim Your Center practice at home once they have been cleared for exercise around 6 weeks postpartum.  In 20 minutes a day, this program is a deep dive to re-discover the vitality and strength of activating the core canister (pelvic floor, diaphragm, transverse abdominis, and multifidus), to support knitting the core muscles back together. Students looking to return to a regular practice but not sure what is best for healing their center will be educated in the unique needs of their postpartum bodies and  learn what postures to avoid and what to encourage.  The Reclaim Your Center program can be completed in three weeks and offers the foundation of a stable, integrated center necessary for a lifetime of dynamic movement and exercise possibilities. One by one you will identify, strengthen, and ignite your core of support like tuning each individual instrument so that when you move back to a dynamic yoga practice they can all engage and coordinate harmoniously together like a symphony.

Private Yoga Sessions