How will yoga help me birth?

By Yolande Hyde. Yoga is neither an amusement nor a sport. Practice crosses the breadth of our bodies, the expanse of our minds and can touch us deep in our soul. When sought regularly as part of a prenatal experience it has the potential to bring us close to the divine. That wistful, dreamy, silent space of labour is there somewhere in every posture. Yoga shows us how to remain calm, quiet and still as we meet the tiger.

Students join prenatal yoga for a number of reasons, some like to remain physically active and have yoga as just one part of an overall programme, other have been referred by practitioners because of neck, shoulder or back pain. Still others come because they suffer from digestive problems or blood pressure and find other types of exercise exacerbate the symptoms. Some come because they read in a book that it was the right thing to do. No matter what brings a woman to the front door of the yoga school she will undergo a journey that will put her back in her body, in touch with her breath and free, even if just for now, of fear or doubt.

Yoga’s aim is the fusion of three essential elements; body, mind and breath.

The physical body, rapidly growing, either creaking and groaning or strong and vital (sometimes both in one day) feels, at times, like it doesn’t belong to you, so foreign this experience can be. Yoga practice takes us on a journey that will bring our attention to the whole sole of the foot, our relationship with it and how it feels under the weight of our bodies. It will ask you to inquire after the small muscle groups that govern movement in the outer hips or will help you feel the connection between your little finger and the outer edge of the ribcage, the lift of the sit bones in a forward bend and the lengthening of the torso, the feeling of the head when it centralises, and for a few tantalising moments balances effortless and weightless. But mostly yoga will bring us into the temple of our pregnant body, a temple that we will visit again and again over the months, where a wonderful familiarity will grow, one in which we will find comfort and trust and inexhaustible strength.

To breathe is to take in the most precious resource in the world, for that resource to merge and percolate, initially with the structure of muscle and bone and eventually its ignition on a cellular level. The inhalation, the taking in, and the exhalation, the letting go are one of the most wonderful metaphors for life, birth and death. On the day of our birth, our very first action was a big deep inhalation, the lungs inflated, life-force expanded us and we turned pink from the heart outwards.

Equally, our very last act will be an exhalation, we will empty the last of our life force as we let go, and, as when we arrived, the colour of that life-force will drain away, beginning at the extremities and completing its journey at the heart. Our breath in yoga, as in life, as in labour is the cornerstone of our experience. Many women have told of the silent strength they felt in a long hold of down dog, only to surprise themselves and find that that same strength became spontaneously available to them in their labour, and that they found it thru breath. In many ways birth will take us close to the veil of death, the biggest decision a woman will make in her labour is her own readiness to let her baby go from her body, despite everything, to just let it go. When she reaches this point she will do it with an exhalation, with a softening and a surrender that cannot be found with the inhalation, nor with the stillness between the breaths.

The fluctuations of the mind can distract and irritate at best, at worst they can generate fear and panic. There is no place for terror or trepidation in the birth room, anxiety, fright, doubt and misgiving can slow down, even halt the progress of even the most determined mothers labour. Yoga provides the runaway mind with a platform of physical confidence and deep, all-encompassing natural breath. As we develop the physical skills and the breath control what we are actually doing is creating stillness and silence. Stillness in the body and silence in the mind. The road to this silence, with a regular practice becomes well-trodden and familiar and although the monkey may not always be quiet, it is, at least, on a leash and can be calmed fairly efficiently and with a minimum of fuss. The calm and tranquil state of mind that follows your practice is yours to keep, a skill for life.

Yoga brings us to a state of union between these three elements. The breath enters the body as a river enters the sea, dispersing, percolating, merging and becoming one. Great courage, great hope, great determination and great love live here, a path to the timeless and effortless, and a doorway to conscious, joyous childbirth.

Our guest blogger, Yolande Hyde, is a prenatal yoga instructor, a qualified doula, and runs Avalon Yoga studio as well as Barefoot Birth Services. She teaches holistic childbirth preparation courses and helps women to achieve trust and confidence through yoga and breath work. She is also a guest blogger on Miranda Kerr’s KORA website.