Pregnancy Yoga

As a small child, I used to watch my mother practice yoga. We lived in a very isolated environment in Central Africa and so everything that we knew about yoga, we learned from books; not ideal, but it was a start. I didn’t have a regular practice although I always returned to yoga during my four pregnancies, finding peace, inner connection and relief from my ever busy monkey-mind – yoga allowed me the time and space to tune into my inner needs, which led to successful homebirths with no interventions or pain relief. Connecting to my instinctual nature and my breath was all I needed to birth without pain.

I feel passionate about helping women create the right space and environment for birthing. By learning how to tune into our deeper needs during pregnancy, and by tuning into the needs of our babies, we can birth in the best way for ourselves and our babies, whether that be a homebirth, a medical-led birth or a Caesarian. Every type of birth can be healing and empowering if the mother is given the opportunity to stick to at least some of what she really needs – even in births where circumstances seem to carry women beyond their expectations (i.e. a homebirth ending up as a Caesar) – if a mother is listened to and given the opportunity to communicate throughout, then she can still come out of the birth feeling that wonderful sense of achievement. However, women have to know what they need, to understand themselves better, before they can verbalize their needs – this is where pregnancy yoga is so powerful, as it helps women to get into their bodies, out of their heads, and into their heart-space.

The first birth I attended was when I was eight years old. The “barefoot midwife” (the name given to village midwives in rural areas around the globe) would fetch me to attend the village births. I also worked in mission hospitals from the age of twelve during the school holidays. And so I watched how women birthed in their homes, and I watched how women birthed in the hospitals. I saw that when a woman breathes deeply, she births easily. When a woman squats or is on her hands and knees, she is open to birth successfully. I observed that the women who were in a sacred birthing space with only women, who moved and made deep sounds without inhibitions and were given all the time they needed, birthed differently from women who were strapped to beds and machines in the presence of strangers.