Yoga: Preparing Mind and Body for Birth

By Monica Stamper, yoga director at Venus–a Fitness Studio for Her, www.venus4her.com

Yoga can be very beneficial for pregnancy. It not only makes pregnancy easier on the body and improves the mother’s sense of well being, but it also can make childbirth easier. If you are practicing yoga while pregnant, it is important to alert the teacher to this fact and to make sure you eliminate or modify certain poses that are not pregnancy friendly.

Some benefits during labor that derive from yoga are more flexible hips, stronger abdominal muscles, and better deep-breathing techniques. Because yoga works on opening the hips, many women who have a regular yoga practice have found delivery to be much easier. Yoga stretches many ligaments throughout the pelvic, hip, and leg area, making positions and pushing in childbirth easier. Not only are the hips more open, but the abdominal muscles tend to be stronger, which helps to push the baby through the birth canal.

Breath work is obviously an important part of a successful delivery. Women who practice yoga tend to be more in touch with their breath and its power. Practicing deep yogic breathing through difficult postures prepares them well for breathing through the pains of child delivery.

“Once a woman owns her life, she owns her birth,” says Davi Kaur Khalsa, who has been a Kundalini Yoga teacher for almost 30 years and has a 16-year-old daughter. Yoga is not merely a physical exercise, and pregnancy is not merely a physical experience. Pregnancy calls on a woman to learn acceptance and find a balance between exerting her will and surrendering control. Yoga provides a context and structure for this, recognizing the spiritual embodied in the physical. This is, in some ways, the experience of conceiving and bearing a child.