Nine Months of Yoga - How Yoga helped me during pregnancy
During the yoga instructors course I got pregnant, it was great joy and excitement and also an opportunity to examine how would a pregnancy where you practice a-lot of yoga be different from my first pregnancy where I practiced yoga but in a much more subtle and modest way. I don’t want to sound like a missionary, and I recall here only of my own personal, specific and narrow experience out of my second pregnancy that concluded a week ago in the birth of our much beloved baby:
Yoga helped me with the nausea in the first trimester - every time I managed to drag myself up to the mat, when I was nauseous - I was not disappointed - the multitude of oxygen entering the body, that motility relieved me very much.
Five back exercises eased the pains in my lower back throughout the whole way - common phenomenon during pregnancy.
Pranayama exercises - and Nadi Shodhana in particular - without holding my breath which is of course prohibited during pregnancy - helped me very much with the relief of anxieties, worries, and lack of ease that I experienced during pregnancy.
Exercises for my legs using a strap which I would repeat every evening, caused me, to practically not have any edemas in my legs towards the end of my pregnancy.
Generally, I felt I was experiencing the pregnancy in a much lighter fashion - even though in reality, this time I gained more weight.
As you gain more weight, at least for me, it was difficult to practice for an hour or an hour and a half. But even if you dedicate 15-20 minutes a day towards this exercise, these short sessions will help a lot.
Towards the end of my pregnancy when I was already feeling and looking like a small hippopotamus and I couldn’t practice long sessions, I had one single 10 minute sequence which I repeated rigorously almost every day: this included the small sun salutation and pelvis flexibility exercises, I will make a video of this sequence soon, and upload a special post where I’ll explain how practicing yoga relieved me during birth itself.
