The Mindful Benefits of Prenatal Yoga
When preparing for labor during pregnancy, you’re likely doing a number of things. Eating well, exercising, reading childbirth books, taking classes. But what are you doing to prepare your
mind?
No matter what kind of birth you’re planning for (unmedicated, medicated, hospital, home birth, etc), you will feel the sensations of labor at some point - and they are intense. To conquer this intensity, you’ll have to train for it ahead of time.
So how do you do this? Enter the magic of prenatal yoga.
Yoga as a practice focuses on flexibility, strength, movement, and breath work. It’s an ancient form of exercise that has many benefits in pregnancy. But what I love it for the most is it’s ability to reduce stress and calm the mind. Two things that are imperative to a successful labor!
How Yoga Reduces Stress
When our bodies are stressed, we can fall into the fear, tension, and pain cycle.
In this cycle, we become afraid of the sensations or the environment around us, so we tense up our muscles. This causes more intensity, which translates to pain, which causes more fear… you get the idea.
To get out of this cycle, we must shift our sympathetic nervous systems (fight or flight) to our parasympathetic systems (relaxation). In yoga, we break this stress cycle with Pranayama, aka breath work.
Pranayama works by bringing more oxygen to our systems and decreasing our heart rates. In labor this does several things. The oxygen makes our muscles work more effectively, it relieves stress/tension, and it gives us more mental clarity to focus on our babies moving down and out.
How Yoga Calms the Mind
Many yoga practices also include mindfulness or meditation. With breath work and poses that are gentle on our bodies, such as Savasana (corpse pose/left side lying for pregnancy) or Bhadrasana (butterfly pose), we can easily check in with our bodies. We examine where we are holding tension, and consciously release.
We use this time in yoga to visualize a moment or event that gave us peace. We focus on prayer. We create an intention for the day ahead. We release and relax into our calm bodies and minds.
In labor, we use these skills to surrender to the sensations instead of fight against them. We block the pain receptors in our minds by focusing elsewhere.
How Yoga Helps You in Labor
Labor is 90% a mental game. How you prep ahead of time will make the difference between an experience that is either peaceful or tension-filled.
Yoga trains us to move inward, focus on our breath, and release our tension so we can ease deeper into our poses.
These skills, when practiced enough, turn into muscle memory. They're recalled when our thinking brains switch off and our mammalian brains are activated during labor, allowing our bodies to open and our babies to be released earth-side. Pretty amazing, right?
Ready to dive in to your yoga practice? Schedule a one on one session tailored to your pregnancy here.
