At eight months pregnant, it's slow goin'

I like being active. It makes me feel good and reduces stress. Since I had my son, two and a half years ago, it has been a challenge to fit in both my daily power walks and yoga. So, I had to scale back and usually did one or the other. Not ideal for me, but I did what I could and mostly was happy with it.

Once I was pregnant with my second, I knew I had to stay active. I gain a lot (a lot!) of weight while I'm pregnant and the two things that ease the aches and pains that go along with that are power walking and yoga. So, when I'm pregnant, walking and yoga are no longer merely nice activities that I would like to fit it; they become absolute necessities.

My family moved back to the city from the suburbs this year and that created the perfect opportunity for me to get my walk in, regularly. Everyday, I walk 2.5 miles to work.

This week I am eight months pregnant and as I made my way to work, I realized that I was walking much more slowly than usual. On Monday, I thought it was just because I was having one of those VERY pregnant days. On Tuesday, I had to take stock and realize that as I become more and more pregnant, I am going to have to make accommodations for the baby growing within. 

So, by Wednesday, I had to adjust my plans a bit. My body and my baby are telling me that things are changing.  It's time to slow down and focus on what baby needs to feel good inside my body. At this point, baby is pretty much the boss. What he says goes.

I'm still walking to work, and I am still in powerful exercise mode, it's just slower. I need to leave the house a bit earlier and I need to be flexible. If, halfway through my walk, it doesn't feel good anymore, I may need to slow it down to a crawl. I may even need to stop and take a rest on a bench, something I wouldn't normally consider.

How long will I keep walking to work? With my last pregnancy, I was able to exercise right up until the night before Josias' birth. Since I know it keeps me healthy and feeling good, I hope that can happen with this baby. If, for some reason, it doesn't, though, we'll figure something else out. And then, before I know it, I won't be pregnant anymore and I'll be looking for ways to fit in exercise and yoga with two kids!

How have you had to change your exercise schedule to accommodate life changes?

My "home" yoga practice during pregnancy

I am almost eight months pregnant. As with my previous pregnancy, yoga is a central part of taking care of myself and the baby I am creating. A lot has changed since my last pregnancy, though, and so has my yoga practice. 

The biggest difference with this pregnancy is that I am not only nurturing the life growing inside of me, I am also nurturing the life that we created almost two and a half years ago. I have precious little time to focus on taking care of myself when I am trying to keep up with a toddler.

I simply don't have time to practice yoga when I am home with Josias. I know however, that I MUST practice yoga. So, yet again, I made a change in how, when and where I practice. One of the things I loved about my home yoga practice was the silence and the stillness. It was the only place that I found the kind of space where I could slow down, reflect and try to connect with my True Self.

Even though that is what I loved most about my home practice, in order to keep practicing, I had to give that part up. My new "home" practice is at the gym located in the basement of my office building. About 3 times a week, during my lunch break, I head down there for a twenty to thirty minute practice.

The gym is not set up for yoga. It is set up for sweaty runners and weight lifters who like to watch obnoxious television programs while they are exercising. Great for them, not ideal for yoga.

My alternative, however, is no yoga. So, I decided to try to be flexible with what it means to practice yoga and what I hope to get out of it. With my new practice, I do not experience the silence and stillness that I once enjoyed. I do experience the beauty of opening up my shoulders and hips; gently bending and twisting my back; and gratitude for feeling good in my current body, which happens to be rather large and cumbersome.

What I know now is that my home yoga practice will always change. Nothing stays the same, but if I can ride the tide of change, adjust my expectations and go with the flow, it will always be possible to feel the peace and gratitude that comes with my yoga practice. Namaste. Thank you.

How has your home yoga practice changed over time?

Wordless Wednesday on the Natural Parents Network

Featuring Josias in the belly. Check it out here!

How yoga helped me NOT lose weight

Have I mentioned that I was HUGE when I was pregnant?  By the time I made it to my second trimester I had gained the recommended amount of weight for an entire pregnancy.  All told, I gained almost sixty pounds.

After giving birth to my son, I lost 25 pounds within a week.  That felt pretty good, and I figured it would just keep coming off.  Nope.  It didn't happen.  My three month maternity leave came and went and no more weight came off.  I had been walking everyday for at least half an hour.  And, as I've posted before I was practicing yoga nearly every day. Not exactly Olympiad training, but not sedentary either.   

So, there I was ready to go back to work and still carrying around 35 extra pounds.  I was not pleased with this fact in and of itself, but add the issue of lack of work-appropriate clothing that fits and it was downright depressing. 

Or was it?

I took some time to think about it and came to this conclusion:  I have a beautiful, healthy and joyful baby; I am healthy and able to provide him what he needs to thrive with love and breastfeeding; and (here's where the yoga comes in) I may have some extra weight on me and not look like I did pre-pregnancy, but I feel pretty darn good in my body. 

Yoga connects me to my body through physical exertion, mental concentration and spiritual awareness.  That feels great.  Perhaps, more importantly, yoga teaches me non attachment: everything is temporary, including my body, the vessel that houses my soul.  So why get all worked up about something that, in the grand scheme of things, may be here today and gone tomorrow?  Yoga also teaches me to be grateful and focus on what's important in life and in the world, and I have a lot to be grateful for.  In light of all that, what's a few extra pounds?

I lost a bit more weight in the months that followed, but still don't look the way I did before I carried Josias for 10 months.  And, even though yoga helped me be okay with that, I still have to talk myself through it sometimes on a daily basis.  That's the great thing about my yoga practice, it helps me feel great, no matter my weight, and be grateful every day.

My pregnancy kula

I had been attending yoga classes for about a year and a half before I became pregnant.  I attended three or four teachers' classes before I found the one for me.  I loved what I learned.  I couldn't wait to go to class each week and learn new things about yoga, myself and my body.  I incorporated those teachings in my home practice as well. 

Going to a class regularly advanced my practice by leaps and bounds.  It was the first time that I heard about the other seven limbs of yoga; those beyond asanas.  I fell in love!  I couldn't learn enough.  I started reading books and magazines about yoga.  I began to meditate.  I also began to reexamine the way I lived my life.  I realized that yoga would be a lifelong journey in which I would never arrive "there," but rather enjoy the fruits along the way.

So, when I became pregnant, one of my first priorities was to find a pregnancy yoga class.  I was crushed when I learned that "my" yoga studio did not have a class that would fit my schedule.  There was another studio a bit further from my house about which I had heard good things.  They had a class that would work.  I swallowed my disappointment and decided to give it a go.  This class and my new found kula turned out to be the single most supportive thing in my pregnancy.  There is a lesson there, but I'll save that for another post.

I've posted before about how yoga helped me physically during pregnancy, but finding my kula meant so much more than that.  My teacher, who was also pregnant at the time, was nothing short of awesome!  I warmed immediately in the presence of twenty other mamas who were there to support and learn from each other.  I learned about pregnancy and birth, about the strength of my own body to do what the mother of all mamas, Mother Nature, had designed it to do, about giving myself up to the experience and about my own power.  Watch out world!  I'm here, I'm pregnant and I'm strong!

I don't live close to my family and friends, so during my pregnancy, when I really needed support and information, I got it all from my kula.  I found out about doctors, natural remedies, breastfeeding, stores that sell used children's stuff.  I heard about Attachment Parenting, co-sleeping, and babywearing, all of which are integral to my approach to being a mama.

I learned about how yoga could support the birth experience I wanted to have.  I practiced poses that would not only ease labor pains, but move the baby into a comfortable position, and use gravity to help the baby move through the birth canal.

I think without my kula I would have been frightened of birth.  I would have been frightened of the unknown.  With yoga, I did not experience an iota of fear about the birthing process (anxiety about the baby's health, yes; excitement about not being the size of a rhinoceros, definitely! But fear, nope!)

My community of mamas helped me understand that I could make choices about my birth experience, and I could take actions to support those choices; I had the power to birth a 10+ pound baby without medication; that birth does not occur on a timetable dictated by doctors and hospitals; and that giving birth is an experience to relish, not to dull, shorten nor sleep through.

The birth of my son was wondrous and beautiful.  I humbly give thanks to the mamas of my kula. 

Namaste.

Yoga and my pregnancy

My son Josias is almost 10 months old, and I am still amazed at what my body did.  It wasn't without discomforts, but when all was said and done, it was not a difficult pregnancy.  I was huge, mind you, so that's saying a lot.  I ate well during my pregnancy, walked an hour almost everyday with my dog Liam, and did yoga at least three times a week.  I had three pregnancy yoga videos and I went to a pregnancy yoga class on Sundays from my sixth month on. And, I gained almost 60 pounds.  Toward the end I couldn't go out in public without strangers asking if I was having twins or if I was past my due date; I was neither.

My theory is that my baby needed the weight.  I don't know why, but he needed it.  I say that because even with all the healthy, good stuff, there was no other word for me except gargantuan.  But, as big as I was I felt pretty good, most of the time.  I attribute this largely to yoga.  And not just the physical exercise of yoga, but the heady stuff as well.

The physical aspect of yoga was invaluable.  At one point during my pregnancy, I was suffering from sciatica.  It made walking and sitting painful.  I looked it up on line and found a few poses that were supposed to help, but they didn't.  I asked my yoga teacher and she suggested a few poses that helped a bit.  In the end I closed my eyes, thought about the baby, my heroic vessel of a body, and imagined what would feel good and make the pain diminish.  After a few moments, the thought: triangle pose and extended side angle pose popped into my head.  I almost disregarded these thoughts, because I had never thought either pose really did anything for my back.  Wrong!  As soon as I did the poses, the pain was gone.  While it may seem like an exaggeration now, it was a miracle at the time akin to loaves and fishes.

The sciatica lasted about a week, but with triangle and extended side angle poses, I was able to get through it.  I was also able to continue walking for an hour a day, another factor that contributed to my physical, emotional and mental well being.  Looking back on it, though, the real miracle to me is that I listened to my intuition and my body and they saved me.

The transformation yoga brought to my life started a few years before my pregnancy, but during my pregnancy, it was a life line.

I wonder what poses got others through pregnancy?

 Namaste. Thank you.