Given Yoga’s 5,000 year history, Prenatal Yoga is a fairly new practice (only about 50 years old). Nevertheless, I am committed to preserving the basics of a classical yoga practice, and subtly weave these concepts into my classes. One of yoga’s traditions is passing knowledge down through a lineage of teachers. The last two weekends (and a few evenings in between), as part of the Dharma Path Advanced Studies (DPAS), I got the honor of practicing with one of my most influential and deeply admired teachers, Mr. Ben Thomas.

Have you ever noticed that when a person announces her pregnancy, after the “Congratulations” she gets a whole lot of unsolicited advice? It likely happened to you! And most of that advice comes in the forms of things to avoid? “Don’t do this, don’t do that…” It often comes from well meaning, yet uninformed friends and family.  It can even come from those “in the know”- doulas, doctors, midwives, prenatal yoga instructors- as well!

Slapping so many don’ts on pregnancy is problematic for a few reasons:

Happy Holidays! That’s what we all wish each other, but let’s face it, most of us moms experience a wee bit of joy and a whole lot of stress. Between the holiday parties, baking, gift buying, sending out Christmas cards, planning your holiday meal, secret Santa gift exchanges, juggling the dynamics of extended families, figuring out when Hanukkah is this year, taking the kids to see Santa, decorating, all while dealing with the extreme emotions the holidays invoke in our little ones (Melt-down City!), it’s hard to feel the joy! This is my seventeenth year doing the holidays as a mom and I’ve almost got it down. I’ve had nearly two decades to hone what’s important to me and to let go of the things that don’t. And...this is the kicker...

Giving birth is not just a means to becoming a parent. It is, by its very nature, a transformative experience that not only turns a woman into a mother, but her partner into a parent, their parents into grandparents, their sisters and brothers into aunts and uncles….While there are few sizable studies exploring the lasting impact of a birth experience on a mother, a small research project by Penny Simkin illustrates how mothers remembered details of their births 15 to 20 years later. I certainly remember my first birth experience in vivid detail and today my mom can tell me the story of my birth just as easily as the first time she shared it with me in my childhood. So why is it that…