Every woman deserves to know how she works.
Normal stuff that should have been taught in warm, motherly chats at bedtime, or in 5th-grade Health Class, aren’t. It’s not that moms are trying to hide the important stuff, it’s because they never had those conversations either. More often than not, they were taught half-baked 1950’s concepts and superstitious ideals that have served to keep women feeling victimized by their bodies and cycles, rather than empowered by them.
- Where is your cervix?
- How do normal cycles fluctuate and what does it mean for fertility?
- Do you need pills to prevent pregnancy or drugs to stimulate it?
- And just how do babies come out into the world? Is it by pushing or cutting? Movement or stillness?
- Why are births considered fearful or dangerous and what does one do to be safest?
- Isn’t a super strong body a healthy body?
- Are medicated births safer?
My question is, whose job is it to enlighten women? Instagram? College roommates? Cosmo? Our men?
I think it should be each of us. Maybe even you.
As a Yogi for the past 30 years, and someone who specializes in Women’s Empowerment & Labor, I was shocked to learn that most yogis who teach Pregnancy Yoga learn asana modification, but not Pregnancy and Yoga for Labor™ Preparation. Just because a woman can do Cross Fit or Headstand while pregnant, doesn’t mean she should. I have worked with thousands of pregnant moms for almost two decades, both on the mat in class and in the room as a birth doula, and I gotta tell you, the moms with a rock-hard core, have generally way tougher labors and deliveries. Often, they end up with very interventions that they were trying to avoid, because they are attempting to force their baby through a rigid pelvis that simply cannot open the way it was meant to.
The same holds true for women with zero awareness, who think that the hospital will just tell them what to do.
And boy, will they ever. You may be signing away rights that you didn’t even know you had on all of those hospital forms pushed upon you at 3 am at 6 cm dilated. That’s not to say that they are evil, but rather that the hospital or doctor generally don’t help women to actually understand what she wants or could even freely expect from her labor and outcome beyond a baby and mom who survive it.
It’s kind of cruel when you think about it.
There is virtually zero support for helping women become aware of the changes that they are undergoing throughout life as a fertile being. Beyond just having a baby, women more than men, create a new sense of Self-identity because of fertility. Labor and the preparation for it, is a preparation for life in more ways than most people credit. Women who struggle within it, are however keenly aware of its implications.
The rash of infertility in otherwise healthy women is not because they are flawed. Rather, I see it as a side effect of the immense pressure women feel to perform. The pressures of career, partnership, self-identity, and motherhood collide in 2nd chakras nationwide. And the skyrocketing expectation of drugs as a cure deepens women’s sense of shame and loss.
The long-term physical, psychological, and emotional side effects of sexual abuse, miscarriage, and traumatic labor are a true form of PTSD, and are what I work to clear every day in my private practice as a hypnotherapist and healer. This potent combination is why I seek to elevate this conversation for women everywhere.
What makes labor easier and a more powerfully positive outcome? Well, it’s a combo of some pretty key factors.
- Psychological preparedness
- Emotional readiness
- Physical preparation
- Mental stamina
Without real training in these aspects of womanhood and motherhood, our new families are woefully unprepared for the sincere shakeup that birthing creates in a marriage, a career and alongside the real challenges of keeping a new soul healthy, alive, bright and thriving. Rather than women going to a “Yoga Stretch” class where they can simply relax, imagine sharing real training and support that they crave and deserve.
It’s important to offer a community of other women going through the same circumstances, rather than succumbing to the weight of powerlessness that many new moms feel at the prospect of birth. Instead, we can help them find real internal integrity and a sense of honoring the inherent wisdom of what becoming a mother for herself truly means.
I train my teams to listen to themselves and their bodies. To trust the knowledge that they are built, via millions of years of evolution, for the task of birthing a child. That the very fabric of who they are is indeed stretching to make way for a new, stronger, connected woman, not a girl. That this Initiation into Motherhood is what women need and deserve.
What would you give to have known this wisdom when you were pregnant? How much would it change the way you currently teach if you had this knowledge available to shape your community? How can you inject more love and passion for women’s wisdom, rather than perpetuating ignorance in suffering? What if you could learn about yourself as a woman and what you are made for?
Join me for Transformational Birth 85hr Yoga for Labor™ Teacher training. This training matters. You change as a teacher, you change as a woman, & our communities change as a result.
Blessings and sat nam!
