When we stretch our bodies we stretch our minds because our bodies and our minds are inseparable.

When Asana is combined with Pranayama and Drishti your mind becomes fixed in Mediation giving one a gap moment where you can choose a response rather than instantly react to each and every sensory input.

In other words, when positioning (movement) is combined with breath work and focus your mind is fixed into your immediate experience giving you a moment to gain control over your response to sensory stimuli.

Approaching a contraction from this perspective gives you the potential to readily identify the  stimulus without becoming completely absorbed or overcome by the sensations provoked.

Movement as a birth skill represents a mix of relaxation, activity, rhythm and ritual to decrease awareness of pain, preventing suffering. I am not saying these skills will remove pain but instead that they will reduce the awareness of painful sensation to the level of coping do-ability.

Moving and being active will help you feel confident in your body’s ability to do this job and why the hell not—this is quite literally what your body is designed to do.

Simple but powerful tools. Used alone or in combination with counting, drishti, or mantra. Yoga-based birth skills are abundantly rich in giving you the tools to do this!

The Whole Way wishes you to know and believe that there is an alternative to your engrained thought patterns about birth. Turn away from the negative bias against normal physiological birth—the negativity that comes in through healthcare providers, hospitals, insurance companies, medical technology, well-meaning “friends and loved ones”, social media, books, and TV.

When you arrive at your first Prenatal Yoga class you have chosen to alter your awareness— you have made a conscious choice. You are consciously choosing a different way of thinking and doing.

You have thoughts about using gravity allowing your pelvic girdle to move freely—thoughts about turning towards the sensations of labor and not working against them.

Yoga is about applying your body in ways that assist your body into quieting the mind, so as to give mastery, and control over the mind stuff.

Your choice— do you allow your mind to become agitated and fixated by maladaptive reactions to stimuli sent to your brain by your uterus or do you find a way to rise above stay on top and cope?

The practice of Yoga allows you to move more instinctively, you are making a conscious choice to listen and then matching what you feel. You have shifted your focus using movement with gravity in a manner that honors what your body needs.

Why does this work? Because your voluntary movements are pain-free, You don’t often consider it this way but hopefully your uterus (an involuntary muscle) is the only part of your body experiencing eustress right now.

Your brain will always focus on the dominant activity. If you allow your brain to remain focused on maladaptive responses then you will be the one to suffer.