Honestly, being pregnant can be crazy-making. If you feel like your moods are all over the place, you’re not yourself, or you just feel less than 100% enthusiastic 100% of the time, you’re not alone!
Prenatal Yoga Creates Community
Prenatal yoga provides a community and an outlet for concerns around pregnancy, birth, and “WTF I’m going to have to be a parent at the end of all this.” Often, moms in prenatal yoga may discuss scary-sounding procedures or tests their doctor has ordered and receive reassurance from other moms. Or, moms can compare notes on what their provider has told them. (Obviously, not as a substitute for medical advice! But rather, as a way to sanity-check what their gut may be telling them.)
And most importantly, prenatal yoga reminds you that you’re not alone in this. Even the best intentioned friends or family members can forget exactly what it feels like to be in the midst of the emotional rollercoaster of pregnancy. Everyone down to random strangers in the grocery store may ask you about how excited you are, and sometimes it just feels good to be around people who understand that you may be scared, experiencing an unexpected pregnancy, or dealing with unplanned struggles like medical diagnoses or personal issues.
Prenatal Yoga Gives You Tools for Mindfulness
Prenatal yoga offers breathing and meditation practices that can help with the sleepless nights, anxiety, and anything else you may be feeling before baby arrives. Again, it is not a substitute for a professional mental health provider, but it can certainly help on the path toward optimal mental health. Learning how to take deep breaths can help you calm a racing mind, or conversely, energize a fatigued one. Meditation practices are helpful throughout the interpersonal and internal drama that comes up when expecting a new arrival in your family.
Plus, both breathing and meditation may help you be more equipped for whatever may come up during labor. Since even the best-planned birth is impossible to predict, the ability to calm your own nervous system is an invaluable tool.
If you’d like to learn more about prenatal yoga in general, check out this detailed post, and if you want to practice prenatal yoga in Stuart, Florida at the KBW Studio, head over here and join us!