Nurturing Body, Mind, and Community Through Prenatal Yoga
In this blog, Ann Green—Hola Yoga’s prenatal yoga instructor, birth doula, and mother of two—shares her wisdom and experience. Through her unique blend of knowledge and compassion, Ann creates a supportive space where parents can breathe, move, and connect in community.
Pregnancy is a wild ride. While some journeys include the type of blissful contentment often depicted in social media, not everyone feels like a blossoming flower… and feelings of isolation, anxiety and even depression can sometimes seep in amid the hormonal rollercoaster.The breath and movement of yoga can be a balm for coping and finding our way back to a regulated system. Prenatal yoga centers breathing techniques that calm the nervous system and postures that help strengthen the pelvic floor, open the hips and chest, and ultimately encourage ideal alignment for both mother and baby. The series is tailored to the various stages of a pregnant body, incorporating safe modifications to a standard flow series and guided space that encourages intuition-driven adjustment for the challenges that can be faced in pregnancy.
There are many beautiful principles of yoga, and the asana – or movement aspect – is not the only practice that yoga comprises. At Hola, we incorporate other traditional principles such as breath control (pranayama), meditation (dyhana), concentration (dharana) and community building with compassion (ahimsa), honesty (satya), acceptance (santosha), and introspection (svadhyaya). Each class begins with a community circle where a discussion topic is shared and each person shares their name, estimated delivery date, birth location plans and a brief personal response to the discussion prompt. Class topics have spanned birth fears and concerns, forms of coping through pain, methods for boosting oxytocin, assessment of support network, establishing mental health resources and beyond.
As a trained birth doula and mother of two, my own experiences and exposure to the wide range of ways pregnancy and birth might look are folded into the structure of the class. Our goal is to foster a safe space for folks to show up exactly as they are, where they are, without any pressure to feel or act a certain way. We gather, we share, and we move together in community.
Too many parents are white-knuckling their way through parenthood – without the necessary foundation of a loving community – and we just don’t think that’s the way the journey was meant to be traversed. To combat this, Hola prenatal clients also have the option of joining a prenatal group chat to easily connect with others from the class as well as the potential to transition to a post-partum group chat to continue building relationships, sharing resources, and lifting one another through the ebbs and flows of parenthood. I’ve had the honor of witnessing parents that connected through class go on to raise their kids together, even some that have cycled back through class for a second round, and watching this community continue to expand has been the ultimate reward for me – a blossoming flower I can really get behind.
