Labor of Love

Tune in to your body, connect with community, and embrace the birth you're given with prenatal yoga.

By Catherine Guthrie

After the birth of her first child, Colleen Millen, 35, knew that she would approach childbirth differently if given another chance. Then a Forrest Yoga teacher in Chicago, Millen stuck to her typical yoga routine throughout her pregnancy. She modified her practice as her belly blossomed, but she shrugged off the prenatal classes at her studio, assuming her years of practicing yoga had bestowed on her the tools for a trouble-free childbirth.

But when the initial pangs of labor brought unrelenting nausea, Millen and her husband raced to the hospital, where her confidence unraveled. Nurses rushed to start intravenous fluids and hook up equipment to monitor the baby's heart rate. Millen was soon on her back, and as the contractions intensified, so did her feelings of helplessness. "I'd practiced yoga for years, but none of that was a comfort when the pain came," she says. After a long, difficult labor, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Jacob, but she still feels haunted by the lack of presence she felt during the experience.

Three years later, while planning for baby number two, Millen dived into prenatal yoga. "I cultivated a strong prenatal practice so that when the time came, the movements and breath would kick in instinctually." And that's what happened. When her labor began, Millen focused her attention on a gazing point, relaxed her jaw (to encourage the pelvis to release), and harnessed the power of her breath to make the most of every contraction. "My preparation helped me surrender to the energy and move with it instead of fighting and struggling against it."

After just 15 minutes of pushing, she and her husband welcomed their daughter, Samantha, into the world. But even if she'd had to face an arduous labor again, Millen believes that her prenatal practice would've helped. Not only did she feel more physically prepared the second time around, but she felt as though her mind and energy were more united throughout the entire birth experience.

Prenatal yoga, the deliberate weaving together of yoga and childbirth preparation, opens the door for women to reclaim their physical, mental, and emotional power and receptivity during the birth process. "Somehow, as women, we think we will automatically know how to give birth," says Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, co--founder and director of Golden Bridge Yoga in Los Angeles, who has taught prenatal yoga for nearly 30 years. "But we are so detached from our instinctual selves that sometimes we need to be reminded of what we already know."

For a growing number of women, that reminder is prenatal yoga. Expectant mothers in urban centers are flocking to yoga studios that have whimsical names such as Mamaste and Baby Om, while moms-to-be in smaller locales are finding a proliferation of prenatal classes at yoga studios, gyms, and birthing centers. What's the universal appeal? Prenatal yoga classes offer a place of refuge where women learn to connect with their chang-ing bodies, their babies, and each other. Asana prepares them physically for giving birth, but most women find that the awareness of body, mind, and breath that it teaches is what truly helps them when it's time to deliver. As Rachel Yellin, a prenatal yoga teacher in San Francisco, says, "Doing prenatal yoga doesn't mean you'll have the 'perfect' birth; it means you'll be able to accept the perfection of the birth you're given, regardless of whether it goes according to your plan."

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