Bonding With Your Baby

If you are a new Mom, you can nuture yourself and your new baby through yoga. Yoga can help you balance and replenish the body, while connecting you and baby on both the physical and emotional level.

If you did prenatal yoga, you are already familar with yoga’s many benefits.  But if you’re a new Mom and new to yoga as well, you may want to check out special yoga classes that focus on yoga postures poses that parents can do with their babies.
 
Yoga classes for moms and new babies usually start at the age six weeks to crawling. In most mom and baby yoga classes, moms place a baby blanket over the yoga mat, and lay the baby on top for the duration of the class.

Specifically designed to help you bond with your baby, these classes can help to create and deepen the spiritual connection and bond between you.

There are even yoga poses just for babies, which can help you and you little one create “breath awareness”, bringing a level of deep relaxation to you and your baby.

Using these teqniques, yoga can help your baby may sleep better and longer, aid in digestion and even help to relieve colic. It’s beleived that practicing Yoga with your baby assists in the development of motor skills and emotional intelligence,

Through touch, sight and sound, your baby will gain a send of trust and security. During a bonding class, you are free to pick up your baby and feed her, rock her, or stop to change a diaper or even play.

A regular yofa practice that creates routine will also help to regulate baby’s emotions.  This helps to reduce stress and lower anxiety. When babies are happy, moms are happy!

Get Back In Shape With Yoga

With a new baby in your life, hitting the gym may seem like an exercise in futility. Sleep deprivation and trying to find a sitter often stand in the way.

After your doctor clears you to exercise, moderate or low-impact programs such as yoga can strengthen core muscles, tone tummies and and help new moms regain strength.

Yoga can also help relieve neck or back pain, eases stress and more.  Even if you’ve had a  C-section or complicated delivery, you can feel good about yoga.

And since it’s not a competition, you can modify most yoga poses to accommodate your own comfort or skill level.

There are special yoga “recovery” poses that can help new moms get back into shape in short order.

Yoga class can also fuction as a support network for new moms, an opportunity to interact with women who share a common experience of a new birth, and getting themselves back in shape in a confortable, low-stress environment.

Getting enought rest, drinking lots of water and eating a healthy diet will also go a long way to helping you regain your pre-pregnancy body as soon as possible.

Motherhood & Yoga

I am not a Yoga teacher. I’ve only attended about 3 Yoga classes although my gym offers Yoga classes.

So, why am I writing about Yoga when I know nothing about it? I am curious – that’s my nature. And through the years, this curiosity has helped me develop a career as a freelance graphic designer and writer.

And it is through a very weird type of Yoga (my own type, or whatever I thought was Yoga at that point in time) that helped me swim ashore when I was teetering between drowning in the sea of depression after giving birth to my sons.

Both times, I was hit badly and constantly turned to the bottle for a solution. The bottle never will be a solution and yet, I hoped it would be.

Yoga and the soon-to-be-mother

There’s all this hype about Yoga that I didn’t fully understand before – what’s all this clamor about Yoga for pregnancy?? What’s the big deal? You have a big belly, retch half the time, have a sudden liking for pickle and have to wear your husband’s clothing….you need Yoga to help you deal with all that?

But of course, I only began the understand the benefits of Yoga as a mother when I started going for the classes, read about them in books, magazines and websites. This amazing method can help mothers regain their physical strength and sends them into a journey of self-discovery and improvement.

Instead of helping you deal with others, in Yoga, everything starts from within. Therefore, to solve a problem, you have to go inside.

And inside a mother, it’s always a battle zone…and it’s tumultuous half the time. Pizza or no pizza? Sex or no sex tonight? What kind of mother will I be? Will I sprain my own child’s fingers when I try to put his/her clothes on?

With the kind of bizarre thinking (and hormones) going on inside our mind and our body, mothers often have a  difficulty finding peace. Your doctor will tell you time and time again that although nutrition is important, finding peace, quiet and calm in yourself and in your life is just important for an expectant mother.

Yoga for the regular mother
Considering the fact that Yoga can help bring calm into calamity, it’s obviously a good choice for you to try out Yoga if you’re thinking of starting an exercise program. Better yet, join a gym…which is what I did.

I used to scoff at people who join gyms and judging from the loud dance music, I remember thinking to myself… “Yikes…gym is just a sorry excuse for a disco.  Instead of serving peanuts, they serve fruit mixes. Instead of alcohol, they serve bottled water. But everyone’s trying to get into a social thing in the gym. It’s a social club!”

And as a mother, I don’t have the time to join a social club. But I was wrong.

As soon as I gave the 10-day free classes trial, I was hooked. No makeup, no dressup (oh, the younger gym-goers still dress up to the nines and apply mascara for gym) and no pretense. I go to the gym and attend the Yoga class to sweat – to end up looking ugly but feeling damn good!

Mothers can open up their minds and free up their hearts after Yoga
Yoga has this tranquilizing effect on people that can hardly be explained with words. It has to be felt. It’s like you’re striking those poses, stretching those muscles and bending over backwards…and all this while, your mind is opening up and all impure thoughts are just flying out of it.

Yoga can be like ‘taking out the trash’. And this can be good for the whole family, especially the kids, as well. After a session of uninterrupted Yoga, you’ll feel renewed. Even a grumpy, sleeping, tired and beaten-out mother will have more energy to spend time with the kids.

Instead of feeling disgruntled and trapped, a mother can use Yoga to actually find an opening, a release that helps relax, not only the body, but the mind as well.

I don’t know about you…but I am going for more classes because I have seen the benefits. Yoga can do a whole lot for the ordinary non-married kidless people….imagine what it can do for a mother.