PregTASTIC podcast about prenatal yoga

Listened to PregTASTIC’s podcast #22 title “Prenatal Yoga” with guest Sara Holliday, which is a little over 40 minutes long. Holliday is a prenatal fitness expert and yoga instructor and has prenatal yoga DVDs for each trimester that follows her own pregnancy. She also has an outdoor stroller workout DVD for indoors and a CD to workout outside.

Some of things Holliday says to avoid when you’re pregnant and doing yoga:

• Laying on your back
• Twisting – torks spine and baby
• Over stretching – as you are further along in your pregnancy, your body is more open to prepare for birth so you may overstretch.

Yoga for your back
During your morning shower, let the water hit your low back and do modified cat and cow (tilt pelvis up and down with hands on knees). With the warm water pounding on your back, this feels SOOOOO good. My new favorite yoga pose to do! Definitely try this out, pregnant or not!

Yoga for sciatica
Move into butterfly –soles of feet together with knees out. Hold your feet and inhale knees up and exhale knees down. Continue to do this with the breath for five to 10 breaths. This will open up inner thighs and glutes.

Relaxation
Lay on your left side. Inhale and exhale breath into each part of body from toes to head and relax entire body.

Bring your right hand to your heart and the left to your baby. Inhale and focus on your love and absorb the feelings into your heart and exhale put into baby.

Don't try so hard

"Perfection in an asana is achieved when the effort to perform it becomes effortless and the infinite being within is reached."
~ Yoga Sutra 2.47

This sutra or thread is one of only three out of the 196 sutras Patanjali wrote thousands of years ago pertaining to the postures or asanas of yoga.

Since I'm past the halfway mark of my pregnancy, my body is noticeably changing. I'm not sure some days what yoga poses I'll be able to do or how I'll have to modify them. At first it bothered me I wasn't able to do some poses "perfectly" - darn foot will not go all the way up to my inner thigh in tree pose anymore. My inner nature is to be competitive and to be the best (that's a Virgo for you!). However doing yoga while being pregnant really illustrates to me what this sutra is saying.

Perfectionism isn't trying so hard - according to this sutra, it's the exact opposite. To me it's saying perfection is when you're able to be in the moment and be peaceful and satisfied with the present. This works for yoga poses and for life in general. Off the mat, I try to remain calm when preparing for our new baby to arrive. It can be effortless to find a good, affordable daycare. It doesn't have to be hard not knowing the sex of the baby until it's born. It is easy to choose our child's name.

Try and make effortlessness your aim today, on and off the mat.

Celeb & US baby boom

Did you know the U.S. birth rate recently hit a 35-year high, almost as high as the baby boom? Seems celebrities are keeping pace with this trend and a ton of them are pregnant these days. (FYI... I may be a yogini, but I must admit to having a celebrity gossip addiction.)

From Jessica Alba to Nicole Kidman to Jennifer Lopez to Halle Barry (let alone Christina and Nicole who just gave birth to Max and Harlow respectively), it seems all the Hollywood “It” ladies are preggers. Now I hear Matthew McConaughey is going to be a dad with his new girlfriend, and Britney Spears was seen shopping for a pregnancy test today... ok, let's not go there.

Seems the famous either love talking all about their nine months or don't want to discuss it at all. Or perhaps it's that WE love talking about them and their babies and this focus and fascination we have with them makes it appear more abundant. The proof? Well, I'm guilty with this post, and there's also a fairly popular blog out there in cyberspace called Celebrity Baby Blog, completely dedicated to this topic.

Celebrities are also always so sickeningly happy and perfect during their pregnancy - don't any of them get sciatica like me? Barry is on the cover of this month’s In Style magazine, and there's a video of her on CNN.com talking about how great she’s feeling during her pregnancy. Angelina Jolie actually became happy during her pregnancy, shock of shocks. Now she's back to brooding again and drinking vials of blood... (joke - can you tell I'm Team Aniston, even now after Shiloh has turned one years old!)