“If you actually understood what a woman has been through: the conception journey, pregnancy, birth, the whole process—what’s happening demands full respect and a deep care. To imagine that people would just snap back into their size 0 jeans and walk out, it begs disbelief. There’s no respect for what’s arisen. And in the yoga world, we’ve fed right into that.”
Uma Dinsmore-Tuli is a yoga teacher, a yoga teacher trainer, and wrote the tome Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Power and Freedom through Yoga and Tantra, which connects feminism, blood rites, and yoga.
What You’ll Learn:
- The postpartum woman just did the biggest stretch there is – Birth
- What yoga IS appropriate for postpartum women
- About the yoga patriarchy
- About why it matters to be a woman and what stage of life you are in for yoga practice.
What You’ll Hear:
-She needs stability nurture and a real sense of being mothered
-Postpartum period is 5 years.
-Deep inner work of breath and awareness to the pelvic floor and breastfeeding
-Stability practices, using the closing practices of yoga in a community, grassroots environment.
-When the advice “take care of yourself” is all you get when you go to a group yoga class doesn’t meet a woman’s needs
-What is the yoga patriarchy?
-The feelings of exclusion in the yoga sangha
-The yoga can subtly welcome the whole range of our life as humans
-Postpartum is messy, dirty, tiring and grumpy, and the extraordinary capacity that yoga has to help us through this.
-Anchara mauna- Inner silence, tuning to the present moment, while breastfeeding and tuning in to the senses.
-The Fourth Trimester- whole process of healing is being overlooked
-You can’t tell how healed a woman is after having a baby — “All those ladies that look so great in bikinis, you don’t know what’s in their underwear”
-Postpartum energy is present after miscarriages, stillborns, and near-death experiences
-The goddess of the Fourth Trimester
-Postpartum care is not a mental health issue: it’s a body issue
-Even if you don’t have a traumatic birth, birth is still a heartbreaking, heart-opening experience
-The yoga world hasn’t helped with judgments around birth
-Birth images: to hire a photographer, or not
-If you have great postpartum care, you’ll metabolize the birth experience, no matter how it went
-Even the most gentle birth is a powerful experience and needs healing at a cellular level — you are in shock during the fourth trimester
-You are a new woman after birth — you need the presence of wise women, to help you make the best choices for your healing
-New mothers need everything new babies need
-Learning to be okay in the not knowing, and learning to rest: menstruation, birth, postpartum, and menopause
-Repair is always possible
