Yoga for Motherhood

By Naomi Annand

'Beautiful, useful, tender.' - British Vogue

'Gorgeous' - The Green Parent

'More than just a yoga manual' – Harper's Bazaar

A beautiful and nurturing yoga guide for new mothers.

Motherhood is the most important job in the world, and it's also the most demanding. It calls upon your every resource – mental, physical, spiritual – and while it is frequently a source of unmatched joy, it is also often depleting like nothing else.

Naomi Annand shows you how yoga can help you navigate its emotional highs and lows, how to tap into the creativity of motherhood and also how to nurture yourself so that you might nurture others.

Using breath-led sequences and simple two-minute life hacks, this beautiful practical companion teaches you how to soothe rattled nervous systems and uplift tired bodies whatever your age and whatever your experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: May 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781472987891

Naomi Annand

Naomi Annand has been a yoga teacher for 20 years and a mother for seven of them. Naomi lives in east London with her family and runs her own yoga studio, Yoga on the Lane. She published Yoga: A Manual for Life in 2019 (Bloomsbury).

Book preview

Contents

Directory of poses and techniques

Introduction

Yoga for motherhood

The whole mother

Yoga and motherhood

My story

Mother to mother

How to use this book

Yoga, motherhood and humility

Grace, power and creativity

Early motherhood

Getting started (including glossary)

Pose libraries

Restorative poses

Seated poses

Standing poses

Kneeling poses

Arm balances

Supine poses

Back bends

Three essential vinyasas

Half Sun Salutation

Sun Salutation

Moon Salutation

Sequences

Yoga for profound exhaustion

Yoga for compassion

Yoga for selfhood

Mum and baby yoga

Yoga for resilience

Restorative yoga for anxiety

Yoga to ride the high

Yoga for creativity

Family yoga

Final repose

Meditation for Now

Legs Bent on Chair

Meditation as a Self-hug

Bee Breath, seated

Breath Washing to clear and clarify

Body Scan

Seated Meditation ‘Inhale let, exhale go’

Seated Face Massage

Nesting and Resting

Micro-practices for mothers

A meditation to reclaim your body, your centre, your core

Self-massage

Yoga play

Journaling

Rituals

Lion’s Breath to release rage

A meditation when you’re losing focus

Rest well

Mini masterclasses

Wrist and tendon relief

The diaphragm

The shoulders

The vagus nerve

The pelvic floor

The core

The spine and posture

The feet

Mother to mother letters

Fourth trimester

Egg donation

Mothering without a mother

Mothering through grief

Twins

Preparing for what’s to come

Agony and ecstasy

Yoga for life

Mothering as a state of mind

Womanly curves

Raising boys and raising girls

Mothering through divorce

When they’ve left

Breath for motherhood

The Loving Kindness Meditation

Acknowledgements

Directory of poses and techniques

Alternate Nostril Breathing

Banana Pose

Bee Breath/Brahmani Breath

Bharadvaja’s Twist

Boat Pose

Body Scan

Bound Angle Pose

Bow Pose

Breath Washing to clear and clarify

Bridge Pose

Camel Pose

Cat Pose

Chair Pose

Child’s Pose

Cobra Pose

Contented Pose

Cow Face Pose

Cow Pose

Criss-cross Bridge Pose

Crow Pose

Dancer Pose

Deep Breathing

Diamond Pose

Dolphin Pose

Downward Dog

Even Breathing

Extended Side Angle Pose

Forward-facing Savasana

Four-limbed Staff Pose

Gate Pose

Golden Thread Breathing

Half Forward Fold

Half Happy Baby Pose

Half Moon Pose

Half Side Plank

Half Split

Half Sun Salutation

Hand-to-feet Pose

Happy Baby Pose

Head-to-knee Pose

Hero Pose

High Lunge

High Lunge Twist

Horse Pose

Knees-to-chest

Legs at the Wall

Legs Bent on Chair

Lizard Pose

Locust Pose

Low Lunge Back Bend

Meditation for Now

Meditation as a Self-hug

Moon Salutation

Mountain Pose

Nesting and Resting

One-to-two Breathing

Pigeon Pose

Plank

Puppy Pose

Pyramid Pose

Reclined Bound Angle Pose

Reclined Hand-to-Big Toe Pose

Reclined Hero Pose

Reclined Seated Forward Bend

Reverse Table Top

Revolved Child’s Pose

Revolved Seated Head-to-knee Pose

Revolved Warrior

Saddle Pose

Savasana

Seated Face Massage

Seated Forward Bend

Seated Meditation ‘Inhale let, exhale go’

Seated Twist

Seated Wide-legged Forward Fold

Side Line Twist

Side Lunge

Side Plank

Simple Side Rest

Sphinx Pose

Squat

Standing Forward Fold

Standing Splits

Sun Salutation

Supine Twist

Supported Bridge Pose

Supported Child’s Pose

Supported Shoulder Stand

Thread the Needle

Three-part Breathing

Tree Pose

Triangle Pose

Two-part Breathing

Upward Dog

Upward-facing Wide Angle Pose

Victorious Breath

Warrior One

Warrior Two

Warrior Three

Wide-legged Forward Fold

Wind-relieving Pose

Windscreen Wiper Twist

Introduction

Yoga for motherhood

Like every woman I know, my experience of motherhood has been one of extraordinary highs and serious sanity-endangering lows. It’s changed who I am and how I view the world, opening up new ways of being that I never imagined possible. But it’s also been stressful like nothing else I’ve ever done and it has challenged my sense of self, putting me under incredible strain physically and emotionally.

It is, as everyone always says, the most important job in the world, and it’s also the most demanding. It calls upon every part of you – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual – and requires every virtue in abundance: patience, diligence, kindness, humility. Which means, of course, that it is pretty much unrivalled in its capacity to send you into a spiral of self-doubt, to get your inner-critic’s juices flowing. I have lost count of the number of times I have got to the end of the day convinced that I am simply not up to it, this the mother of all jobs. Thankfully, there have been far more days when I have snuck into the children’s bedroom to watch them sleeping and thought myself the luckiest woman alive. And there have been plenty of days when I have felt all the emotions under the sun: resentment, love, frustration, anger, and a total unmatched outpouring of joy.

Throughout this extraordinary experience, the thing that has kept me going is yoga. It has done what yoga has always done for me – saved me when I needed saving, given me strength when I was at my weakest, energy when I was at my most tired, kept me grounded when I felt I might just float off up into the sky. And that’s what this book is about. The lived reality of motherhood and how yoga can help you navigate its highs and its lows.

The whole mother

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a lot of you are reading these words while you’re pregnant. If you are, congratulations! Being pregnant with my daughter was probably the most vivid experience of my life. Everything felt heightened: all my senses, all my emotions, all my anxieties. Particularly, the latter. It had not been at all clear that I would be able to get pregnant – I have type 1 diabetes and pretty serious hypothyroidism – and so I was jumpy, one nervous eye always on my blood sugar levels, and the results of my many scans. But I was pregnant. I had entered into this secret contract with an unknown sentient being that was there inside me, and I was growing an organ, cells dividing and growing to build a placenta, a life-support machine for a new life. And I will always think of my pregnancies as magical times. But it’s important to note here that this is not a pregnancy yoga book. There are already dozens of brilliant guides out there that deal with those extraordinary nine months and this is something different. This is a book about the whole mother: pre-pregnant, pregnant, post-partum, never-pregnant, menopausal. It’s about how yoga can help you through every stage of the whole thing, from pre-conception to life after they’ve left.

Yoga and motherhood

One of the great ironies of motherhood is that we mums – so often held up as the ultimate caregivers – are often terrible at looking after ourselves. When it comes to the family’s priorities we almost always find ourselves at the back of the queue, balancing this and juggling that, always thinking about someone else’s needs. And too often we find ourselves ploughing on. Breastfeeding through the pain barrier. Battling to work after a sleepless night. The never-ending treadmill of meals prepared and meals eaten and meals cleared away. But it’s not just about the demands motherhood makes on your time and energy; the emotional impact is massive. You take on the hopes and fears of another person. You feel their joy but not as acutely as you feel their sadness, their rejection, their wounded pride. You can, I have found, very easily lose sight of yourself, totally forget that you are a person with wants and needs, someone who also needs to be cared for and looked after.

And that’s what this book is about: self-care for mothers. I have found, and I know others have too, that yoga is one of the surest routes back to a memory of myself, a sense of myself as a whole person, an autonomous individual, someone who needs to be nurtured, someone who needs rest. The trick is not to think of this rest as a retreat from motherhood, or a holiday from it, but rather as an essential part of it. You are only able to nurture if you are nourished, give care to others if you are capable of caring for yourself.

My story

So many women I know have had fraught journeys to motherhood. I know I did. In my late 20s, I developed type 1 diabetes, which I do my best to control by regularly checking my blood sugar with a finger pricker and injecting myself with insulin. Some diabetics have fairly stable diabetes and seem always to require a consistent and predictable amount of insulin for what they’re eating. I don’t. My diabetes is erratic, thrown by my menstrual cycle, stress levels and other seemingly unknowable forces.

When I told the doctors I was hoping to get pregnant I immediately felt under tremendous pressure to bring my blood sugar under control, knowing that I had to get my average down to a certain level before I would be given the go-ahead. It was an acutely stressful time, in which I battled away, knowing that until fairly recently women with type 1 had been discouraged from trying to get pregnant.

After many months and lots of scrutiny of my daily habits and tightening my glucose control, I was given the green light to try to conceive a baby. Thankfully, for me this bit happened quickly and without stress. But then, as soon as I was pregnant, the pressure kicked in again as the need to control my blood sugar became even more pressing. I woke every couple of hours through the night to monitor my sugars, and so I was permanently exhausted, which only added to the overall stress.

Towards the end of my pregnancy I was told that my baby was growing more quickly than was desirable – a not unusual state of affairs for diabetic mums – and so I was induced at 36 weeks, even though I could feel I wasn’t ready. After four very difficult days I was on my knees begging for a C-section, which I was finally granted and, at last, I had my darling little girl.

The stress of the pregnancy and the birth did not set me up well for the first six months of motherhood. A situation that was compounded by my other auto–immune condition, extreme-hypothyroidism, which was diagnosed shortly after I developed diabetes. My thyroid stimulating hormone was all the way up at 175 on the scale when it should be consistently under four. Having felt very unwell when I first developed hypothyroidism, I had things relatively under control throughout my pregnancy, but once I had my daughter my requirements did not revert, as expected, to my pre-pregnancy level, which meant I was over-medicated and doubly wired, and found it very hard to cope when my daughter was distressed.

I felt eerily, barely myself. I floated through life, ghost-like as I tried and failed to achieve basic tasks. Getting dressed and brushing my teeth felt like marathons. I was incredibly happy and very, very sad at the same time. I cried a lot. But I got through it. I found a formula that worked for my daughter. I did a lot of yoga. I found myself slowly coming back to myself. I emerged. I was a mother.

Mother to mother

There is tendency with a book like this to imagine that the person writing it is doing so because they’ve cracked the code, taken effortlessly to motherhood, and are now ready to stand on the mount and dispense their wisdom, their version of how to do it properly. In terms of this book at least, nothing could be further from the truth. I haven’t cracked the code of motherhood. I haven’t even cracked the code of yoga – that’s the thing about yoga, no one has, it just doesn’t work like that. Yoga is depthless and limitless and its full mystery will never be discovered by man or machine. All I have is some sense of some things that have worked for me. Not things that have made me a better mother but things that have helped me cope better with motherhood; its depthless mystery.

The first-hand experiences recounted in here are inspired by one of my most cherished friends, who wrote me a letter when I was in hospital, detailing how challenging her experience of motherhood had been. She, like many of the women I know, paddles hard under the surface, while seeming to glide through life effortlessly. I never had even an inkling of an idea she might be anything other than thriving, and her sharing some of her story spoke to that fragile part of myself. It reminded me that there is no one experience of motherhood: there are motherhoods, each one very different from the other, each one full of quirks and ticks, complexities and particularities. My friend’s letter relaxed something inside of me. I hope the stories here might do the same for you. As you read them, you might read some of your experience in the stories of other mothers, but even if you don’t, you’ll still get the sense that it’s not easy for anyone and this is what perhaps connects us all.

How to use this book

I’ve been teaching yoga for 20 years and I’ve been a mother for seven of them. One of the things that I have learned since I combined the two roles is how frequently I don’t live up to the things I talk about when I’m teaching a class. I’m often not very kind to myself. I don’t rest enough. I don’t listen to my body. I don’t slow down. And I beat myself up about it. How I’m not living the values that I talk about, write about, believe in.

But, in truth, this failure on my part is essentially what this book is about. The whole point of it is to dispel the myth of the perfect yoga practice. Whatever you can do is enough. It always is. There is no external yardstick for yoga, just as there is no external yardstick for motherhood.

And so it’s in this spirit that I’ve structured this book. It isn’t an exhaustive guide to yoga, its lineages and vast philosophy. It isn’t a primer on the spirituality of the practice and its roots in Hinduism. I am not – and make no claim to be – the person to write those books, particularly when there are so many excellent ones out there that cover these huge topics so well.

Instead, this is a practical guide to doing what you can, when you can, where you can, for however long you can. My aim in writing it is to move away from the idea of yoga being something that is only properly done for 90 minutes in a light-filled studio with a view over the mountains. This guide is about how yoga and a yogic attitude can help support you as a mother. Sometimes that will mean a long immersive candle-lit session in an otherwise empty house, but other times, it will be five snatched minutes between this pressing thing and that pressing thing that you are able to make nourishing and calm and reflective in some small way.

And it’s important to note here, too, that nothing in this book is intended as a definitive stamp on what yoga is or how it should be practised. There is no one yoga. There are dozens, even hundreds, of yogas, each one the product of a different lineage, each one with a subtly difference emphasis. After years of exploring the many different approaches I have found that the yoga that works best for me is Vinyasa yoga, a dynamic, flowing, breath-led practice that is endlessly adaptable and possessed of a dance-like grace and artistry. It is the closest thing I have found to mindfulness in motion, which is the spirit that animates all that follows.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of this book is made up of detailed libraries of the different postures that are the building blocks of the physical practice. As with my previous book, I’ve taught them as I would in a class, with cues for you to follow to help you in and out of the pose. I’ve also included Mother’s Notes with some of the poses – these are pointers particular to mums that might highlight things to watch for if you’re recently post-partum, or are feeling especially frazzled.

It’s important to note here that this book isn’t intended to replace a studio practice – there is a particular care and attention that you can only get from a teacher in a space, modifying postures in the moment, which will always be the best way to learn – but I hope it can be a complement to in-person lessons and a useful guide as you develop your practice.

Another substantial part of the book is made up of nine Sequences, which I have put together with mothers in mind. Some of them are for when you’re on the edge of burnout, others for when you’re flying and want to ride the high.