Prenatal Yoga

Due to the holidays and random scheduling conflicts, I've not made it to my yoga class in a few weeks. Let me tell you, I have loved prenatal yoga. It has been relaxing, renewing, and I have enjoyed how normal I feel during the classes.

That is until now. Prenatal yoga during the 9th month is no joke. I mean...shit gets real.

First off, I was kinda between clumps of due dates. So all the people I'm used to are recuperating and about to join the postnatal Mama and baby class. I'm the only one who waddles in. There is a fresh crop of high teens and low twenty weekers that are a bunch of yoga hosers, and I'm sure they feel great, and like they are God's gift to prenatal yoga. I was one of you, too, hopefully not as annoying...I'll explain later...

So anyway, it's been a few weeks. Today I realized I am one person with two spinal columns at the moment. Imagine doing yoga with a rigid back brace on backwards... Now imagine that back brace moves on its own, in any direction it pleases, but usually not the one you would also like to go in...

So cat/cows...that turns into torso straight, a little less straight, torso straight, a little less straight...forget arching and hollowing...Pico didn't want to. We also do this pose where we round out our upper backs. That seems doable...except that's when Pico decides to try corpse pose and I have feet in my diaphragm.  So basically I could drop my head...

Standing poses!!!! Yeah! Always some of my favorite. We did warrior one and two, and that was pretty good. So then we turned to a mountain pose and did squats. Squats are my jam, I squat at work all the time to check foley bags, get meds off the bottom shelf of the OmniMed, etc....except somehow in three weeks I've gone from being able to do squats during yoga no problem, to getting tunnel vision and even my hearing diminishing...as in I'm about to have a syncopal episode. And we're not talking about numerous reps...like 8... I didn't pass out, thanks to years of balancing on a beam and bars with head colds, but sheesh, I was embarrassed for feeling that way.

So then we go to tree pose...and this is when yoga hoser comes into play. I can still rock tree pose. But that's without random objects being kicked and thrown at me. So one of the twenty weekers, of course, tries to do a more complicated version of tree pose because apparently it was competition day at prenatal yoga, except she can't. She kicks her damn metal tree hugger water bottle as she stumbles, and, of course, it bee lines for my shin...but, dammit, I'm a strong tree, with my one foot on my thigh, and I just glare at her with left eye. We switch feet, and I'm once again rocking my tree pose on my "bad side". I hear scuffling, and as not to be surprised again I open my eyes to watch her splat...just to her knees. I swear, I was gonna call OB triage at my hospital and tell them to refuse her because she was an idiot. 

I think our yoga instructor was pretty exasperated at this point, because we did humility pose for the first time. It's basically first position in ballet (feet flat, heels together, toes turned out, arms by sides, head down). Then you raise up on your toes...Well, Yoga Sue, just wobbles all over her own yoga mat...my zen is out the window. She turned Namaste into nama-gotohell.

Finally, we get to shavasana, which is typically my favorite. Honestly, it's what keeps me coming back. You lie in corpse pose, or in our case a semi-reclined corpse pose with a bolster, for about 10 minutes. It can be very relaxing. So I'm all trying to chill out, and Pico decides it is fun time and moves around like a wild thing. Ze is moving strongly enough to make me wobble on my narrow bolster. So now I'm trying not to laugh and ruin everyone else's Zen. At the end of the class my instructor even said she could not concentrate because she was watching Pico move so much. I'm so in love with my wild thing! I can hardly wait for Pico to be on the outside so I can see what ze has been up to for the last few weeks.

Peace, Love, and Find Your Own Damn Zen!

Mary Katherine