How I started to deepen my yoga practice

Meditation, immersed in nature, became more regular.

I first found yoga while I was pregnant with my first child.

My yoga practice kicked up a notch when I was pregnant with my second child. Miraculously, I had found a wonderful yoga class with a fantastic teacher at the gym near my work in North Sydney. I would rush over the road during my lunch hour and squeeze in a class, maybe twice a week if I was lucky.

While I wish I could remember her name, I’ll never forget how this yoga teacher made me feel, and the nurturing space she was able to hold in that gym environment. The room was downstairs, away from the clanging weights and pumping music. It was a little darker than normal - she would light candles and incense and use singing bowls.

For the first time I started to enjoy more regular breath work, chanting and meditation. My asana practice started to include more challenging poses. I started to practice a little more at home, if I found the time and space. Throughout my second pregnancy I was able to find rare and precious moments to sit quietly by the ocean or in the bush and spend just a few minutes meditating. Infrequent, irregular practice, but helpful all the same.

I’m certain my yoga teacher from that North Sydney gym helped prepare me to stay grounded and manage the impending pain of my second birth. I’d been so scarred physically and emotionally by my first experience with a posterior ‘sunny side up’ back labour that I was determined to find a way to handle this second pregnancy to be calmer and fully embodied this time around.

Of course, every birth is different, and yet some aspects are the same. While my little girl’s entry into the world wasn’t quite so traumatic as her brother’s, it was still profoundly painful and exhausting. And life-changing.

Both labours were incredibly difficult, and I needed the drugs, oh how I needed those drugs…“give me the druuuugs!!!” But I’m so grateful that I had enough basic yoga experience to help me at this critically important time in my life. The second time around was so much more wonderful. Mainly, I believe, because I had yoga to help me in a truly impactful way.

It’s amazing to think back on what a miracle it is to have a healthy birth and baby. I am to this day so thankful that my babies emerged safely into the world, squealing and hot and squishy. I look back at both experiences and marvel at how instinctively I knew when to push, where to place my body to ease the pain (somewhat), and how to embrace their wet, slippery bodies and put them onto my breast. Just incredible. That awareness of my body, and tapping into my babies’ rhythms and needs, was a real taste of how yoga can be experienced off the mat.

I am also innately reminded that, like animals, we hold a deep, instinctual knowing about certain things. With the birth of my daughter, I reached a point of earth-shattering pain where I thought I was literally going to die. It was in the moment just before the epidural finally kicked in. Just when I thought I could not possibly go on, right before she emerged into the world, I experienced an incredible, roaring wave of power, which I now recognise as the divine feminine. It was probably only a matter of seconds, but it could have been hours.

It was beyond pain – an all-encompassing, all-powerful emotion that transcended the agony that was ripping my body wide open. This divine feminine energy wrapped me, and my baby, and all the other women in the world who had ever given birth, and their babies, and in fact the whole world with every one and every thing in it, into what I can only describe as a full and enveloping and warm embrace of love. Mighty. LOVE.

After the profound insight I was gifted during my daughter’s birth, I went even further down the path of yoga. By the time she was a year old, we had moved to a new suburb and I kept up my gym membership. Again, I explored different gym classes, but I was continually drawn to the yoga sessions on offer.

Within a year, my focus moved almost exclusively to attending yoga classes, and there, in that loud and bright and almost crass gym environment, I met more teachers who would change my view of yoga, myself and more broadly, my life.