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Baby Om: Yoga for Mothers and Babies
Baby Om: Yoga for Mothers and Babies
Baby Om: Yoga for Mothers and Babies
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Baby Om: Yoga for Mothers and Babies

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A dynamic yoga program for new mothers and their babies

How does a new mother get back her shape without giving up precious time with her baby? In Baby Om, authors Laura Staton and Sarah Perron -- both dancers, yoga instructors, and moms themselves -- answer the new mother's need for a calming and rigorous way to align and strengthen her body while having fun with her baby. Based on their popular New York classes of the same name, Baby Om takes mothers through a yoga practice they can do with their infants -- anytime and anywhere. The techniques help new mothers enjoy the spiritual and physical benefits of yoga, allowing them to nurture themselves as well as their babies. This easy-to-use book includes:

--Baby Om basics -- the practical information you need to get started
--baby engagement -- how to play with and stimulate your baby during yoga
--four step-by-step Baby Om classes -- each concentrating on a unique stage in your child's development

The beautiful illustrations and photographs in Baby Om capture the intimate sharing between mother and child, and create a visual model for how to achieve the poses at home. Safe, effective, and easy to learn, Baby Om brings mother and baby together, ensuring the health and happiness of both.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 8, 2014
ISBN9781466867604
Baby Om: Yoga for Mothers and Babies
Author

Laura Staton

Laura Staton, co-founder of Baby Om, is a professional dancer and fitness trainer who has been doing yoga since she was a teenager. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two children.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love this book! I hear the most gleeful laughs from William (my 4 month old) while we're doing these routines. I've done yoga for a very long time now and was thrilled to find a way to incorporate William into my yoga time and still get a bit of a challenge myself. Highly recommended, especially for those with some yoga experience.

Book preview

Baby Om - Laura Staton

INTRODUCTION:

The Baby Om Story

When people ask us why we created a business of mother and baby yoga classes two months into parenthood, we have to be honest: we did it because we needed them. As new mothers we hardly felt like budding entrepreneurs. We were elated and exhausted, and most of all felt an overwhelming urge to spend time with our children. But as women, as dancers, and as yoga teachers, we yearned to get back into shape. Learning how to practice yoga along with our babies turned out to be the only way to indulge both needs: to deepen our bonds with our children while healing our postpartum selves physically and mentally. And by creating classes for others around what we learned—classes that turned into Baby Om—we managed to help a network of mothers and friends do the same. We wrote this book hoping it will do the same for you.

Why does yoga, more than any other form of exercise, address the needs of new mothers so well? We’ll explore this question in more detail later on, but there’s a simple answer. Yoga is all about flexibility—in addressing your changing life as well as your stiff limbs! It stretches and strengthens you, gently assisting a gradual return to physical strength just as it can deliver a shattering workout. It encourages improvisation and play. It provides babies with a soothing environment in which to begin experiencing their bodies’ interactions with the world. So it perfectly answers the new mother’s need for a calming yet rigorous way to align and strengthen her body while still having fun with her baby. Throughout our pregnancies we suspected some of this. After all, we were yoga teachers and felt that yoga would be an integral part of our early parenthood. We just had no idea how much it would help, or that a new business and a new life for both of us would result.

Our friendship is based on our shared passions. We followed parallel career paths that started in modern dance and embraced teaching yoga as a (slightly) less impoverishing profession. When we each found out we were pregnant, we were elated, but also uncertain about the future. How would we combine the physical demands of our professional lives with the needs of our children so that no one felt shortchanged? Sarah, who had toured with Mikhail Baryshnikov, was pregnant with Rosey and was still dancing and directing rehearsals for the company she had performed with for over a decade. Laura, who had been choreographing and dancing since leaving Juilliard, was pregnant with Dylan and had a full calendar of dance commitments. Still worse, we were both scheduled to perform in a show around two months after our babies were due. What were we thinking?

While we danced and taught through our ninth month, our birth experiences turned out to be very different. Laura underwent a difficult labor that ended with a cesarean section, while Sarah had an unmedicated vaginal delivery. Both of us emerged as delighted and depleted as every new mother. But after a two-month blur of diaper changes, family visits, midnight feedings, and baby vomit, the dreaded show arrived. While our husbands in the audience nervously held fussing babies, we staggered and finessed our way through the whole thing. Backstage between dances and impromptu feedings, we tried to calm our anxiety and catch our breath, but the reality was obvious: life had changed, and so had we. It was time to get back in shape.

The next week we began searching the city for yoga classes we could take with our babies in tow. What we found wasn’t promising. Our first instinct was to return to our usual yoga classes, an everyday routine before we had babies. But since those classes are far from baby-friendly, we were faced with either leaving our newborns with a friend or family member (a favor quickly used up) or finding a baby-sitter (costly). There were also postpartum classes that included babies but these tended either to concentrate mainly on the infant (baby massage, for example) or offered meditative yoga focusing on breathing and soothing. While we wanted to include our babies, we still craved a complete workout—one tailored to our postpartum bodies, aimed at strengthening, aligning, and grounding. The combination simply wasn’t to be found.

One day, sitting around Laura’s apartment eating jellybeans, it dawned on us that since we couldn’t find the class we wanted, we should create one. We could construct exactly the environment that we knew we, as new moms, wanted and that others might want, too: a class that would address mothers and babies equally, a class applicable to anyone, from swami to couch potato. We decided to give it a go. We rented studio space, took our kids and yoga mats along, and began to experiment several times a week with what felt right for our bodies, our psyches, and our infants.

The joy of discovering a robust physical activity that we could share with a tiny, fragile infant was tremendous. We found focus and energy. We uncovered an entirely new way of playing with Rosey and Dylan: we could fly them on our knees while strengthening our abdominal muscles; we could breathe through warm-ups like Sun Salutes while tickling them; we could exercise their tiny limbs and enjoy their smiling response. Our mother-child bonds deepened. The babies also got to know each other, becoming close friends who shared everything from pacifiers to partially chewed bagels. Each time we left the studio, regardless of the amount of yoga we actually got to practice, we felt better about ourselves. These sessions became the highlight of the spring and summer of 1999.

That September, with some trepidation, we launched Baby Om with a class that was attended by one mother, Naomi. Since then, the response of our students has been tremendous. To our surprise, we’ve started amassing the trappings of a real business, including a great logo designed by our friend Victoria Lewis, and the now-obligatory Web site (www.babyom.com). We have also experimented with two variations on the original Baby Om concept: Toddler Om (a riotous failure) and prenatal classes (a great success). We are most proud, however, of the individual success stories of which we are privileged to have been part.

One of our current students, Andrea, is a great example. She had a difficult birth and found that yoga was the only exercise she and her baby, Katie, were able to do. Katie loved it from day one. She became relaxed, and then I was able to focus on what I needed to do. She now practices daily, finding that yoga helps build her confidence and patience.

Susan, a Web designer who works from home, was thrilled to be able to spend time concentrating on her second child, Trygve, as she worked out. She was also excited to learn that we had designed a yoga class to do while nursing.

Judy recalls being afraid to move herself or her child until she started Baby Om and how the classes helped her become more physically secure both in her own body and when handling her daughter.

Best of all, most students can’t believe how great they feel after each class. Whether they were in great shape before the baby arrived or not, yoga helps them find a sense of their former selves. Postpartum mothers will be flushed with excitement from suddenly finding themselves touching their toes for the first time since their second trimester. They are always far more surprised than we are. Other parents, distraught over their apparently inconsolable crying kids, are thrilled weeks later when their babies have calmed and are gurgling and shrieking with delight. Once they are used to the classes, babies will roll, crawl, start fledgling conversations, engage in small battles over toys, or burble along while the adults chant.

Some parents tell us how much their babies look forward all week to coming to class. We often wonder how the babies communicate this. In any event, whether they actually looked forward to class or not, we have graduated hundreds of babies since our opening. As for their caregivers, though our students are most often first-time mothers, we have taught all kinds of people: fathers, gay and lesbian couples, and even grandparents. One new mother regularly brought her own mother to class, which gave us the pleasure of watching three generations practice yoga together, each mom relating to her daughter from a different perspective. We find that non-birth parents often value the interactive time spent with the baby more than the yoga itself; they find that yoga contributes a language of physical bonding to their relationship. Classes also provide students a chance to meet a network of other parents and share experiences in a small, intimate setting that embraces their children. The value of this network is enhanced by the variety of our students’ professions: doctors, photo editors, analysts, writers, social workers, designers, office managers, lawyers, and models, to name only a few. We’ve even taught some fellow dancers!

We never expected any of this to happen; we were just looking for a class to fill our needs. Somewhere along the way we were lucky enough to join a growing and loving community of parents and babies who come together to share the joy and restorative power of yoga.

How to Use This Book

What Baby Om offers is a comprehensive method for achieving flexibility and strength and deepening your knowledge of your body and baby. Don’t think, however, that this will somehow be second best compared to actually taking one of our classes. While we’re great advocates of classes, it’s also important to stress that one of the fundamental goals of yoga is to develop a personal practice. Perhaps as important, doing yoga at home has many practical advantages if you have a new baby. You can go at your own pace, paying attention to your specific areas of need. You can choose the ideal moment for your class—always helpful when negotiating unpredictable nap times! You don’t have to waste precious time on travel. And you don’t have to go it alone—you can practice with friends or even create your own group.

We’ve organized the book around you and your child’s development. First, we address some necessary fundamentals: chapter 1, What’s So Great about Yoga?, explores the benefits of yoga; chapter 2, Baby Om Basics, lays out all the practical information you need to get going; and chapter 3, Baby Engagement, deals with playing and stimulating your baby during yoga. After that comes the core of the book: four yoga classes, each concentrating on a unique stage in your child’s growth and your recovery during the first year after birth.

Class 1: This class for the first three months of your baby’s life is for everyone from beginner on. It addresses basic postpartum needs such as restoring core alignment and beginning to strengthen and reconnect overstretched pelvic floor and abdominal muscles. It’s designed to nourish your body and mind with much-needed calm. The baby exercises will gently stimulate your infant’s body, basic motor skills, and vision.

Class 2: This class covers months three to six and is aimed at a slightly more intermediate level. It focuses on some wonderful chest-opening positions that will lift your spirits and stretch those tight shoulders. By this time you’ll be getting stronger, and you’ll become able to exert yourself without as much potential for exhaustion. Your baby will be stronger, perhaps attempting the Cobra pose (tummy down, head lifted), and will probably sit with assistance.

Class 3: Addressing months six to twelve, this class enables you to engage in a more vigorous practice. By this time you’ll be physically stronger and well on your way to a more balanced and integrated body, so this class is more varied and strenuous than the first two. Your baby will now be using you as a personal jungle gym, excitedly practicing pulling, crawling, and assisted walking. This class will get you and keep you in good enough shape to run after and carry your baby without strain.

Class 4: This class addresses the unique needs of mothers who underwent a cesarean section, and runs in parallel chronologically with Class 1 (0–3 months). It is designed to accommodate a high level of physical tenderness and even discomfort, focusing on gently strengthening the post-surgery body. It is also recommended to any mother as a restorative class to take when feeling especially frayed around the edges. The infant exercises described in Class 1 apply here, albeit with some added caution to avoid straining the incision site. Please note that if you had a C-section we recommend you start this class no sooner than six weeks after giving birth.

The four class chapters are followed by discussions of different aspects of yoga and motherhood, including yoga for nursing and to soothe colic, yoga and postpartum depression, and the process and physical effects of childbirth.

The later chapters include a certain amount of medical information, some of it technical—and we think it’s important they do. In our experience, it really helps your yoga practice if you understand the dramatic physical impact of pregnancy and birth. We have tried to do this in a medical context that addresses specific health issues with clarity. Just use the information that interests you or is pertinent to your

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