Prenatal/Postpartum
My first thought, upon typing that title, is “thank goodness Ortho Women’s Health & Urology I’m neither!”
The prenatal/postpartum class is required for my 200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher certification, and is probably the only one I wouldn’t have taken anyway even if it weren’t required. (The only other option is Kids, and to be perfectly honest, I’ll be happy if I go my whole yoga-teaching career without having to deal with kids, either in utero or out of it.) I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I’m totally uninterested in being a parent. I’m somewhat less vocal about the fact that I’m definitively averse to being pregnant myself, to the point where I’m very nearly phobic about it.
Days like today do nothing to allay that feeling. Setting aside all the stories about pregnancy and its myriad discomforts…setting aside the course material about the postpartum period (bleeding for 4-6 weeks!?!?!? I had no idea, and was probably happier for it)…setting aside the fact that I’d feel like a complete fraud teaching a prenatal/postpartum class, never having been pregnant myself…when we stuffed out extra clothing layers into our yoga pants for the master class, and several women looked at me and remarked how realistic I looked, I very nearly wigged out right then and there. I was very uncomfortable, mentally, the entire class and couldn’t believe how relieved I felt as soon as I was wearing my t-shirt in a more conventional fashion again.
Setting aside my personal hang-ups, though, it was a good class. There’s plenty of material that crosses over nicely into another class I am very interested in taking, as well as ideas that integrate nicely into more general classes, especially the gentle, restorative ones. And although I am glad I took the class, I heard just enough about the Kids class (from both the instructor and other students who had taken it) to make me wonder whether it would’ve been a better choice. Logistically, it certainly wasn’t, but emotionally, I might have been a lot more comfortable. Still, sometimes it’s good to face things that make me uncomfortable, and any problems I had in the training were mine, rather than anything to do with either the class or the instructor.
Tomorrow—Yoga for Seniors class! I’m looking forward to that one, because it’s really more about modifications for various physical conditions than age per se. I suspect it’s also something that would have been very helpful to have known when I did my student teaching, so I’m keen on circling back to pick up that knowledge.
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