Yoga Teacher Rosa Santana on Supporting Mothers and Other Insights

Motherhood and Yoga: Lessons from Rosa Santana

In my continuing quest to understand motherhood and become a better-informed parent, I’ve been reaching out to yoga teachers who can shed light on this path for me. Recently, I had an illuminating conversation with Rosa Santana, a mother of three daughters and a lifelong yoga practitioner.

“You never stop being a mother,” she says. Her own journey is inspiring—she was a gym rat long before she stepped into yoga, and she took her first yoga class while six months pregnant. She admits it was a terrible experience at the time. Up until then, she had taught step aerobics, which gave her fitness discipline but didn’t prepare her body for the nuances of pregnancy.

My Key Takeaways From My Conversation with Rosa

• Start with mothers. “The mother is the first guru,” she says, “and if we can support that one mother well, the world will be different.” The mother is the first guru and if we can help that one mother we know then the world will be different. I resonated deeply with me. I received tremendous care not only during my pregnancy but post delivery also. I felt loved, supported and that has undoubtedly shaped my wonderful postpartum journey. I love that yoga traditionally emphasises nurturing the mother.
• Prenatal yoga is about strengthening the legs for the pushing, widening the pelvis and lengthening the spine to make room for the baby.
• Starting a yoga practice after you get pregnant is less than ideal.  Any new movement during pregnancy becomes an experiment, because there are so many factors that come into play (hormones do their own thing). A consitent yoga practice before you fall pregnant makes you physically and emotionally strong. You become more attuned to what feels good and what feels off. You have that subtle intelligence to back off before you injure yourself or end up doing something unsafe.
• The perils of not modifying the practice for pregnancy.  This is always controversial with practitioners. I feel many women think it’s a sign of strength to conitnue with intense workouts during their pregnancy. Because there are no conclusive studies that have been done to show the negative impact of intense exercise during pregnancy, many women disregard the yoga teacher’s advice to modify their workouts. That said, I’ve personally noticed women who have done intense workouts take a longer time to heal, and experience an increase in pelvic floor dysfunction and back issues post delivery. Here’s a blog about the bunch of lesser known symptoms that might be exacerbated if you’re not careful.
• Postpartum weight loss. If you take care of yourself during and after your pregnancy, you might actually get a better body later on!!! This is something that Agi Wittich also spoke about and I’m so grateful for this insight because it encourages you to think about long-term health. My own experience has been that I’ve become more conscious of myself physical and emotional states, and more in tune with my body postpartum.

I feel like my body was decosntructed and now I’m constructing it back again but with a more solid foundation.

If You Liked this Blog….

Watch the full lively conversation here.

I also had a similar conversation with Agi Wittich, a yoga teacher and scholar based in Israel. You can either read the blog or watch the conversation.