Breathing Space for New Mothers Rest, Stretch, and Smile--One Yoga Minute at a Time

A gentle and novel guide to new motherhood—one that encourages women to take time to breathe, embrace their experiences, and be "good enough"—one yoga minute at a time

Yoga instructor Alison Rogers and coauthor Erin O. White forge a new path through contemporary motherhood with their collection of gentle suggestions for beginning and deepening a home yoga practice for new mothers. From the warm-up of first days with a newborn to the wobbly-but-standing postures of confident new motherhood, Breathing Space for New Mothers encourages women to notice and nurture their feelings and foster self-compassion to approach motherhood with curiosity instead of fear, improvisation instead of rigidity, and humor instead of worry. The authors offer mothers a singular message: your well-being matters as much as your baby’s. Each chapter ends with a one-minute mindful yoga practice, which can be done in a sequence to create a relaxing and balancing support for the incredibly demanding first nine months with a baby.

ALISON ROGERS trained as a Kripalu Yoga instructor at Kripalu Center for Yoga and earned a master's degree in counseling psychology from Harvard and a doctoral degree in Cross-Cultural Child Development from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After more than thirty years of clinical work as a therapist and educator, she shifted her focus to create the Yoga of Parenting workshops, a practice and philosophy that integrates principles from cutting- edge Western psychology with mindful yoga to help parents as they practice caring for their children with confidence, authenticity, and pleasure.

ERIN WHITE received her MFA in fiction writing from the University of Massachusetts. She is the author of Given Up for You: A Memoir of Love, Belonging, and Belief. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, including several anthologies: The Bitch is Back, the sequel to The Bitch in the House; Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers; and Oh Baby: True Stories About Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Labor and Love.