The most comfortable yoga positions in pregnancy are very similar to positions women instinctively assume in labor. So, by practicing the exercises, you will have cultivated ease and comfort in the natural positions for birth used by women through the ages, without needing to think about it very much. You will be able to move freely and instinctively; your body will know what to do. Yoga will help you to be more deeply in touch with your own center. It will be easier to surrender to the powerful forces within your body during labor.
As stiffness lessens, your body becomes free of pain.
You will gradually become familiar with the discomforts and even the pain of going beyond your usual limits. As labor and birth will demand going beyond your normal limits of pain endurance, positioning your body to go beyond your normal limits of movement during pregnancy prepares you gradually for this kind of effort. The exercises will teach you to surrender to the forces within your body. This is the best possible practice for labor; it will help you to cope with the intensity of the sensations of your contracting uterus, and will also help to reduce the pain by enabling you to relax and accept the feelings rather than tensing up against them. As one mother said, "By exercising, I learned how to be at one physically and emotionally with the changes that would inevitably lead to the birth of my child. The teaching enabled me to 'go with' my body, even when the pain was a burden. I was physically and also mentally prepared for everything that was to happen to me, and I approached the final events with excitement and real confidence."
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