Relief from pregnancy related low back pain

 I've been looking at how the body moves for as long as I can remember. Teaching movement comes naturally — I know it in my bones. Throughout my twenties I danced on stages, taught yoga, and trained in the Alexander Technique. I taught in a university dance department, where I was honored as the person who most impacted first-year students on a campus of 22,000.

The question I always return to is the same: how does the body find ease and connection?

This course is the answer to how that looks for a pregnant body.

It's been on my mind for years.

I remember hiking into the backcountry, Lake Tahoe just coming into view. I had recently finished a prenatal yoga teacher training in San Francisco and was thinking about how little support there was for pregnant women navigating a changing body.

I was connecting ideas with what I already knew from years of studying and teaching the Alexander Technique (AT) — a somatic practice that looks at how we carry ourselves, and how we get in our own way. It’s also a place people land when they’ve tried everything for low back pain.

And I remember thinking:
Why aren’t we talking about these things in pregnancy? Aren't we just re-organizing ourselves around a shifting center of gravity?

Five years passed.

In that time, my AT teaching was quiet while my yoga teaching was thriving. My classes were full, I was leading retreats in far-off places, and working privately with people who win music awards. A Korean princess once called me a national treasure.

Then came the pandemic. Everything fell apart. And I got pregnant.

And suddenly the idea to help pregnant women came rushing back.

I created a series of prenatal yoga classes, but that wasn't it. I couldn’t yet wrap my mind around how to translate what my body already knew.

It wasn’t until my second pregnancy that it began to come into focus.

My husband (also an AT teacher) was dealing with a moment of low back pain and started to play with connecting his deep core to what we already knew. He suggested I try the same. 

As we worked through it it started to make more and more sense. And it became clear the pattern wasn't only behind low back pain — it was related to pelvic girdle pain and sciatica too.

There was a predictable pattern hiding in plain sight.

And so we built this course. And I tried it with my yoga students. And he tried it with his AT students.

Again and again, it worked. 

In my third trimester, people started to tell me, "you're such a great pregnant person!"
And I just smiled and said, "well, thank you."

But I knew how to work with the pattern.
I knew how to carry myself.

And that made all the difference.