Whether it’s through strengthening the right muscles, training yourself to focus on breathing or helping you to locate your inner calm, taking pre-natal yoga classes can really help when it comes time to push.

I sit on my yoga mat looking out at nine pregnant bellies, nine expectant faces. It’s the start of another of the six-week pre-natal yoga courses that I teach.

I begin by telling them a little about myself and my own birth experience. “I had a very long birth — around four days,” I tell the expectant mothers, even before I can stop or edit myself. I go on, despite the looks of fear and shock on many of the women’s faces. I explain how I managed to endure several days of labour, including 16 hours of intense, established contractions, without using any drugs for pain management.

This is all thanks to yoga. Yoga gave me the tools to work with my breath and stay centred, calm and grounded despite the rigours of an unusually protracted labour. Because I remained calm, my baby didn’t go into distress. His little heartbeat stayed steady and strong throughout, which meant the doctors did not feel the need to intervene any earlier.

Understanding and relief now settle upon the women’s faces. I too feel a sense of relief for candidly revealing my self-perceived failure to achieve the wished-for “natural” birth when my birth plan was thrown out of the window and I ended up in the operating theatre.

Like many women, I have had to deal with this disappointment. However, I can also credit my yoga practice for ultimately providing me with the insight to be compassionate towards myself and move on. I have come to see this as the first of many great lessons in acceptance and surrender that accompany the path of motherhood.

Can yoga guarantee an easy birth?

A common belief is that regular yoga practice will make for an easy birth. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The kind of labour you have depends on many factors completely beyond your control. These may include your age, genetics and the conditions surrounding your labour: your birth support team, location and so on.

Of course, many of the special pre-natal yoga postures can help in opening the pelvis and positioning the baby optimally for birth, but there are no guarantees. Despite your best efforts, your baby may decide to position herself in breach or the placenta may end up low lying; or you may find, as I did, that you have a very slow first stage of labour (dilation of the cervix).

The greatest benefit yoga can offer is to transform our experience of our labour, no matter if it ends up veering from our hoped-for birth plan.

Byron Bay mum Annette Paysden took pre-natal yoga classes throughout her first pregnancy and found it helped her front up to her birth feeling mentally confident and empowered. “Due to circumstances beyond my control, I didn’t end up in my chosen birth-place, enjoying a natural water birth,” explains Annette. “But I found that I was able to draw on the calming techniques I had learnt in yoga and stay focused on channelling a positive outcome through to my baby.”