The journey to starting Grounded Motion
It is through the journey into motherhood itself that I truly started to understand the unique challenges faced by women throughout this transition. The lack of knowledge, community (in its truest sense) and the low accessibility to affordable, supportive, holistic care really took me by surprise. There is a true power in being supported to trust one's own intuition and to be in an environment which supports and connects women in the creation of practices, physical and spiritual, that honor what it is to be a woman and the experiences shared in each season of life.
It was the journey through my first pregnancy, birth and my postnatal period that really had me reflecting on what holistic and accessible services are actually available to women, to support them with the unique seasons of life, month to month, year to year.
For many years now, I’ve had a deep love of yoga. I've had my own personal yoga practice for almost 15 years. Completing my yoga teacher training was on my bucket list for many years. Like so many other things in life, competing priorities kept getting in the way. In 2021 I was finally booked in to undertake my 6 week intensive training at Krishna Village when once again life had other plans only this time it was a delay that the training could wait for and a delay that I was yet to find out would set the foundations to the kind of practice and teacher I wanted to be. I was pregnant with my first child.
Whilst pregnant with my first child I continued my fitness training much as it looked prior to being pregnant, just slight modifications as needed as my pregnancy progressed. I was still doing HIIT workouts, taking 16,000 steps each day at work, going for walks before or after work and attending a beautiful prenatal yoga class once a week. What strikes me the most during this time and my approach to my own personal movement practice was the number of people who told me that I couldn’t and shouldn’t continue weight and cardio training, that as I was pregnant I should be resting instead of moving. And yet birthing my son was and remains to be the longest endurance process I have ever taken part in, it required physical and mental strength, I labored for 18 hours, with no rest and I feel that my movement practice throughout pregnancy contributed to the physical strength that saw me through labor and in to my postpartum period.
I had a beautiful water birth and there isn’t anything I would wish to change but nothing had really prepared me for the fact that having a child almost feels like my body went back to ground zero. There were muscles I had never even considered before which I now had to actively work on rebuilding. Throughout my pregnancy and postpartum period I saw a wonderful women's health physiotherapist, who supported me through pregnancy and re-building strength, it is something I acknowledge I am lucky to be able to afford.
When my first born was around 10 months old as a family of 3 we headed up to the Northern Rivers region of NSW for me to undertake my 6 week intensive Yoga Teacher training at the Krishna Village. At the time I was doing the teacher training mostly for my own personal practice with the intention of teaching a free community class for mums to be able to attend with their children.
I still teach a free community class each week, however it was through personal experience, personal practice and self guided study that the vision for Grounded Motion was born and continues to grow…