3 things you need to know to teach fertility yoga

So you want to teach fertility yoga? Perhaps you’ve recently gone through your own fertility journey, or maybe you just have a strong interest in this area.

For me, teaching fertility yoga is incredibly meaningful work. At its heart fertility yoga is about creating the space and a practice to help relieve some of the extreme stress that an infertility journey creates.

So I guess the question then is… If you’re already a yoga teacher; do you need to do additional training or is your standard teacher training enough?

This depends on a few different factors; your experience with yoga, your own fertility journey and your understanding of the menstrual cycle. Let’s talk about the 3 things I think you should know if you want to teach fertility yoga.

What you need to know to teach fertility yoga

How to calm the nervous system during times of great stress

Infertility, baby loss, IVF and other assisted reproductive procedures are often stressful, depressing and lonely journeys. Yoga during these times is incredibly helpful to manage and reduce stress that may make fertility problems even worse.

The good news is that as yoga teachers – this is our core business! You likely already know many great practices that can help to relieve the stress for these women. I find it is also helpful to teach them practices that they can take off the mat and use during their everyday life as well. For example ujjayi breath can be a helpful tool during procedures to manage anxiety. This helps them to have tools to use between classes to manage stress, rather than always relying on coming to a class for support.

How to live and move by your menstrual cycle for optimum health

Fertility yoga is a practice that honours our femininity and our cyclical nature. Knowledge of the menstrual cycle and the four different energetic stages helps women to connect with themselves more deeply and look after their whole being.

This inevitably leads to increased fertility, because fertility is the icing on the cake of our healthy bodies. By using menstrual cycle awareness to guide our movement and self care we’re able to greatly improve fertility in a way that doesn’t feel obsessive and solely focused on conception. This knowledge and self care is also incredibly helpful for women going into motherhood, so it’s a win win really.

Menstrual cycle awareness is an understanding of the four energetic stages of the female menstrual cycle; menstruation (Winter), pre-ovulation (Spring), ovulation (Summer) and pre-menstruation (Autumn). Knowledge of these stages helps us to rest well and turn inwards during the times in the cycle where our body naturally craves this. It’s about listening to our bodies cues and planning our life in a way that supports it, rather than trying to force or push our body to go against its natural energy.

If menstrual cycle awareness is something you’d like to know more about, we go into depth on this topic in my fertility yoga teacher training. We approach this through a personal exploration of our own cycle and energy, and you’ll learn what yoga practices are best for the different stages of the cycle to support fertility.

Empathy for how hard fertility journeys can be.

Empathy and understanding of the challenges that that trying to conceive presents for some women is probably the most important element if you’re going to teach fertility yoga. In order to hold the space for these women you need to be able to truly connect to that deep longing for a child, (whether you’ve had children of your own yet or not is irrelevant). If you’re able to connect to that longing and have a desire to work with women in this space to help arm them with tools to manage the challenges, then I think this work is perfect for you.

If you have any questions about my fertility yoga teacher training watch this Q&A video, or learn more here.