Photo taken at Carrboro Yoga Company
Whole Mama Yoga is yoga, community, and commiseration for all phases of motherhood and parenthood – from preconception to parenting.
Through Whole Mama Yoga, we offer prenatal and postnatal yoga classes and workshops, perinatal yoga teacher training, motherhood retreats, private movement sessions, and more!
Our Whole Mama Yoga Collective of teachers and perinatal professionals offer a wide variety of services that support mothers, parents and families.
On our blog, you’ll find yoga sequences, tips, and humor for our readers on the path of motherhood and parenthood, whether you’re looking for fertility support, prenatal help, postnatal support, or community.
We hope to foster that community both online (through online classes, questions, comments, guest blog posts, and private social media groups) and offline (in our in-person classes, workshops and retreats, through our yoga teacher training offerings, and in private sessions).
Our mission is to provide yoga resources, education, and community during all parts of motherhood. We believe in supporting motherhood and parenthood in an authentic way, and we strive to recognize the beauty, challenge, and absurdity in the experience of being a mama or parent.
With Love,
The Whole Mama Yoga Philosophy
Where We Stand On:
Inclusivity & Anti-Oppression Measures, Identity, Language, Accessibility, Birth Experience, and Feeding Choices
Whole Mama Yoga is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Any pregnant or postpartum person of any race, ethnicity, national orientation, religion, relationship status, sexual orientation, or gender identity is welcome in Whole Mama Yoga prenatal and postnatal classes, workshops, and trainings. We do our best to speak that invitation and let that invitation be reflected in the promotional materials we use and the language we use.
As Whole Mama Yoga, we use language that is both gender-neutral and gender-acknowledging, since historically LGBTQIA+ experiences, women’s experiences, and motherhood have all been erased or minimized. We believe that inclusivity has to be both gender-acknowledging and gender-neutral, rather than exclusively gender-neutral, and our language reflects both realities, taking an additive approach, so that parents who identify as non-binary and LGBTQIA+ feel invited and welcome and parents who identify as women and mothers do not feel erased. Those in healing and health professions need to use more inclusive language and communicate with LGBTQIA+ families with greater sensitivity and competence, and we are making strides to do so. We know and recognize that not everyone who gives birth is a woman, and we consciously use alternatives some of the time, just as we consciously use women and mother some of the time. As we work to use gender-neutral language along with gendered language embraced by the majority, we hope that you recognize as we do that we are all growing, loving, learning beings. We want what we offer to be of service to anyone who needs it, with no judgement or withholding.
As white women, we are aware of structuralized racism that is built into the fabric of our society, and the fact that it causes inequality of resources and care when it comes to Black and other non-white women and mothers. We are always self-educating, reading, and striving for more self-awareness as mothers, teachers, yoga professionals, and humans in the area of anti-racism and equality. As part of our mission and as part of our Prenatal and Postnatal Yoga Teacher Training, we believe it is our responsibility to address issues of structuralized racist oppression in birth, pregnancy, and parenthood. We acknowledge that this country was built on slave labor, followed by years of segregation, leading to systemic racism and structuralized oppression of Black people. Unequal resource distribution due to a history of oppression, plus continuing bias and discrimination, lead to inequality of care during pregnancy and birth. This is reflected in higher death rates in Black mothers across the nation, sometimes double the rate of white women. As part of our effort to address structural racism, we educate our students on these mortality rates of Black mothers, we bring in speakers who discuss racialized maternal health inequality, we list care resources for BIPOC and BINW mothers on our website, and more efforts. We know that large-scale, top-town changes are necessary, but we believe the (small) part that we can play is advocacy and education.
We recognize that multiple factors including race, orientation, national origin, religion, and family values, personal experiences and preferences lead to a diversity of views, preferences, and opinions about birth and parenting. We strive to support all experiences of motherhood/parenthood by fostering autonomy and personal agency of mothers and parents, rather than being prescriptive or presumptive about anyone’s experience of motherhood or parenthood.
We are prochoice. We recognize that families need the opportunity to plan, and the choice to have a child can only be made by the pregnant person. We believe in access to birth control and fair and equal access to abortion services.
In our classes, we do not privilege any particular type of birth. We believe all birth experiences are valid, and we make every effort to use the terms “intervention-free” or “unmedicated birth” and “Caesarean birth,” which are more accurate and inclusive than phrases like “natural birth” or “Caesarean section.” All birth is natural and all birth is birth!
We do not privilege any one way of infant feeding. We believe the person in the best position to make choices about how to feed a baby is a mother or parent, and we recognize that all ways of caring for and feeding a baby must consider both baby and mother/parent.
Our classes and workshops are accessible and available to folks of all levels of income. If you would like to attend our offerings but do not have the financial ability to do so, scholarship, free, and sliding scale options are available. Please contact us and let us know your needs, and we will work with you to determine the best way for you to attend.