Valerie May Yoga

Should living really be about tracking every metric constant restriction, carrying an umbrella everywhere in case the sun damages your collagen & obsessing over supplement spreadsheets.

Your bloodwork is perfect, but when you look in the mirror, you feel s**t as you think you’ve aged too much .

You hit your daily 10K steps but are unaware of your surroundings as you rush to get to work at the same time .

And when your kid tries to talk to you, you’re totally distracted because you’re busy thinking about tomorrow’s workout.

Right now you’re treating your life like something that you need to optimise by tracking, measuring and looking for the next thing to do to stay healthy & in control.

But all that does is pull you out of the place where your life is happening.

You’re so busy trying to protect your future self that you’re missing the experience of being present.

Instead of living your life, you’re managing it. Instead of feeling your body you’re monitoring it.

The irony of this is that the more you perfect your health the further you are from the actual experience of being alive.

But yoga has something beautiful to offer. The traditional practice of yoga is not a way to optimise yourself or a self improvement project.

A good yoga practice teaches you to stop, breathe, feel your feet on the floor and notice what is here without trying to change it.

It strips away the noise you’re constantly distracted by until you can see clearly that you don’t have to change anything

So that when you go for a walk, you notice the trees & sky.

When you eat your dinner, you stop calculating your protein and start appreciating the taste of your meal.

When your partner speaks to you, you’re there to hear them.

And when you look in the mirror, you see yourself as you are rather than a face that needs fixing before you can enjoy your life .

Freedom isn’t waiting in the future it’s here right now found by doing less of what pulls you away from yourself and more of what brings you back

So maybe the goal isn’t to reduce your biological age to 30 when you’re 20 years older . The goal should be to make sure that while you’re here you’re actually here.

Being a new parent is a beautiful thing, but it’s also f-ing hard.

No one really warns you how lonely the new parent journey can be.

People spend so much time telling you, “Sleep now because you won’t ever sleep as well again,” or “Long days, but short years.”

But no one tells you about spending most of your day with your baby, yet sometimes feeling incredibly alone.

You haven’t felt like yourself in 5 months. You totally love your baby. They’re hitting their milestones, becoming more interactive and yet there are days when you feel really sad.

That then makes you feel guilty. Because you desperately wanted this baby.

So why aren’t you happier? And why do you dream of just having 5 minutes where someone doesn’t need you?

Right now you deal with that loneliness by scrolling your phone, or keeping busy with jobs around the house,.

It feels like everyone else is getting on with their lives while you’re stuck in this world of feeds, nappies and broken sleep.

But when you spend time with other women who are going through this same exhausting, brilliant mess, something shifts.

As you realise it isn’t just you.

This is one of the reasons I love mummy and baby yoga classes so much.

Inside these classes you’ll find the occasional recognisable downward-facing dog, but you’ll also find other new mums who are where you are at too.

You can chat about what being a new mum is and feel supported when someone says, “OMG, me too,” and you know they deeply get it.

You’ll laugh, start to recognise the same faces, make plans for lunch after class. And nobody will bat an eyelid at the cafe when you bring your 6-month-old along because they’ve brought theirs too.

It becomes somewhere you can turn up exactly as you are. Tired, emotional, baby attached to you, unsure whether you’ve brushed your hair.

And slowly, you start to build your people.

Because sometimes what you need isn’t another piece of advice about how quickly these years will pass.

You need someone sitting next to you saying, “Yep. Me too.”

And that’s what mummy and baby yoga is about.

Come for the yoga. Stay for the community. Leave knowing you’re not doing this alone.

Midlife reinvention for women is massive right now.

We all know someone who is moving to Lisbon or just bought a house in the countryside. If it’s not the house, it’s the divorce, or the qualification, or the practice, or the brand she is about to launch about the thing she learned from the qualification and the practice.

We all know her. Some of us are her. I am often looking up villas for sale that I can’t afford on a Greek Isle I have never been to.

So as you’re around 50, right now you’re apparently supposed to be considering blowing your whole life up.

Your marriage, your job, your house, the whole version of yourself that got you here to become someone new and shiny.

You’re told that real midlife is waiting behind a wellness retreat. Or a novel you haven’t written. Or a man fifteen years younger. Or a skincare protocol with a waitlist.

But the message is the one you have been hearing your whole live. That who you are now is not quite right, and if you just try one more thing, you will finally arrive.

Spoiler alert you will not.

Instead of thinking you have to find a whole new self, shed everything that apparently was never really you. You need to start accepting yourself.

Because when you stop trying to fix yourself, you create space to actually experience and appreciate the life have.

And this, to me, is a huge part of what a good yoga practice can teach you.

Not that your life needs perfecting. But how to notice what is here, and stay with yourself instead of constantly judging it.

So the pitch for the second half of life shouldn’t be about becoming someone new.

It should be about becoming more of who you already are and to stop apologising for being her.

This is what a yoga is meant to teach you.

It allows you to sit alongside your 50-year-old face, your changing body, your complicated emotions, your brilliant bits and your less brilliant bits and say.

Yep. This is me.

You don’t need a house in Morocco with a vintage tiled floor. Or a field in the Cotswolds with a mini donkey in it.

And you certainly don’t need to become a different version of yourself to fall in love with the 50+ you.

You just need a practice that shows you how.

It might seem counterintuitive if you haven’t given birth before, but the last thing you want to do is stay still through contractions and up to delivery. That’s because when you stay still, your body is more tense, your pelvis can't move freely, and its harder to find comfortable positions through contractions.

Moving during birth is highly recommended and beneficial because it helps with staying comfortable and in control to find positions that feel right for you.

Knowing and practicing all of this ahead of time is key, so that you can advocate for yourself during labour

This is really why a prenatal yoga practice comes in so handy.

All 4’s with cat/cow or body circles, leaning against a wall or shifting from side to side, or anything that helps move your hips and keeps your body relaxed so that your pelvis can move and your baby has room to descend.

Upright movements help as they use gravity to your advantage and free the bones of the pelvis to shift and allow your baby to descend down through the birth canal.

Moving also helps you to connect with your breath, making enduring birthing pain more doable.

My pregnancy yoga class is basically a preparatory laboratory for birth.

Inside class you’ll learn how to connect breath and movement so that when you are in labour, there is already a familiarity with utilising your breath to help stay calm and relaxed, even when there is strong sensation happening in the body.

When all of that is practiced it becomes like second nature, you’ll far more easily be able to breathe through intense sensations, move into positions that feel supportive, and stay connected to your body instead of feeling overwhelmed, when the day comes.

You don't need to be confined to a wheelchair or bed during labour.

You can move, change positions, use your breath, and find ways of working with your body that help you feel more comfortable and empowered, while advocating for what you need throughout your birth.

So get your cat/cow on, take a walk, rock your hips, do some gentle squats on the way to seeing your baby’s new face.

That’s exactly what we do on Saturday morning inside my prenatal classes. So come join us.

Giving birth stressful. All the prep, the worry of the unknown, it’s common to be overwhelmed and arrive at hospital in early labour, only to be shocked that contractions have slowed,, spaced out, or maybe stopped altogether. It feels like you've made no progress at all.

That's often the moment the panic sets in. You start worrying why your contractions have stopped, if you’ve done something wrong and whether they are going to send you home.

But you're not doing anything wrong and your body is NOT failing. This is a normal physiological response.

Your brain constantly scans for safety, so a new environment, a busy hospital ward, unfamiliar people, bright lights, different sounds and smells, can trigger your nervous system to become more alert. When adrenaline rises, it interferes with oxytocin, the hormone driving your contractions, so labour temporarily slows.

So here’s an example You arrive at the crazy busy hospital and your thoughts go into overdrive. Where do I go? Who is that in the room and is everyone watching me? You need to answer loads of questions. Another contraction is coming, they want to do an internal exam...

At this point your brain asks one question to your nervous system. Am I safe? Until it gets the answer yes, stress hormones will rise and labour will slow.

That's one reason many women are encouraged to stay at home during early labour. Arriving at hospital in established labour means the change in environment has less impact on the flow of labour.

The good news? You can support your nervous system with:

Longer exhales which to help settle the nervous system. Gentle rocking movements and positions that encourage the body to soften. Jaw release and sounds. Positive affirmations and guided relaxation.

These are practical tools to calm your nervous system, so that when adrenaline starts to creep in, you'll be able to stay grounded, work with your contractions and trust your body instead of fighting against it.

So If you don't want a long labour, don't just prepare your birth plan. Prepare your nervous system.

If you would like to learn these techniques, I'd love to welcome you to one of my pregnancy yoga classes.

Right now you're treating motherhood like the job you used to have.

You had a senior corporate job, worked all the hours, hardly spent any time at home. You were good at it, so when the baby came, you did what worked before, you researched, read everything & tried to build yourself a system.

Suddenly there you are all day long, alone at home with your dependent baby. You assumed it would be manageable rather than a complete confidence shaker.

But a baby isn't a 9-5 research project, where you can use your laptop to collate results and set aside of an evening to enjoy a comfortable night's sleep. If babies were a work project, you could delegate tasks to someone on your team, you could prepare and put in the groundwork so you'd know what was ahead of you, but that's not possible with a baby who is completely unpredictable.

So instead you've ended up here. It's quite alarming to realise you can't go to the toilet without first thinking about the safety and wellbeing of your baby, or that you can't have a bath without worrying you might not hear her crying over the noise of the running water.

You want someone to tell you what to do, to train you up, instead you feel lost at sea with zero routine, never knowing what to do and if you're doing it correctly.

There are libraries of go-to advice on how to look after your baby, but sadly it all contradicts itself, and the advice changes daily, so it's confusing what's the right way to do things, and it's intimidating reading all this expert advice that's often impossible to implement in real life.

More research is never going to fix being distracted from responding to your baby who is in front of you.

What you actually need isn't another system, it's the presence so to get to know your baby.

At my yoga classes, you get the chance to lay down the weight of responsibility for 1 hour, move your body and breathe. As you begin to calm down and relax, you may start to connect to that inner motherly instinct to see what actually works for you and your baby.

If you're ready to stop searching for the “right” way so that you can start to appreciate your baby, join us for mummy and baby yoga taster sessions in August.

I think we’ve got a little lost over the last few years. Being healthy in 2026 seems to have become something that we buy whether that’s the latest gadget or the newest supplement.. or the exciting trend that is promising to change your whole life. And all these things coming with hefty price tags.

But before we spend thousands on the latest wellness must have, have we nailed the foundations . So things like getting enough sleep, moving our bodies every day, eating nourishing food, getting outside in daylight and taking time to slow down and destress..

I’m not saying that any of the products in this carousel are bad, they have their place. I’m just wondering if we do truly need all of these things before we’ve looked after the basics.

Health doesn’t need to be expensive and it doesn’t have to be perfect. It certainly shouldn’t make us feel overwhelmed.

Sometimes the most powerful things that we do can do are also the simplest.

So if you’re feeling totally exhausted by the pressure to keep up with every new wellness trend, you’re in the right place keep your eyes peeled for something new that’s coming very soon.

You're 30 weeks pregnant, and at night you're finding your whole body revs up and won't come down.

Maybe it's after the appointment where they said baby was measuring too big. Maybe it's because you mind is constantly running through everything that could go wrong during your baby’s birth.

So you've been doing what every pregnant woman does. You asked Chat GPT, you saved all the birth prep posts, maybe you even bought extra calming pre-natal supplements.

But none of it reaches you in the middle of the night when you’re panicking and need it the most. That’s because reading about how to be calm at 2pm in the afternoon doesn't lead to you being able to find calm at 2am.

What you're really wishing for is to walk into your birth feeling steady, trusting your body’s ability to handle the birth experience, and to get some actual sleep between now and then.

Here's why the saved posts and AI aren't getting you there.

Information calms your thoughts, but the revving isn't happening in your thoughts, it's happening in your nervous system, and your nervous system doesn't read books. It responds to signals from your body, which means you need a tool that works through the body, that you've practiced enough times that it's simply there when the surge hits, at 2am or in the delivery room.

Yoga has had one for a very long time. It's called Bhramari, bee breath, and it's beautifully simple.

You close your eyes, rest your fingers over your ears, and exhale with a low steady hum, so the vibration has nowhere to go but through you. That hum stimulates your vagus nerve, the main line that tells your whole system it's safe to settle, and it lengthens your exhale without you having to count or think.

It's why midwives and prenatal teachers have long used humming and low vocal sounds as a birthing breath, and my prenatal students tell me that it works.

Tonight, instead of spinning out for hours, losing sleep and waking up exhausted, try three slow rounds and notice what your heart rate does.

If you want to actually build this into your body before your due date, so it's already yours when labour starts, this is exactly what we practice in my prenatal classes. Join us.