Did you know that in many parts of the world they have special dances for pregnancy and birth, celebrating fertility, roundness and ripeness of the female body in pregnancy? This is how the oriental belly dance was “invented”. It was a dance of pregnancy, dedicated to the moon as the feminine element. Heavily pregnant women would get together with their female cousins and just dance. Men would not even be allowed in there, it was a “women’s thing”. The soft circular and spiral movements of the belly and the whole body were used to keep the woman healthy and strong and get the baby in the optimal position for birth. They would give birth dancing, gently nudging the baby down the birth canal in soft round motions.
Photo credits: Contrapposto
Inspired by the lovely lady at my recent Active Birth workshop who told me about the secret of belly dancing, I prepared a pregnancy yoga class based on oriental belly dance. The moves of belly dance are perfect for releasing tension in the hips, opening and energising the pelvic area and strengthening deep abdominal muscles. It was quite fun to let the hips roll experimenting with plenty of gentle round movements and I’m sure the little ones loved it too.
Researching and planning the class I’ve found out that there is already a couple of teachers, though mostly in the US and Australia who try to bring together yoga and belly dance. An interesting example is Australian based Lebanese-Palestinian Maha Al Musa, a dancer, doula, writer and human rights activist, who gave birth to her last child at the age of 46 in her own home - belly dancing :) Here is one of her videos explaining the basic circular movement in belly dance.
Another lady who really knows how to spin her hips in the right way is Las Vegas based Amira, a belly dancer who released a DVD called Belly Dance and Yoga for Pregnancy. The yoga part is very very basic and transitions between the poses sometimes quite rough, but the belly dancing part is awesome! It took me a while to decipher some of the hip loops. Later I realised that it’s better to just let the hips get the movement before the mind.
Belly dance is not really an easy thing. In order to master it you need to learn how to move each segment of your body separately. I found it crazy how, for example, they can dance with the chest only while keeping the rest of the body still. So, only the part from the diaphragm to the neck moves, while the shoulders stay where they are. Or maybe moving just one hip in very tight circles… Huh, I guess these things are a bit out of reach for most of us in the West, used to use our hips in a bit…hm… more politically correct way.
Anyway, here are some of the little drawings I made during my research for the class, trying to understand the loops of hips drawing diagrams (oh, so Western from me).
And here is the belly dance inspired yoga class we had (yeah, some more stick men :)
