Last week, I spent 5 full days with some wonderful women learning about prenatal and postnatal yoga. I learned so much, not only as a yoga teacher but also as a pregnant woman and as a future mother. Women from all generations were there sharing their stories. Some were trying to get pregnant, some had lost their babies, some had 2 year-olds, some had 20 year-olds.
The teacher showed us some movies about birth and labor, which made me cry pretty much every time. One of them was about the story of women giving birth throughout the ages. There was an aztec statue of a goddess giving birth with a crazy face, called Tlazolteotl featured several times during the movie.
The next day, one of the ladies said she had something to show us, she had bought a replicate of that same statue in a Mexican market many years ago. So it became our mascot for the remaining of the training (in the middle of the picture above).
At the end of the training when we took our little shrine down which included objects that women had brought representing birth and womanhood, a little baby gecko came out of it.
The teacher thought it was so curious she did some research on their symbolism.
"Geckos are a symbol of change such as transformation, death and rebirth.
"Lucky charms carved in their likeness were said to preserve eyesight and worn by pregnant women to insure a safe delivery of a happy healthy child."
When I told this story to Vanessa, she said she was going to paint a henna gecko on my belly...
No comments:
Post a Comment