The Birthlight Trust is an educational charity, with over 30 years’ experience of promoting an integrated approach to pregnancy, birth, babyhood and parenting with Yoga.

Pregnancy, birth and the first 1000 days are an exciting and fragile time. Women need support to connect or reconnect with their own body and prepare for the arrival of a new life. Birthlight offers unique yoga-based teacher training to mother the mothers and nurture new life, on land and water. Our simple yet effective moves and our way to teach in circles help to build strong and healthy foundations for life. Our courses include: Fertility Yoga, Pregnancy Yoga, Birth Preparation, Postnatal Yoga, Aqua Yoga, Nurturing Baby Massage, Baby Yoga, Toddler Yoga, Baby Swimming, Toddler Swimming and Well Woman Yoga.

In a nutshell, our aim is to practically support the wellbeing of women through the journey of pregnancy and birth and to help both parents and infants relax in mutual enjoyment of their life together. We do this by transferring specially designed, original sets of body-based skills and exercises. These are drawn from classic yoga and also from traditional modes of care and parenting across cultures. We work both on land and in water with parents to be and new parents with their babies.

At the heart of Birthlight is Francoise Freedman PhD, whose vision for Birthlight has stemmed from her field research with rainforest indigenous people in South America, her teaching as a medical anthropologist and her exploration of innovative body-based practices to support motherhood as a trained yoga teacher/therapist and swimmer.