I had a yoga class today - I had a card for free sessions and am working my way through them. I was having a very heavy period and the entire time I was paranoid about bleeding through and having the others noticing the stains on my yoga mat.

Do you ever skip or change your yoga plans for concerns like that?

It is better to relax and enjoy the period rather than worries or being trained while the body want to rest from too much activities and daily involvement.

Dear Dace -

It sounds like we have different points of view about yoga, and about having a period

First, I have a period for 7 straight days. That means it's a quarter of my life. I am not going to lay on a bed bored out of my skull for a quarter of my life.

Second, yoga isn't something I want to "stop doing"! It is a normal, happy, daily part of what I do. It is about breathing and meditation and stretching and enjoying my morning. If I don't do yoga, my body aches. It feels tense and unhappy. Yoga is what *makes* me have rest and enjoyment.

If you are practiced during menstruation they can cause reflex or back flow of menstrual blood from the uterus to the fallopian tubes and then to the abdominal cavity. The blood would carry along with it some endometrial cells and tissue - this is called retrograde menstruation.

It mentions in the authentic and ancient texts that asanas should be avoided. It is a controversial issue but it is better avoided during menstruation.

Marina -

I'm curious, how would for example doing tree pose cause my menstrual blood to flow upwards? Surely only upside-down poses would cause that?

I feel that doing yoga during my period HELPS things. It soothes my achy body and stressed out emotions.

I only bleed about four days. Seven would suck. I think i my mom has the same periodicity.

Usually i have a really bad emotional day or two, and sometimes also bad cramps. Yoga helps with both situations.

I am of the opinion that even inversions are not a problem. I am not sure my blood will actually go back up my tubes and fall out into my body. It doesn't make sense that it could so easily fall out. That would be a pretty bad design flaw.

here is what the yoga journal has to say about this (ie- that nothing is proven about this fear). The women web MD even suggests elevating your legs (and exercise) to relieve endometriosis.

Of course, there are simple one minute inversions and then there are half hour ones. I would think if this was a worry one could avoid the extended inversions when bleeding.

Witches I have discussed this with come down firmly on the gentle practice and avoid prolonged inversion techniques side of things. A few years ago a local Portsmouth (UK) Witch contributed This arcticle on the subject to an internet complimentary health forum.

Hope it helps

Great articles Jilly and Ian - thank you for sharing those!

I don't do prolonged inversions so I think I'm OK there.

I definitely feel healthier and more relaxed when I do yoga daily so I think it could only hurt to stop doing those activities right when my body needed relaxation.

I was thinking about your original question about bleeding through to the mat. It seems your cloth pads are not really up to heavy flows?

It was fine, I was just paranoid

Lisa, I definitely agree, and if anything the stress reduction aspects of yoga are even more beneficial during this time. I was just discussing this with my own yoga teacher (in fact I interviewed her on my blog recently and we talked about exactly this, hope it's ok to link to that here.)

It's interesting because women didn't practice yoga until the last 100 years or so (am also reading an excellent book on the history of yoga BTW called The Subtle Body for anyone interested), and when it was introduced to women a lot of cultural biases and misunderstandings were introduced, including the idea that inversions caused flow problems. Medically, that's been proven not to be the case. Energetically, in terms of the flow of upana - our natural 'releasing' energy (prana being its counterpart) - there is still the idea that our body is trying to release during menstruation, and that inverting may take that energy up into our belly area, which is the 'fire' area, which could throw off the energetic release, either causing us too release too much or too little upana. But many women have found that light inversions, and certainly a full yoga practice, are very beneficial at this time. So I think it is about trusting and feeling what is right for our body, which yoga really helps us tune into.

I've been thinking about this topic over the past few months and I absolutely find that, for me, it's important to keep doing yoga. If I just "stop" for a full week I feel awful. Now that being said, I don't do inversions in my routine, so maybe that is part of it for me.