Twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays I waddle off to pregnancy yoga.

This isn't the first time I've dabbled in yoga. I first tried it many years ago when I moved from Johannesburg to Cape Town to study, and instantly turned into a hippie.

Yoga was a small part of this journey, and something I left behind after I graduated, got a job and could afford real clothes and hair dye. But pregnancy is an unusual time and one finds oneself revisiting all sorts of things you thought were safely behind you. Like teenage tantrums... and well, zen exercises.

I attended my first yoga class feeling a wee bit apprehensive after three long immobile months spent clutching the toilet bowl wracked with morning sickness. Halfway through the class though, I realised there was very little to worry about.

The beauty about being many months pregnant is that there is only so much bending, stretching and contorting one can do. Most of the time pregnancy yoga just means sitting around with our eyes closed, breathing in and out.

Mind you, every now and again we might get told to stretch one arm up and over. And if we haven't zoned out so much as to actually hear what our yoga instructor has just told us, we might even do this.

Waddling women; gentle lunger
In the land of pregnancy yoga, the energetic deep lunges required of you in normal yoga translate into gentle steps forward, if we feel like it. Toe touches mean knee touches in our class. Really, we're just a room full of spaced out, waddling women who every so often might bend a couple of degrees to the right. We breathe heavily mind you. Anyone listening outside might think we were doing a spinning class. Because if there's one truth about pregnancy it's that it doesn't take much to work up a sweat nor get you breathing heavily. Even a minute of shoulder rolls can do the trick.

The best part of the hour-long class is where we all get to lie on our left sides for five minutes with our eyes closed doing absolutely nothing. This is called meditating and is very beneficial to both mother and baby, because as our yoga instructor keeps telling us – 'a calm mama has a calm baba'.

Which is possibly the real reason we all keep coming back for more. We're all hoping like hell for a zen baby.

Oohhhhmm...

Susan Newham is a journalist living in Cape Town with her partner Roxi Blake, who's a graphic designer. Susan fell pregnant after being inseminated with the semen of an identity release donor.

Have you got any pregnancy exercise tips to share? Where do you find your zen?