Welcoming a baby home comes with life-altering change. The rate of change is only amplified as little babies rapidly grow into toddlers. With the joys and challenges of parenting comes great potential for personal growth and healing. Mother, author, and world-renowned yoga educator Sarah Ezrin is guiding people along their parenting journeys by emphasizing the empowering quality of yoga. Her debut book, The Yoga of Parenting: 10 Yoga-Based Practices to Help You Stay Grounded, Connect with your Kids, and Be Kind to Yourself is the culmination of years of embracing yogic principles on and off the mat. It is due for release this summer from Shambhala Publications and Penguin Random House.
Ezrin’s first son was born at a time of great fear and uncertainty—the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many mothers around the world, Ezrin experienced postpartum anxiety and depression. Unfortunately, some of the tools that served to assuage her fears before motherhood only heightened her anxiety during early motherhood. “Books and my yoga mat were always my sources of refuge in trying times, but I had a really hard time finding books that didn’t make me feel like I was doing something very wrong. And my yoga practice definitely didn’t look like what it used to.” Ezrin knew what she was looking for. She wanted a resource that gave her permission to be uncertain, rather than give her all the answers. She wanted a guide that would lead her to harness the power within, instead of urging her to seek it from things outside of her. It was then that she realized that she could create what she was looking for.
It all started with a link between two seemingly unrelated disciplines. “I went to yogic texts and found incredible parallels with modern psychology,” says Ezrin. Unearthing this link would reveal much more to her about yoga as a practice. At the foundation of her decision to write the book was the understanding that the principles of yoga are always at play, across many spheres of our lives. “Yoga is so much more than just the poses we do on the mat. Yoga really is how we live our lives. To me, yoga is ultimately about connection, so everything I do that has an element of connection–writing, parenting, teaching, creating–it’s all yoga.”
Ezrin covers about ten different principles in the book, from presence, to vital life force, to more obscure yogic concepts like tapas (transformation through intensity), but there is one principle she loves the most. “In yoga, we talk about the concept of sthira or sukha, which is the continuum between strength and softness, stability and ease. I see this scale as representative of boundaries.” She notes that her conception of boundaries is not limited to the topics we commonly discuss, like ‘over-sharing’. Rather, her understanding centers the management of energy and the balancing of priorities. To her, this concept encapsulates all of the principles in The Yoga of Parenting.
In addition to spreading the messages nestled within these principles to parents around the world, Ezrin hopes to unpack misconceptions surrounding another important aspect of the book—self-care. “There’s all these ideas that self-care needs to be bubble baths, or massages or huge overt experiences, which is hard when you have a baby or a toddler.” Modern conceptions of self-care often do not account for the bustling energy of parenting, which makes these overt experiences difficult for people to create consistently. This does not mean that self-care is impossible for birthing people, however. Like all forms of care, self-care while parenting requires effort. “We all have this old idea that the person disappears the moment they become a mother, but we are actually even better mothers when we work to nurture that person inside of us.”
The Yoga of Parenting is a gentle push from Ezrin to do just that—honor and care for yourself through the journey.
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Sarah Ezrin is an author, freelance writer, yoga educator, and content creator based in the Bay Area. Her willingness to be unabashedly honest and vulnerable along with her innate wisdom, make her writing, teaching, and social media great sources of healing and connection for many people.
Sarah brings a wide spectrum of life experiences into everything she does. She is unafraid of sharing all sides of herself. She does so in the hope of giving others permission to be their most authentic self. At this time, when honest self-awareness is so important, Sarah’s is an essential and exemplary voice.
Sarah writes extensively on the subjects of yoga, parenting, and mental health, often interweaving these themes. Her work ranges from heavily-reported assignments to personal essays to blog content for brands. She is a regular contributor for Yoga Journal Magazine, Motherly, Yoga International, Healthline, Scary Mommy, Mind Body Green, Mantra Magazine, and LA Yoga Magazine. She has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Bustle, LA Weekly, and NBC News.
