The majority of mothers can, with this mental and physical support conduct their births in a gentle and empowering way, helping ease their recovery, and giving their babies the best possible start in life.

This preparation also enables women to make more informed decisions about their births when dealing with medical professionals.

Dr Franciose Babira Freedman tutors and continually, lovingly overseas the teachers and therapists who lead the pregnancy courses. Franciose has developed her own special and provably effective aqua natal yoga techniques.

Yoga also reduces the allergic response in your lungs, though how this comes about is not yet known. Another useful benefit of yoga is the increasing mastery that you gain over your involuntary nervous reflexes. The enables you to reduce the overactivity of the parasympathetic nerves, and to react less to factors that normally trigger an attack.

As well as making attacks less frequent, yoga can assist you during an attack. The increased capacity to relax and to control your breathing enables you to avoid panic and thus reduce the attack's severity.

Participants in our asthma courses report feeling more in control of their breathing, less prone attacks and more energetic. In a few weeks noticeable improvements can usually be felt, and after some months of practice many people are able to reduce medication under the supervision of their doctor. With regular practice, benefits continue to increase for months and years, in contrast to some other forms of complementary therapy and to conventional drug therapy, where the efficacy of the treatment often diminishes with repeated use. Indeed, the dependence on yoga can decrease with time, once a stable plateaux has been reached.

For yoga therapy to be successful it is vital to practise regularly. Encouragement is essential for young children to develop the necessary application.

The children's class makes yoga fun, gives the children a sense of security and a parent can join the class,too, so a home practice can be developed together.

The 20th century brought us great benefits, yet the hectic pace of modern life which continues in the 21st century imposes a great burden on our eyes. Visual display screens, pollution and stress can all cause eye strain. This tends to precipitate the development of refraction errors (such as short- and long-sightedness and astigmatism), glaucoma, and allergic eye inflammations.

Your are far from helpless to prevent such disorders, however. If you take conscious care of you eyes you can considerably reduce eye strain and limit the damage it causes. The yoga method of eye therapy allows you to help yourself holistically, by combining general relaxation to reduce stress with specific eye exercises. This can both arrest the rate of deterioration and bring lasting improvement to already existing eye problems.

These ailments can be divided into three basic groups: those that are strongly stress related, such as fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis; those that are partly due to the ageing process, such as osteoarthrosis, and generalized joint aches and pains; and others, such as ankylosing spondylitis (commonly known as bamboo-spine disease).

If you suffer from a stress-linked rheumatic ailment, the three-layered approach of yoga therapy – relaxing your muscles, slowing your breathing, and calming your mind – can bring you great benefits. Rheumatoid arthritis, for example, can respond particularly well to yoga therapy. It is due to an autoimmune conflict that affects both muscles and joints, causing pain, chronic fatigue, and inflammation. Here, yoga meditation balances your immune system and stretching exercises release your stiff joints. The cleansing effect of yoga also increases the effectiveness of anti-inflammatory drugs, helping you to reduce your dosage.

In fibromyalgia, which can last three or more years, the supporting tissues and muscles close to certain joints become tender and ache and this is often followed by uneasy sleep and depression. Early research on the effects of yoga therapy has yielded promising results, but suggests that regular practice over several months is needed to improve this difficult condition appreciably.

Ageing-related joint conditions are also aggravated by stress but are primarily caused by chronic ill use of the joints. Long-term inactivity makes the joints stiff and painful, as in osteoarthrosis, and overuse, for example in athletes, strains the joints and makes them wear out more quickly. Yoga can help you by stimulating blood circulation, removing accumulated wastes, and releasing stiffened joints.

Osteoarthrosis mainly affects load-bearing joints, such as the knees, hips and spine. Generalized joint pains, or arthralgias, tend to affect the whole body. Here, relaxation, meditation, and gradual, passive loosening of the joints is the most effective treatment.

In ankylosing spondylitis, a hereditary inflammatory disease, the vertebrae in the spine fuse together, making it rigid and causing pain. Yogic exercises that flex the spine free these immobile joints and reduce the stiffening. Even if you experience some lumbar pain, you need not avoid forward bending. Do not strain, however, and avoid excessive pain.

Although we categorise ankylosing spondylitis under arthritic conditions we recommend the low back pain courses as more appropriate for this condition.

Other muscular, rheumatic or joint-related problems such as frozen shoulder, torticollis or knee pain can usually be dealt with in a yoga open class. Always mention your condition so the teacher can direct you to the most appropriate session for you.