Coping with postpartum depression and trauma is difficult for any new mother, but coupled with the social isolation required during the pandemic, it’s even harder.

That’s why three organizations based in Southeast D.C. decided to launch a series of free four-week healing workshops for new mothers, says Charnal Chaney, founder of Bold Yoga and lead organizer of the series.

In the once-per-week workshops, which first began in November, groups of six to eight moms learn coping skills like yoga, meditation, affirmations and journaling, and foster community through healing sister circles –– all effective ways to help equip moms with tools for managing motherhood while in a communal but socially-distanced setting.

Chaney says she started the series, called “Four Week Postpartum Yoga Sessions,” to help moms learn how to put themselves first before supporting others in their lives.

“I’m feeling like my child is a burden when I should be feeling like my child is a blessing,” she says some mothers express. “But why is that? Because I’m not taking care of me,” Chaney says.

Along with Chaney’s Bold Yoga, other organizations partner to host the workshops, including Thriving Moms, a support group founded by Ward 8 resident Tanisha Murden that helps moms set and accomplish their personal and professional goals. Also involved is Girl Interrupted Reconstructed, a group founded by Ward 8 resident Nakia Nicholson that facilitates restorative healing circles to help mothers heal and talk about trauma.

While the first four-week session ended on Dec. 15, Chaney is planning to launch another series in January.

Chaney calls past sessions “real and raw,” noting that mothers who participate feel free to discuss their feelings of loneliness and isolation, lack of support from their family or the child’s father, and uncertainty about whether they made the right decision to start a family.

“When we are in that space, we are in a non-judgemental zone,” says 43-year-old Betty Murray, founder of Genuine Sisters Supporting Sisters, a Southeast-based support group for mothers and children that also facilitates yoga and healing circles. “Whatever is said there, stays there.”

In the healing circles, Murray — who herself has four adult children — shares life experiences and lessons with other moms, talking openly about leaving a violent relationship and struggling with grief as a teenager when her mother and only sister died from breast cancer.

“It’s so important for me to let women know to connect with your own feelings. You can’t help no one else unless you help yourself,” she says. The November-December workshops were held at the non-profit Community Family Life Services’ E St. NW headquarters, though they may relocate the workshops to Southeast in the new year.

Chaney, a mother of five, knows from personal experience that it can be hard to show up for your own children when you have to work through family trauma. Her own mother, Lashonia Thompson-El, was incarcerated for 18 years.

“I felt like if she wasn’t a good mother, I can’t be a good mother,” says Chaney. “At one period of time, there was a disconnect between me and my kids. Whenever [my mom] wouldn’t show up for me, it would make me not want to show up for [my kids].”

Thompson-El came home when Chaney was 21 years old, and later helped found Women Involved in Reentry Effort, a non-profit dedicated to building support networks for women returning citizens when they transition back home. (Chaney is an event planner with The WIRE.)

Chaney says she first joined healing circles when her mother’s nonprofit hosted them, and found them helpful. They’re part of what helped motivate her to leave a violent relationship and enroll in therapy, which included yoga.

During her first yoga session, she repeated affirmations to herself. One mantra — “‘I am light. I am love. I am peace.” — were the “same three affirmations [that] my mother would put in her letters when she would write to me [while in prison.] I had tears running down my face,” says Chaney.

Chaney says she knew she could turn her hardship into inspiration, like her mother did.

It was through The WIRE that Chaney met Thriving Moms’ Tanisha Murden and Girl Interrupted Reconstructed’s Nakia Nicholson, both of whom worked with The WIRE in different capacities. Chaney recognized that the three women had similar interest in supporting mothers.

During the postpartum workshops, Chaney leads yoga class. Afterward, Murden facilitates activities like discussions about self-esteem and motherhood, and Nicholson co-leads the sister healing circles. During a November workshop, mothers identified physical traits that they like and dislike about themselves, affirmed those areas, and created affirmation cards to put in their home. Other reflection activities include creating vision boards.

The facilitators encourage women to take the coping skills they learn in the workshops and implement them into their daily routines. It can be as simple as taking a warm bath, sitting in the sun, listening to music, and even starting “mom pods,” where parents take turns babysitting each other’s children so that one mom can have a four hour self-care break.

During the sessions, Chaney reminds moms that “they cannot pour from an empty cup. You have to put you first, and then you can pour into your child.”

Murray says she’s doing just that: “I fill myself up so I can be the best me. I get a lot out of it. I feel relieved. I feel like a weight is off of my shoulders.”