LONDON: Oscar winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow has taken up yoga to see her through her pregnancy. Paltrow’s baby is due in a few months, but the usual antenatal classes are out of question for the actress. Instead she is said to be turning to special yoga classes.

Paltrow and husband Chris Martin are using the ancient ‘ashtanga’ yoga technique, which is said to benefit the spiritual well-being of the mother, father and the unborn child. It uses correct breathing and postures to allow students to “rediscover their fullest potential on all levels of human consciousness — physical, psychological and spiritual”.

The couple is being helped to learn ashtanga at classes given by Hamish Hendry, one of London’s leading experts in this area of yoga.Paltrow normally does 90 minutes of yoga a day but her postures have been amended in the light of her current condition. The actress can currently be seen on-screen as the poet Sylvia Plath in ‘Sylvia’ and has two other films in the can, ‘Proof’ and ‘Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow’.

Although she is an American, some of her most successful work was done in Britain, including ‘Shakespeare in Love’, for which she won an Oscar in 1999, ‘Emma’, ‘Sliding Doors’, and ‘Possession’. She and Martin were married at the end of last year. — HNS