A Change in the Weather

 

 

 

 

“A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.”
Marcel Proust

Last week, two women I know had big surprises that neither of them had hoped for. One Mom planned on a beautiful water birth with her partner and doula present. What she got was 20 hours of labor, ten of it raging hard and ended up with a C-section. The other planned on breastfeeding her baby for at least a year. She worked with a lactation consultant, planned her work schedule around her baby’s needs as well as she could. Her baby at six months is on formula.

Yoga and Parenthood are perfectly matched. Children, simply by being born, transform their parents and give them what they least expect. This can be confusing –even downright disorienting. Most of us don’t like change and unpredictability. Yet, the MO of parenthood is constant change. Just think about it, as soon as you get the rhythm of feeding your baby every four hours, it changes. Just when you thought 10 am might be a good time to leave the house with your baby, she suddenly needs to eat, and eat a lot. Then of course there is the poopy diaper to change. Infancy yields to toddlerhood and on and on…How do you respond to the continuous nature of change and unpredictability? Do you sometimes find yourself tightening or resisting?

Yoga also brings impermanence to center stage. One breath in, one out, that moment gone, now this one. All is forever changing. Even the knot in your hamstring feels different now than it did one down dog earlier. What do we do? Hang on for dear life to the last moment or exhale and allow for this moment, this shift. The simple act of noticing and slowing the breath can ease the discomfort and fear.

Try this. Take a moment and bring your attention to your breath, follow it all the way into your belly, softening, slowing. Feel it moving in and out, in and out. On your next inhale bringing your arms slowly overhead, exhale and slowly bring them back down to your sides, do this three more times, noticing when the in breath gives way to the out breath. When does the raising of the arms become the lowering of the arms Send yourself and your child some love and kindness. Some people like the simple words, “May I be safe, may I be at ease as I experience the shifting of time and self”. Do you feel at all different than you did at the beginning of the exercise?

This week when you encounter an unexpected change in plans, check in and see how your body feels. Breathe in the feelings, whatever they are, with acceptance and breathe out compassion for yourself and all of us who struggle with change. See if this has an impact on how you feel with your child as you move through your day. We can’t control the births of our babies, we can’t make our babies sleep, eat or poop on demand. What we can do is shift our own internal weather so that we can absorb the unexpected, the shifting tides with more resilience. The good news is that, with practice, we can actually alter the way we manage stress. This theory, that is increasingly evident in psychological research, is called nueroplasticity. We can rewire our nervous system to be less reactive, calmer. I will write more about this in an upcoming post.

It is my hope that by nurturing this blog one post at a time, I will be nurturing you. We will grow and change together with practices that inspire and support your adventure in this demanding job of parenting.