In it.

It has been almost exactly 2 years since my last post. I am curious about why I have not posted as much as I did when I first began this blog, and the conclusion I have come to is that this process of changing careers—including the risk, fear, identity shift, and knowledge-building that comes with it—has been for me a fairly internal process. It has been internal, I think, because it is changing me, and I am watching those changes from the inside, without the desire to process externally to a larger audience. The fear associated with this major change also carries with it a sense of shame and humility that I have wanted to protect. The shame comes from a fundamental worry about getting it wrong, and the humility comes from a fundamental awareness that—after many years cultivating expertise in one professional area—I am now a raw beginner.

While it does not feel appropriate to delve into the darker parts of the anxiety, I do believe that I am not the only human who has encountered this tension of being in two disparate places at once: feeling the pain of fear while feeling deeply fortunate for the opportunity to feel that fear. I would guess that any large risk that we take in this life to cultivate happiness, make a demonstrable contribution, and undergo personal metamorphosis comes with it the pain of change and the gratitude of having the opportunity to do it in the first place. Just think of the phenomenal humans who have made an impact on this earth. And, sure, the pain can overwhelm the gratitude, and that sucks because it means you've lost perspective on the fact that you chose to take the risk and that it is worthwhile. But if you can keep your focus on the fortune and your purpose, you can put a foot in front of the other and keep going.

And that's what I do. The labor and delivery semester calls upon me to unfold in a hospital environment—new literacy, surrounded by experts, emergencies, labor management, the mother-baby unit, sociopolitical tensions, my age, my previous experiences, my lack of knowledge, my hopes. While I am adulting in a variety of areas in my life, in the clinical setting I am an adolescent who doesn't belong, wearing scrubs that are too big for me, conscious of my weird hair, fearful of the next oral quiz my preceptor will give me, worried that the nurses will see right through me to my lack of experience. I have memories of sitting in my quiet office, a tenured professor grading student papers behind a closed door, gentle music playing, the poster of John Cusack in Say Anything that I kept taped behind my door for just me. And while in the middle of getting another question wrong or wrestling with my heart to be more assertive with my nascent skills, I feel a little feel of wanting to be sitting in that chair. And then I immediately remember that I wanted to be with—viscerally with—humanity in this capacity, and even with a racing heart I tough out the day.

I keenly remember being a good professor: kind, organized, an advocate for students, graceful, collaborative, understanding, compassionate. It's comforting to remember fondly that I was all of those things. In the distance, I see myself as a midwife: kind, organized, an advocate for patients, graceful, collaborative, understanding, compassionate. I see it, and I feel it deep down. But the ruddiness of my shame-heated cheeks, the palpitations, the awkwardness, the feeling of being an imposter, and the deep memories of my many years of perfectionism and avoiding mistakes causes me pain on this journey. I cannot hold up the pure idea of perfection that I became so attached to before taking on this challenge. If I do, I won't prevent failure—I will fail. That perfectionistic ideal is a pain-maker of its own kind, and my soul must have known that it was time for it to end—I would have run my parenting right into the ground if I had kept standing on that tiny little pin of compulsion.

So, here's where birth becomes another metaphor for change. In the physiological birthing process, we need to talk with pregnant people about the difference between pain and suffering. Although labor can feel like we're being destroyed—and sometimes it comes close—a healthy labor does not have to cause suffering. The pain is symptomatic of the productive engine that brings a human forth. A child. Love, tenderness, growth, amazement. This journey is a birth for me. The pain is heavy and intense—the letting go of habits and perceptions and previously-held beliefs feels like shearing tissue away. But it is not suffering. It is the productive engine that will bring forth a midwife. Love, tenderness, growth, amazement.

The 6th Breath

It's been 18 months since my last post. I have spent it in biochemistry, cellular biology, and microbiology, and in the first year of nursing school. In drinking in my family. In reading about meditation and imperfection. In stretching my brain and heart. This has been metamorphic.

I have not been to the shala in about a year. I could not have imagined such a thing a year ago. Nursing classes are almost every day, and they begin early. If I went to the shala, I would have to leave before seeing my children in the morning. When my older child was first born 7 years ago, I believed that I was being "bad" by not going to the shala, and I left in the early part of the morning each day to be there for practice. Missing her. I will not miss my children in the morning now—indeed, it seems ludicrous to me now how I used to do that missing.

Without a doubt, I was initially and have been for years drawn to the practice of Ashtanga because of its structure. The sequence, the count, the every-day-ness, the schedule of no-practice days. I have found, however, that the exploration of and around these boundaries has been the real yoga of practice (I think that's the secret that you don't find out for quite some time). These boundaries have been a constant (re)negotiation—with work, pregnancy, illness, relationship, parenting.

After many years of dedicated attendance at the shala, I am in a new world of self-practice. These days, I am on my mat in the early morning while Curious George plays in the background and my partner scurries back and forth with breakfast items and getting the children ready for school. I breathe the air that my children are in with each breath. From my mat I fix a pony tail, give snuggles, laugh at the jokes they laugh at, untie knots, settle arguments, give gentle reminders, and kiss bellies before they leave for school. The little ones adjust me as needed—my older child has learned the assertion and softness of a Baddha Konasana adjustment. I have done Supta Vajrasana with a child sitting on each knee.  The boundary between the mat and my mothering is a blur.

I miss my dear teachers—their wise words and hands, their understanding, their encouraging presence. Trying to make them proud, trying to remind them about how invaluable they are. But the sequences are burned in my mind, and so I have taken up the challenge of negotiating this space of self-practice on my own. Mysore-style practice is self-led, but to practice alone is a different passage of practice than that which is done in the shala. As the one witness, I am free of that extrinsic pressure, such that I have noticed—sharply—the ways in which I used to seek it out to validate my progress. In the first several weeks of home practice, I did not know what to do without those tethers of my fellow Ashtangis beside me and the teacher weaving through us. I imagined that it was all still there. I felt the aloneness discreetly, the aching transition from bed to mat without the walk to the shala to soften my joints, the coolness of my home compared to the warmth of the shala, the silence of my one breath.

Over time, however, I began to hear the chorus of all of the teachers I have had, with a conductor—my own voice. I worry less about watchful eyes and find Dwi Pada Sirsasana less nerve-wracking and more deeply in my belly, and the peace of Karandavasana on the slow, smooth way down. The voice draws my attention to places in the big toe, the sole of the foot, the pelvis, the top of the back, the cavernous hip joint.

And this:
Self-practice has led me into the experiences that wait beyond the 5 breaths. How powerful is the struggle and the relief of the 5 breaths—it is part of the structure that scaffolds the practice, a lattice upon which to hang the endeavor to find calm and patience in asana, a secure and quantifiable approach toward deepening the practice. It was not until this exploration of self-practice, however, that I began to step over the edge of the 5th breath to see what the 6th, the 7th breaths would reveal. And the body always says yes, and it always says thank you. It is never not impressive to feel the body's response to that transcendence. It is more than holding a pose for a longer time. It is a will to open further in time. Remaining in asana beyond the 5 breaths can illuminate a dynamism of asana—the body fills with life, it can feel raw and uncultivated, it can let go of some of its holding on, and it can light up another part of who we are.

For me, this pursuit toward understanding and caring for the human body in nursing and midwifery is also an exploration into the realm of the 6th breath, 7th breath, 8th breath. Each day I step out and onto campus or into hospital, I am walking beyond the boundaries I have been negotiating for decades—it is raw and mind-boggling, it is unsettling, it is inspiring and life-giving. It is terrifying, and yet it lights up another part of who I am. But I have to open further in time to experience it, and it is this act of stretching my awareness toward this new knowledge, this new role in my world, that helps me to understand the spiritual space that I inhabit and cultivate, breathe through the anxiety of insecurity that we share, and feel the awesome vulnerability of humanness. They call nursing a "practice."

I get that.

Word Trolls

My boy's words tumble out of his mouth like those little rock trolls in Frozen. Yep…I've got a Frozen metaphor for this.

Maybe one day I'll write a post about how much I dig that film—despite its numerous weaknesses—and how much I respect that the protagonist makes my daughter swell and spill over with emotion that even she, articulate and expressive as she is, cannot explain. How her connection to the story seems to be rooted in something that has existed for ages, longer than she or I have been here. That film has redefined what "princess" means to her: when she was a toddler and I asked her why she liked princesses, she could only offer, "Because they spin." But now…NOW…a princess is a woman with powers, with a resounding voice and a great dress, with fierce hair and determined eyes, with conviction and huge love. Not afraid to defend herself, courageous, intense, graceful. And, yes. Elsa is a righteous inspiration to me, my daughter's mother. She is an awakening from a fitful sleep.

Where was I?

Right. The trolls. Those rolling balls that look like rocks until they unfold into chattering, wise, loving, communal beings. Their words climb over each other. Inside of my son's mouth, the tongue and teeth are wrestling with the language, and his lisp adheres his words together so that his gigantic sentence starts as a puffy, packed ball of language that he works to eek out of his mouth. Sometimes, the whole sentence falls out still tightly wound, and I have to untangle it in my own mind to know what he's saying. Sometimes, the words fall over one another as they exit one by one on piggyback, all mashed around in fuzzy, salivary somersaults. This morning, his sentences stumbled through: "Mommy, she [his sister] needs juice, and so when we go downstairs, she will have some juice and she will feel better. And I will have juice, too!" It was a magnificent idea. And though we didn't actually drink juice, the juicy idea of juice and how it might unplug a stuffy nose and lift the spirits was delightful.

I am fluent in my son's language. But it's more than the communication of the message itself that locks us into place when we talk. It's not just the impressive presence of the words that draws me into the voyage they take from his mind to mine…it's the voyage itself, from brain to clear air outside of his mouth. It's the delicious experience of watching and hearing the sentences work themselves out, and observing the developing gestures in his little hands. The intonation of his little grumble-laugh at the end of his point. Each word is a little rock troll, so sincerely eager to unpack, burst open, and convey to us its sagacity, humor, outrage, confusion, tender advice, and astute remarks on the world that this tiny boy is trying to understand.

She reads.

The child reads.

And I am there inside each letter, curled up in a ball inside every vowel and hoping to leap out and surprise her with how it sounds.

Like when I surprised her with those "Frozen" jammies that she had been asking and asking about by just casually laying them on her bed, where she would find them that night. She exploded with joy upon finding them and wore them night after night, even after they got toothpaste all over them. Even when they were quite a bit too big.

Or like when I surprised her by taking her to the windiest part of the city, where the apartment buildings are exceptionally tall and the climate seems to change out of nowhere. And there's a fountain. And lots of flowers. And deep grass. And that trip in the stroller seemed to last ages until she knew where we were and she was exuberant to get out and run and feel free in this new place only 12 blocks from our house.

But to surprise her with the word is to ruin the surprise.

Who knows where the instinct came from. From being a teacher? From being a reader? From wanting the challenge—"Don't tell me! Let me guess!"

I don't give away the surprise. She looks to me for the answer to the word beyond the first letter. p-l-a-t-e. She knows that's a P. She knows the "P" sound. But "pl" is trickier. It doesn't unfold right away, and she looks up from the word and searches my face.

All I give her is my wide eyes and my willing her to know it. Maybe I press my lips together…ever so slightly. A teeny hint.

I remind her to look at the word, at the letters. "You know these sounds," I tell her. And she achingly annunciates each individual sound like it's a boxcar on a train of sounds. And she cannot find the seamless link between those cars. And I can feel her lack of comprehension. It feels like static would feel if we could feel it.

She looks to me again. Shrugs her shoulders. "Look at the letters," I say. And then I bring in a gush of memories from my own emergent literacy years—the context clues. They don't age. They are keys to comprehension. And with a few words of my own—"What's he doing in the picture?" I feel her realization. It feels like sunshine. "Plate!" she exclaims. With big eyes. And roses in her cheeks. And a vast smile that I have to reflect back at her. Who could help it?

And we move on to the next word.

Words, study

It has been almost a whole summer since I've blogged, a summer spent transitioning from my tenured professorship and into an intensive course in Anatomy and Physiology, starting a new volunteer position at a local midwife practice, and taking the GREs—twice. The left brain is twinkling and bright like a Christmas tree—and I use that cliché with intention. Lights, sparkles, colors, icicles, tinsel, and a star at the top that is the sweet, sweet encouragement and inquiry and love. I love it back.

Even as I type now, my Chemistry, Biology, and Nutrition homework awaits. It awaits before I get on the train to the midwife practice. It awaits and I await it, excited and nervous to tiptoe into these first chapters of the semester. Anticipating quizzes and exams. Working through an evolving understanding of medical records. Observing. Wondering about how "well" I will do, how the landscape of my mind will continue to shift over the months. Eager to continue to put it all together, in my imaginings of moments in clinical hours and in midwifing a mother through her birth and in becoming even more educated about what's happening under our skin, under the skin of my partner and children.

It's many, many, many new words. Erythropoietin, hemolysis, greater tubercle, mediastinum, stratified squamous epithelium, mandible, ethmoid, anterior median fissure, postganglionic. Words bitter and sweet and sometimes sour...and all the time digesting, digesting. Becoming part of my own epithelia. Tough skin, delicate skin, an integration of brand. new. knowledge that is shaping me for a brand. new. career. I wake up in the morning both anxious and longing to breathe through the synthesis of this material and emotion in my practice. And I conclude practice with full heart, clearer brain, calmer belly. Ever the grateful yogi.

In the meantime, my smaller child stumbles into and tills and paves out his own language road. Unfurling blends and phrases linked to phrases make us—and his older sister—marvel. How unexpectedly wonderful to share this surprise with my daughter, to see the two of them in a growingly complex dance of conversation. The words like boxcars on a train move through our interactions with one another, and I am compelled to list some of the many:

"I need help with this."
"That's too much tight on me."
"I need it—whole time."
"I love you, Mommy." (and Daddy, and sister)
"I need breakfast." (dinner…lunch)
"I got a bug bite."
"I can't reach it."
"You tired? I tired, too!"

So many "I"s…an illumination of self in relation to his world. A crystal clear understanding—even at two—about self and otherness, what the self wants and how the other might be able to provide it or keep it away.

And in the meantime of this meantime, my daughter has begun to integrate that verbal struggle to express what she means—you know, um, like, gestures. She rolls her hands and fans her fingers and nods her head as she simultaneously tries to express her full meaning—"So, you know what I mean, like, sometimes…"—as she searches for recognition in her conversation partner, a kind of acknowledgement that the two, whether that partner is 5 or 55 or 85, have a mutual understanding of human experience. She, too, owns the "I" as she works to express the uniqueness of her self: "Sometimes, you know, I get a cough like this…" or "It's so strange [gestures of incredulity] how I can do THIS…and then also do THIS!"

All the while, my partner smoothes our language and worries with jewels from his great memory bank of quotations and inspiration. No less a learner, he plows through the dense discourse of his profession, extracts the essence of what's going on in our political world, examines the children's growth and measures it against something spiritual and quantitative and aesthetic that is beyond us. And, just at the right time, he finds the wisdom of his words to calm us.

And in this family we are all old souls—I can feel it when we engage in dialogue. I can see it in my children's eyes, in my own, in my partner's. We reach for these words to explain who we are, who we are becoming, how we connect to one another. And so we study together, our unique studies.

On the Deep, Dark Forest of 2nd Series

A few weeks ago, my teacher gave me the last few headstands of 2nd Series. She said to me before dropping me back that day, "So? You've finished!" And I remember distinctly the anti-climax. Nothing like disappointment. Nothing like that at all. Rather, a concavity of memory. It was the flood of remembering how long it had been since I had begun 2nd Series—4 years—and how when I first began I felt the weight of the pressure to progress. Much has changed in the last four years. My longing to hear the words of my then-teacher asking me to do Pashasana, my embarking on 2nd in the winter after my first child was born and in the last few months of our nursing, a slow-moving parade of new teachers and shalas, the challenges of conceiving my second child, the backing away and then moving toward the series, my second pregnancy and the delicious dreaminess of Kapotasana, the birth of my son, the return to Primary, the starting over of 2nd Series one pose at a time, and nursing through 16 months. The reconnection to the first several poses in the first several months after birth, and then progress through the second half of 2nd Series this past winter and spring. In a flash, before I dropped back, my mind went to those memories and re-felt the energy of the holding tight and letting go. Will to step back, will to start over, will to find determination to progress. And in that deep bowl of remembering, the gathering of memories and energy was a tangle.

In a very short amount of time, 2nd Series stopped being an adventurous race to the finish and more a deep, dark forest. Contributing further to the tangle of reflection that occurred to me upon being given the last of the headstands were the stumbles over the roots in my own body, the backtracking, the darkness of dreams that often accompanies those outrageous backbends, the remorse of charging back in after the birth of my first child, the graciousness of knowing not to do the same with my second, the bursts of energy and tears and anxiety that would whoosh through the spaces I had opened, the post-practice tussle with the ego, the worry about Kapotasana upon awakening and the fear of Karandavasana that would later follow, the visual repeated images of darkness followed by clearing throughout the practice, and the mystical ways in which the whole practice has changed my body. My relationship to fueling it. My dance of engaging, releasing, plugging in and letting go, navigating around the blossom of the pregnant body and gently gliding back into the postpartum practice while continuing to nurse before, after, and around the practice.

Seems like a lot of drama around a physical practice.

But it's not drama when every step in that forest is somehow echoed throughout the rest of one's life. Each tentative, determined, egoic, anxious, blissful, angry, curious, adventurous, sorrowful, wondering, humble step through the breath and from asana to asana is a mirror of the steps we take throughout the rest of the big day. Because even though we have the big day plotted out in our iCals and our Outlooks, even though we've established a gorgeous routine of naps and lunches and bath times and potty training and school days and trips to the park and this-is-how-we-pack-the-stroller, even though we have assembled the stones on our professional path and booked doctor appointments and stocked our cupboards with "good food" and maxed the contributions to our retirement accounts, the big day is still a deep, dark forest.

And so when my teacher, in her loving and kind way, lauded my reaching the end of 2nd Series, I reached back into the last six years since I'd begun to practice Ashtanga at all, and I felt the complexity of that journey like so many knots. And some part of me was astounded. And proud. No doubt. And another part of me felt so viscerally content not to start 3rd Series. And hoped it would be a long way away. And another part of me looked with my mind's eye down at the mat, and at the current task of dropping back, and sensed being fully present on that mat, in that moment, in those drop backs. And I was purely happy to be right in the tangle of that deep, dark forest, with all of its unknowns. And happy to be in the care of my teacher, and of all of the brilliant teachers without whom I would not be standing there in that moment. And relieved that the moment was, indeed, an anti-climax. A gentle settling in, a sinking into graciousness, an appreciation of the profound work of the practice, a humble not-knowing, and a deep knowing more.

Where Did the Time Go? A Response...

This morning I registered my daughter for kindergarten. But I'm not sad. I'm not really nostalgic. I'm not melancholy at all. In fact, when my partner and I arrived, all that I could feel was bliss. Pure, constant happiness for her, for us, for the efforts the public school she'll attend is making to become richer and more diverse and more child-centered and more inclusive of the families of its children. All I could do was to be viscerally there. Then.

Where did the time go? my friends and family ask. Surely she cannot be in kindergarten! Where did the time go? they ask when they see how my baby boy is walking and talking and making jokes and upping his adorability factor in every moment.

Where did it go? Where did the 4.75 years my daughter has been out of the womb go? Where did my son's 19 months go? Time went right into them, and it's sitting in their pores like the nectar of the gods, in their cells like life's essence, and it seeps back out in every new word, every bit of sorrow, every blink of confusion, every single note of "Let it Goooooooooo!" that my daughter sings. I can see Time in my son's reaching for the balloon string hovering from the living room ceiling, in the aura of mystery around the potty chair we just put in the bathroom last month, in his endless efforts to get a rise out of his sister, in his drooly wet kisses and his sleep-drunk baby body.

And as those beautiful whispers of Time unfold in the eyes and limbs and hearts of my children, so it does in us. And between us and them those unfoldings, like long, graceful arms, reach for one another and take hands. And they make a soft, fluid, loving embrace that is our family. And we watch, and feel, and with every effort try to stay present in the presence of Time.

And that is what I said to my dear partner as we crossed the concrete, icy-patched parking lot of the public school where my daughter will spend her days starting in September. "Sweetie! Let us be present now. Let us be here in this moment. Can you believe it?" And we can believe it. We can. And that walk across the parking lot will always be a part of my Now.

Revelation

It has been so many weeks since my last post because I have not been able to create the mindspace to discuss here the major career change on the horizon. Indeed, the core of this blog—the exploration of heart, brain, and belly—keeps me focused on those essential components of journeying through yoga, motherhood, and the unfolding of intellectual development. That beautiful confluence has inspired a spectacular leap of faith to leave my tenured professorship and embark on a study of nurse midwifery.

For many years I have wondered longingly about medicine. For more years I have been diving slowly into the depths of the body through my practice. And for more years I have been haunted by the exquisite births of my two glorious children. The memories of those extraordinary experiences flow through and around me like ghosts, and the unsettledness of those memories, I have come to realize, is a haunting of the most promising kind—a welcoming, and an invitation. Even with the extreme focus of achieving tenure—a kind of career pinnacle that in many ways is constituted by richness of expertise, the lore of academic tradition, the brightness of rigorous research, the envy of academics seeking that kind of prestige and permanence, and the mystery of what it might be to marry an institution for the rest of one's life—I have asked what seem to me to be deeper questions about love, time, happiness, faith, and a calling from beyond. Even with the slowly moving tidal wave of tenure's critique, I would only have sought to live it fully, traditionally, ethically, and with joy. But in asking these deep questions, I have come to see myself changed in the last several years.

I do not doubt that I have the process of achieving tenure to thank for this revelation. And I arrive inside of it with the keen awareness of a clear and urgent shift in my responsibility to my world. I sit faithfully in the arms of rhetorical study, especially as I witness the rhetorical distance between my intellect and the body so beautifully diminishing. Indeed, I am called to be even closer to the body, with lessening fear and increasing love, as a witness to others' experiences with age, change, birth. I am called to support and soothe, to educate, to encourage. To use my understanding of communication inside of a complex situation of woman, system, tradition, and nature. To draw from many years of political education as I enter a sphere that is fraught with a vexed history and a future that needs nurturing and shaping for the good of humankind.

I find additional faith in what I see as a particular, endearing connection between tenure and my hopes of becoming a nurse midwife. I can only assume that some part of me holds a conviction that achieving the former has been a logical, healthy, and serendipitous precursor to achieving, and thriving in, the life of the latter.

Self-soothing

It's what we do to calm ourselves down. It's the step we take—and the steps after that—to help ourselves through the understanding that this surge of emotion isn't all we are. It's a passing storm. It's time spent in discomfort (or bliss, as the case may be), and we can be present and not lose our minds or our sense of self or our awareness of the other important stuff that is happening in that very moment.

It's the skill we're helping our babies to build when we give them a moment or two to feel their feelings when they cry in the middle of the night, or just after we've left the room to help them to bed. I'm just learning this, with my second child. So fearful of my daughter's having to sit in her own distress, I ran to her within seconds of her crying. I wanted to rescue her from herself. I was petrified of crying it out. I had no visceral awareness of what self-soothing really meant.

With our son, my partner and I had an idea, and we gently waded into the realm of 2 minutes...3 minutes of his tears. Maybe even 7 minutes.We sat together, we looked at the monitor, we looked into each other's eyes, and we helped to soothe one another with words of encouragement as we let the boy experience his own feelings.  We began to understand his cries. And we watched together as he calmed himself down with his thumb or with a little change of position and fell back to sleep. If we sensed after a few minutes that his distress was taking him outside the boundaries of what he could recover from himself, we went in. And sometimes he needed to be picked up and rocked and helped back into his sleep. And sometimes he needed to be nursed. But most of the time, after only a few minutes, he created his own calm. He still does, and now he looks to his security blanket as a source of comfort. And we stop everything and listen for him—every time.

It took our daughter about 15 months to sleep through the night. Children are so different from one another. This much is true. But I do wonder whether it might have helped her to have a chance to sit inside of her own emotional storm for just a moment, and to help herself as it passed. When she awoke, she often was still half-asleep. I have wondered whether allowing her to do that sleepy self-soothing would have sunk deeper into her mind and into her heart.

The bright side is this, and it is very bright: Our experience with our second child has helped us to help our first child to soothe herself, to delight in the nourishing comforts around her. I'm now teaching her about essential oils to include in the bath.

And, in combination with the depth of my yoga practice, it has helped me to do the self-soothing I have been longing to do since I was a child, but never truly learned.

It's rather like asana, isn't it? Sitting in these emotional storms?

Historically, I have tried to find a variety of ways to escape. I was horrified by anger and sadness, and found that seeking to send them away only led me farther into them. The subtlety of intelligence and the fortune of loved ones helped me to avoid the darkness of narcotics, but I know that the sources of escape-comfort I chose were not at all nourishing, and looking back at that younger girl who was trying to find a way out of her emotions makes my face melt and my heart hurt. I want to mother her.

I mother her now.

As I sit here and type in a coffee shop not far from where I am going to pick up my sweet babies from school, a delicious spinach empanada sits comfortably in what was a hungry belly—a belly I used to ignore. In the anxious moments of my day today I sang: Natalie Merchant's lovely lyrics as I walked into the nervousness of my first day of class, and Springsteen's "Thunder Road" as I made a beeline away from the noise of administration and toward the bathroom, where I could therapeutically wash the parts to my breast pump. The hot water, the sudsy soap, the pieces of rocking my baby. I used to do work on the bus commute, but now I read the live-giving words of a book. And I try—oh, I do try so gently, so steadily—to listen. And the self-talk: "Shhh...it's okay." "Om, Namaha." I feel the undertow of worry and fear, and I pull myself back and look around. Look! Tree. Sky. Feet. Neighbor. Breath. It is okay. Or even this: "It's not okay right now. But it's okay."

Yes. This is the lesson of asana: to sit in the emotional flood of the pose and breathe. This is the lesson of our children: to love them deeply to the bottom of who we are, and to find ourselves found there.

Fear of Falling

There's a heat wave this week in Philadelphia, and I am consciously aware of where I was and what I was doing exactly one year ago: big belly, moving slowly, on the brink of submitting my tenure dossier...expectant. 

Today, I sit at my desk in my slightly cool office, feeling the twinge of vertebrae talking to one another after a deep practice this morning. My teacher has led me toward Karandavasana, and we are working through it in pieces: taking Padmasana while in the balance of Pincha Mayurasana, then taking the balance on the forearms with Padmasana curled up into my body. Last year at this time, this space is where my baby boy lived. 

I have a keen awareness these days of fears in upside-down postures, and my teacher tells me that it is the wrestling with mortality that comes from mothering. I sit in the amazement of a stronger, more flexible body, accompanied by a mind that is, truly, more fearful. Where between babies I used to jump up into handstand and find the security there, now I feel a need to protect myself from falling over. Today, my teacher asked me to bend all the way back to the floor in Pincha Mayurasana so that I could feel the feeling of falling over. There was the floor. Not an abyss...just a floor.

But the fear isn't really of the floor, is it? It's of the abyss. And the abyss is the mystery of loss. What if... My baby boy has unfolded with both a sweet, delicate nature and a durability that is uniquely his own, and I am drawn into it as his mother to both protect and challenge him. My daughter, now 4, is committed to climbing higher and sometimes wants to let go of my hand. She sits these days in the contested space between wanting to own every skill, and wanting us to brush her teeth for her. This negotiation of fear and security, I find, I am doing in and with my own body. Close to the floor I build strength: in jumping back, in twisting, in back bending. Even in back bending, I can see the floor as I fall toward it, and control the fall. But upside down—especially after seeking the protection of a wall in upside-down poses while pregnant—draws out of me the fear of what I'm falling into. I cannot see it. I want my teacher to help.

And, as mothers, do we not spend so much of our precious energy protecting our children from what we suspect might be lurking? Even if it's unnecessary? And don't we have to let go of that a bit, to have faith that the child will begin to make those predictions himself or herself, and to negotiate falling into the earth below, even if he cannot see it behind him?

Practice is a mirror—in it we see who we are. But it's not just a mirror, but also a physical application of all that we're working through. It's a laboratory to experiment with and examine who we are: the actions we take, the ways in which we identify ourselves, the questions that haunt us. In every pose, we see a relationship to ourselves that is not just about that pose, but also about how we're moving in the world more generally. It forms a philosophical and tangible bridge into the day that leads us into a sharper awareness of how and why we will be in the world. And the next morning, it welcomes us back to journey deeper into that awareness. This fear of falling is real in how it manifests in my practice and in my movement in the world. But practice teaches us that reality is always a product of the mind, and that calming the mind can take us to the edge of how we've created our vision and help us to revise our realities. 

My teacher tells me that the fear will never really go away, and that instead of resisting it and waiting for it to disappear I should instead acknowledge that it is there. A longtime companion. 

A reminder that there is space to move through and around it, with myself, with my children. Space for faith that a fall will not be far.

Tittibhasana

One of my beloved teachers gave me the Tittibhasana series about two years ago.

I remember the heavy difficulty of these poses: the pain in the inner thighs and groin, the lack of access to the low belly, the sound of the noise in my mind as I reached to bind without success. I jokingly told my teacher that it was "sooooo hard." And he responded, with some humor, that I was "in the gauntlet" of the series now. I used a mat towel to bind as I moved through through these poses day after day. I dreaded them as my breath sped up in the panic of what seemed like too much. The weightlessness of Pincha Mayurasana was a great relief after 10 steps up and back, after the intense squeeze of Tittibhasana C.

In order to bring more focus to conceiving our second child, I stopped doing Tittibhasana to free the low belly.

Since having my baby boy, my current teacher has been giving me poses back, one by one. Last week: Tittibhasana, after many, many months. And there it is now, waiting for me: the bind. Fingers find one another, a closed circuit of energy. A giant hug of this little body that has become so greatly swollen in pregnancy and birthed two babies. The breath is measured and strong as the spine reaches down and around, and the gaze follows to the nose as the body lifts low belly and rounds around. Tittibhasana: a little bird, a firefly. Some delicacy in the name of the pose, but the path laid before it reveals a power in the womb that has fiercely and devotedly brought my children into the world and left behind it a sweet lightness. And now to find the bind in this pose: a reverent embrace. The walk, a nimble series of steps, with breath. The closing fold of Tittibhasana C an honoring: of them, of the power of the body, of the humility of our Knowing and unknowing.

Reunion

As is the case with so many jobs, mine poses many challenges. Beautiful, organic, interpersonal, influential, compassionate, creative...yes. But there are days when I leave this job and feel the weight of hurt feelings, political interactions, mistakes, and anxieties about what I cannot predict about future hurt feelings, politics, and mistakes. The job can seem too big on those days, mis-sized in relation to the vast world that surrounds it. I know that I have lost perspective, but I am stuck. As I make my way out the door, across the street, and down the busy sidewalk toward the bus stop, I breathe slowly. On some days, and in some weeks, the heart is heavy, and the process of breathing through and around it is pained and confusing. On many occasions, I do ask, "Is this the right place for me?" Is this the best way for me to give back to the world? Am I doing my best work here? These are questions I might hold on to for days until a mindful process of gathering perspective reminds me that, yes, this is good. I consider the alternatives: I imagine myself in other corners of the world, in other clothes, reading other books, working differently with humans and their complexities. And I re-choose this job of all jobs. But there is the immediacy of the melancholy that can come with the doubt on those tougher days, when we wonder whether we've chosen rightly; and the contorted view of the job's importance, its sense of urgency, its undertow can trap the mind back at the desk (or wherever we locate ourselves in our work).

The fortune of what awaits me at the end of those days is medicine to this melancholy.

With the coming of my second child, I have developed a vicious hold on the hours at home, devotedly turning my attention to family and decidedly not looking through the technological portals that might lead me back into the complexities of work. That walk to the bus leads me to the cross-city journey to reunite with my children after hours away from them, and I find a deep sense of responsibility in sorting through the layers of weight that work worries might give me as I walk out the door. As is often the case, I cannot make sense of it all in the 20-minute trip, and so I try earnestly to tuck it away. I use words in my mind—om namaha—and the fundamental rhythm and sound of the breath to get perspective. But even then, as I walk down the stairs to my children's school, I might still be holding on.

And then I see them. My daughter rushes out of her play, breaks into laughter, and hurls herself into my arms. And I smell her: a tiny, warm, sweet little body that came from mine. I can smell the crackers she ate at lunch, and the paint she used in the art center. I feel her little muscles so alive, the soft clothes that I have washed over and over, her beautiful baby hair. Together, we gather her belongings and I exclaim joyfully as I look at the art she made for me, and together we walk excitedly down the hallway to baby brother, who is often fast asleep in a late afternoon nap. And then I have the delicious chance to walk over to his crib and gently rub his belly as he slowly awakens. He sees me, he smiles, and I pick him up and snuggle into his neck. Pure baby: my milk in his belly, the baby food I have made him in his belly, the sweet lotion we put on his face, the softness of his wispy hair, his little body fitting so perfectly into mine as I carry him. Over and over, like on the day he was born, I kiss him and whisper and press my face into his cheeks. And I watch him look all around the room at his baby friends: proud. My mommy's here now.

And as I push the enormous stroller of babies and bags down the city streets toward their beautiful father, I forget about my heavy heart.

Mala

Eight months after the birth of my second baby, I am re-discovering Second Series. My teacher is re-giving me the poses. It is like a second life inside of this practice, and it is blowing my mind.

At a recent workshop, by teacher Angelique Sandas talked saliently about the practice as a japa mala: each asana is a bead, and we follow these beads around and around, coming back to each one, but never in the same way. It's a perfect analogy—indeed, we have seen the words in Guruji's articulation of the practice. Through the lens of this analogy I daily consider another wise point that my teacher makes about how even inside of this very challenging practice the practitioner must challenge herself so that the practice can continue to give back. Indeed, over several years of daily practice, we can find ourselves in a place of ease. Ease is good, yes? Of course, yes. But if that sacred marriage between effort and ease begins to fall out of balance, if as we become stronger and more flexible and the effort becomes less and less, we must seek out new ways to draw benefits from the practice. And thus, as we go round and round the mala, we find adventurous elements tucked into each asana that we had never before discovered.

Now, starting Second Series all over again, I am discovering new obstacles, much illumination, moment after moment of awe. My teacher believes in the beautiful, complex process of the practice, of the mindful doling out of poses only when the practitioner seems ready, of the weeks and weeks of pause in the sequence. In many ways, progress is up to her: she follows her own mystical instincts, and I give her my trust. She relies on the power of the practitioner's deep engagement in each stage of the sequence to open space in a pose before moving on. I am practicing up to Dwi Pada Sirsasana, and I feel viscerally the challenge of the hip openings, of the spine growing, of the muscles in my back learning to speak kindly to my legs, to my shoulders, to my chest as everything works to lengthen and open and balance. And how challenging to pause here, not only because of the effort required to do these asana, but also because backbending comes right after. My body longs for Yoganidrasana, for Pincha Mayurasana...but I hold here, at Dwi Pada, coming to rest and breathe and be okay in this intense bend in the body. After this, I come to rest, breathe, and be okay in backbending and in dropping back. Then, new this week, my teacher assists me in dropping back, guiding hands to ankles.

I have spent some moments in this space: I am 38, I have two children, and I take my ankles in backbend. Rock on. But I cannot stay there long because I cannot completely understand it beyond how fired up it makes my ego, and the ego is so easily impacted (isn't it?). And even 5 days into that deep backbending, I see much more clearly into the space around the ego: the Self that transcends all of it is practically impossible to understand intellectually because peace is more felt in the soul than processed in the brain. Humility is the fairy dust that falls all around the ego, gently dissolving it like sugar in a glass of water. Wonder is the magic of this practice and the rest for the heart and mind that comes with it. And so, like in those asana where we stay for weeks and months, and rest, breathe, and be okay, wonder sits with us and we don't have to move beyond it.

That is the brilliance of coming round and round again through the mala, that extraordinary chance to wonder, to know ourselves beyond the bounds of understanding.

The Practice of Parenting

I did not know about the tug of war between the waiting and the surprise. It's a secret I would share with folks who are about to have a second baby: You will find yourself waiting. For what, you may not know. But you'll feel it: a constant state of anticipation. And yet, it will all seem new. The waiting comes from an endless string of unknowns that streams out of a first child. The brain now wants to predict. And the heart sits at the ready, but still cannot wrap itself around the raw newness that this child constantly brings.

My brain waits for the next tooth, for that exciting tip onto the belly as the rolling over begins, for the child to sleep all...the...way...through...the...night, for the first word. We have dug out the same script we used before, as the boy has found "Da da da da": just as I did with his sister, I turn to his father and point and say, "Dada? YES! Dada!" But my heart, I find, is surprisingly surprised at everything my sweet boy does, despite the fact that his sister did it all before him and we call up the same scripts we used with her, despite the fact that my brain says, "Look what's coming next!" It's all so strange and new and naked. The brain expects, but the heart feels the visceral reality of what this child presents to us: something altogether baby brother of the first, and altogether his own.

In the pull between the anticipation and the revelation, the confidence of prediction and the humility of the unknown, there is something complex: anxiety, the sound of breathing, certainty of impermanence, lack of understanding. Deep, rich love that is woven throughout with: Yes., How long?, I know., and What if? In moments when the brain wants to lay it all before me in spans of years, I can worry about how quickly it will all come to pass. How quickly it has come to pass now, as I sit here writing and he sleeps soundly upstairs, a creamy, doughy little muffin of 6-and-a-half months. In the video monitor I see a stream of sunlight passing over his little face, his yummy pink cheeks, his lovely peaceful eyelids. [How fortunate that technology does allow us to see our children in their beauty, like this, without waking them.] And I want to stop time.

How many other parents have said that? "I want to stop time." And do what in that pause? Linger and look and breathe them completely in, never to be separated from this moment.

But, consider this. It is a breathing pause, a relaxed holding of position, a balance of effort and ease. These moments, when we parents aim to rest without anxiety in the pure childness of our children and in the pure parentness that is our inexplicable connection to them, are our asana. Yoga teaches us to find rest even in the most challenging of asana, and Ashtanga teaches us that one asana will be followed by another and another and onward forever as long as we practice. Thus, it inspires me to consider whether my panicked moments of trying to hold on to this time with my babies could be likened to that. Vinyasa in, vinyasa out: a breath-led journey into and out of these precious spaces of time that we feel desperate to freeze. Always the awareness of breath that gave us all life in the first place, always the nectar of bliss in those asana. In each asana of my practice I breathe into this whole body that birthed my babies, I smell with my inhale the skin of my son and feel deeply in my heart the perplexity my daughter carries with her in her own. Let us let the worry float away with each breath, knowing that another asana will come. Let us string these asana together and call it the practice of parenting: loving and wise, soft and strong, deep and sweet and humble and forever.

Baby Mudras

While the four of us meander through the haze of sleep deprivation, the obstacle course of identities shifting and egos large and small swelling and shrinking, and the ache and anxiety of early winter sniffles and coughs, we pause with each energetic connection between us. We notice acutely the warmth of love between us when the two children—so beautifully getting to know one another, and yet have known, already, for a long time, it seems—make one another laugh. The baby boy is purely entranced by his older sister, who seems as if she's lived in the world for far longer than her 3.5 years. And our daughter's sweetness pours out of a new place just for him...why, just today she snuck into his sleeping place while he was meant to be napping. And I watched her on the monitor smiling tenderly at him, reassuring him, drawing him into her world with kind words, modeled in part after her parents' words to them both, and drawn in other mysterious ways from a source much larger. In what can be a blur of a day of responsibilities we share —awaken, shower, switch babies, nurse, rock, make breakfast and lunch, take children to school, practice, go to work—these moments of connection create a peace and a silence, so important to the grand project of perspective.


And while we come together in these places of connection, each child navigates his or her own body in baby mudras that are palpably awesome and always instructive. My daughter has learned to snap, a skill that began with watching, then fumbling her tiny fingers around one another, then placing thumb to middle finger...and the tiniest audible snap. And now, after so much practice, a perfect snap, as loud as 3-year-old fingers will allow. Clear, spot on. What does this mudra mean? Thumb to middle finger: shuni mudra. An expression of living in the present moment; the "seal of patience." She uses it to clear her own mind sometimes...a reminder of how simply a mudra can locate us here. Now.

And the baby has found his toes. Ah...this does not get old. It is something to see it again in another child: the parent is wiser, the parent trusts herself more, and thus she trusts her child more. She's not looking, and there he has gone, tracing the hand down the midline—sushumna nadi—toward the toe. The hand finds the toe, and there is the mudra. What does it mean? Judging by his face: strength, grace, joy. It makes him smile. Or, perhaps, it makes me smile and then makes him smile. Either way, the joy of a hand to a toe? I think of Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana...such a challenge. The body shakes with the test of balance. Could I think about it more joyfully?

Yes.

And more love

Two months.

In the last two months, I have been balancing, stacking pieces in each day, addressing them methodically one by one, finding a new efficiency that helps to propel me home from work, where I unfold: nurse, listen to my daughter's stories, exchange glances with my partner, sink deeply into the sweet face of my baby boy. Eyes sharper, heart more open, mind fuzzy and wise, melancholy and bliss in a dance, sense of humor a low flame that I try to keep lit.

In the last two months, I have seen a birthday. And for a moment on that day I caught myself feeling old, only to find on the day after that my jump back returned to me in practice. It comes and goes, but it reminds me of the memory and strength of the depth of the body.

And that is true, too: I have returned to the shala. I just finished my 2nd week back, and it was deliciously calming to walk in on that first day to the kindness of my fellow yogis, still moving diligently through their own practices. The smell, the sound of breathing, the nurturing hands of my dear teacher. As if I had never left.

Weeks post-partum without the physicality of yoga turn from a necessity to an echoing kind of missing. It begins to feel necessary to bring it back. Without asana, the mind tries to hold steady to all that the body has done in years and years of asana to clear it out. And we realize how critical asana is to the 8 limbs. And now, with even more intuition—more instinct, sharper senses, a greater will to let go—I practice more wisely. And that efficiency transfers onto the mat. Softly, with less need to force anything at all. Lightness.

And the fire in the belly is slowly returning. Each day something new. Today, jumping back to plank: The sweeping, energetic uplift to Upward Dog after that jump is something I had forgotten. So, this practice—practiced before—becomes new again. A mix of memories and newness.

And more love. One wonders where it will all fit, this love for babies and partner. It has to all crowd in at first, and the tug of loving and missing and awe feels like pain. The pain surfaces in the form of anxiety or sadness, frustration over a messy living room (Cannot we have a perfectly tidy living room for this family?), or deep worry about a sniffle (Is everyone okay?), or fear about mediocrity (If I were a better mother, I would....). But the love settles in, and the heart begins to feel like it was always this big, as one manages the low, dull ache and beauty of this blessing.

Harbinger

In these last couple of weeks I have found the bliss of mothering this new child to be hauntingly accompanied by melancholy, as if the two emotions are holding hands and engaging in a conversation that tries to make sense of the present, past, and future. The bliss looks down at the child while he nurses, tries to find the memory of our knowing one another deep in his dark baby eyes. The melancholy rests sleepily nearby, sorting through what is to come...a low, dull feeling of sadness that—until recently—I couldn't quite explain.

Here's what I have so far. I have come to theorize that this underlying sadness is an emotional preparation for the impending, additional loss of self, as the layers of who I have been peel away with the unfolding of this new child.

I remember, deep into the 3 years of my first child, an awareness that I had changed significantly. When she was in the belly, I worried in my own self-centered way that she would never come to understand or appreciate the love I would give her, and that I would fade away into the vacuum of her unknowing, having very little left to give to myself. But it was not long into her life that I realized she had already blessed me with something much greater than her appreciation: mothering my child had completely rearranged my mind, freeing me from the barnacled images and perceptions that had relentlessly clung on for many years. And understandably so: they had nothing quite so forceful to shake them loose before. The union with my partner had begun that process, but being a mother kicked it into a higher gear of transformation.

This change has been sweeping, and I am still in the throes of it, palpably aware of the lessening of mind burdens that used to weigh me down: food worries, fears about the body, fear of letting go, impatience, anger, depression. There is much more to release, but I am overwhelmed by the impact thus far. A movement away from self and into Self.

And of practice: for me, there is no practice without this mothering. Indeed, practice began as an independent journey. But the arrival of my daughter merged with daily practice into a beautiful, symbiotic, holistic life force. In every vinyasa, I smell her, hear her in the breath, draw deep into the womb to find stillness.

And now my son is here. And in this pause of daily physical practice, this healing and holding, this constancy of nursing and giving and wandering through the haze of sleep deprivation and negotiating the fragile and enduring energy between my partner and me...why the melancholy? Am I sinking back into that undertow of mind-chatter that drags us all down, undoing the levity of strength and balance that has come from the bliss of mothering my daughter? I encounter the familiar resentment of the solitude of the mother that my male partner could never know; I seek his awe at the miracle of childbirthing and breast feeding, and feel deeply the absence of a recognition that he could never begin to offer, for I, too, cannot begin to acknowledge it fully for myself. I sense a palpable aging, a fear of the speed of time, a dark sorrow around mortality... Is it all back, this noise? Is the melancholy a blanket of regression back into the indulgence of self-pity and fear?

I do not think so.

The melancholy, I think, is the harbinger of what will fall away as this boy reveals himself to me. It is the beginning of another force bringing on the molting of the body, and of the tectonic shifting of plates of the mind. That force, with the force of my daughter, will continue to draw love out of me, from deep places that seem to go much, much farther down than the soles of my feet. When I return to the physical practice, with these babies in my soul, I expect to be beside myself, and that is really always where I wanted to be.

Haze of Sleep | Practice

Ah, yes. The haze of sleep deprivation in these early weeks with a newborn. I find myself a bit anxious as the day winds down, anticipating those wake-ups. Though I am nursing, I have a beautiful partner who gets up once in the night to give our child a bottle of breast milk, and this contributes enormously to my sanity. Nevertheless, the mind and heart are always awake throughout the night, even as the body sleeps...and the wake-up is an emotional business. A reminder that he is here, an immediate need, a slow lifting of oneself out of the cocoon of bed. And the haze stays with us during the day, inviting us into both a remembering and a forgetfulness. The daydreaming, melancholy, and creativity that bubbles up with nursing. The vast gaps in our memory of time. Things found in the cupboard that should be in the fridge. Slips of the tongue.

I wake up from a night of turbulent rest and feel compelled to go right to work. My partner said to me the other day, "If you hadn't just had a baby, you'd go right to practice at this time, right?" "Of course," I said. "Well," said he, "at this time, you must sleep instead of practice."

Hmmm. Yes. And I try. But the sleep void is also a form of practice.

 I think there is something magical and beneficial in this haze. The edges are all blurry, the mind is untethered (except, of course, in those insane sleep-deprived moments when a missing sock becomes very, very important). This haze creates a churning of the mind. Add breastfeeding to that haze and what comes into vision is a collage of memories, understandings, images of reality that change shape constantly, and many, many emotions. These visions rearrange our minds. When the haze lifts, we find a kind of enlightenment, if we are able to see it.

 The other night I was rocking my baby, and I began to cry. I don't know what sparked it, but I suddenly realized that I had been holding him at arm's length since we had come home from the hospital, afraid of hurting my daughter's feelings. I realized why I missed those days in the NICU—the hospital ice, the sounds of machines and the soft voices of the nurses, the early mornings spent alone eating my oatmeal and hard-boiled egg in the cafeteria. I missed those days because he and I were alone in our secret love affair, without the guilt of seeing my sweet daughter's face turn away when I look fondly upon him. I cried and cried because I was so sorry for holding back, and because I was so sorry for asking my daughter (who is frugal with her affection) to share the love space. And a membrane separating the rooms of the heart began to dissolve in that haze of worry and love and the smell of him and the image of her face.

 We sleep to rest the mind and body. To be pulled out of sleep and wade through the thick fog that the deprivation creates is a test and a journey leading somewhere beautiful. It is its own kind of practice. While the belly heals, the heart and brain collaborate to open space for two children; to churn patience between parents like rolling, buttery fields of calm; to turn it all back inward to cleanse the soul.

Arrival

I knew my son would come early. I could feel it deep in the belly, that the belly would only grow so much, could only grow so much. I suspected he would knock on the door to the world at around 37 weeks, just like his sister. And lo, on the day when 37 weeks concluded, the belly showed signs that he would not be long. He would arrive less than 48 hours later.

My intellect — such a driving force in my being — tries to reach back into the last two weeks, wrap itself around them, and capture with full understanding how it all happened: the pre-labor, the 19 hours from first contraction to his emergence, the one night we spent at home, the two nights in the NICU under the lights, and the stream of nights we have spent since then riding the undulating wave of days spent nursing, playing, singing, balancing the sweetness and raw pull of our 3-year-old, connecting to the ambitions of the Olympians, wiggling in our work, drinking sleep deeply, finding moments to make eye contact and say out loud, "We have two children. We have TWO children."

Post-partum blues wrapped around me like a wool blanket when my daughter was born: at 37 weeks, I still had a few weeks of the term left to teach. Grade, respond to students' needs, close out the school year. My intellect stepped in to take care of those things, and my self-nurturing (itself a newborn at the time) could not compete. I hardly ate, I sat and nursed all day while keeping one hand on the keyboard, and I resented the offerings of others. I barely connected with the unpregnancy melting over my body, and my senses retreated deep within. It wasn't until my dear sister, a mother of four, said to me over the phone, "Get OUT. You must get out," that I began to see with some focus the ball of light I was carrying all day, and the intense youth that would be born of it in me. It took some time.

With my son, I prepared to keep my senses on the surface. I prepared our space by cleansing it of clutter, I stocked my toiletries with grapefruit and bergamot, I purchased soft nursing tops that would allow me to feed my child easily, I pledged to eat and walk slowly and drink lots and lots of water. When he arrived, I let my mother-in-law spoon-feed me, vacuum my house and do my laundry, care for my 3-year-old, and advise me from her own grounded sense of mothering. When we were told that we had to readmit my son for phototherapy, I let the big alligator tears just come as they liked while the neonatologist was explaining the process and the nurse was showing me to my sleepover room, where I would spend the next two nights waking every two hours to come to his incubator and nurse him. It was not long before I absorbed the gravity of the other struggling babies around me, and understood the sweet blessing of his health — what was a little light when I was surrounded by teeny newborns whose cries sounded like wee kittens? Humility. And a kind of sharing of maternal energy; I wanted to donate my breast milk (not allowed, but the instinct was there and pulsing). One thinks that one is tired, and one learns that there is more energy to be found.

Such was the case with my labor... My daughter opened the door with a broken water and no contractions. And so hours later I found myself bellowing through the induction as I moaned and hollered through her descent. And there she was: quiet, pensive, a low flame of the extraordinary curiosity and imagination and delicate sweetness that she would become. With my son, I had the rich fortune of understanding what a slow, building labor could be like. The first contraction I shared with my daughter, as it lifted my tushie off the couch minutes before she was set to go to school with her Dad. "Whew!" I said. I think Baby might be coming. And so he was...and the day swelled as each contraction built on the one before it, taking us walking from home through the city to the hospital, stopping to breathe through a contraction while holding on to the side of a townhouse. Labor intensified while we waited two hours to be admitted to the PETU and walked the halls. It continued to build into the late hours of the evening, and deep into the early morning, when I was almost sure that I couldn't proceed. An intersection of worries gathered in my mind in a huddle: I heard his heart decelerate with one of my contractions, and I became afraid that I could not keep him alive on the journey outward (a child's heart will do this as it makes its way through the birth canal, but I worried just the same); I worried that my ego was driving me too far in this natural delivery (ego-fearing ego, and forgetting for a moment that the body was doing what it was wildly designed to do); I feared that I was taking too long, using up finite amounts of energy; I was steeped in the pain of contracting and pushing; and I was losing touch with where he was in the journey outward. These imaginings gathered together and tried to erode the ease of knowing and feeling the process. I told the sweet, loving people in the room that I was capped out, and they told me I wasn't. What a bizarre series of moments, when some part of you lets others find a power when you, yourself, cannot seem to believe that it is there. The midwife asked me for one more push, and I drew strength from deep in the root of the body, deep in the recesses of the back, and pulled on a strong scarf wrapped round the birthing bar to push him out in a series of wails and waves of intense energy. I have a banshee in me; I think all women do. She was there at his arrival, as the midwife expertly met him at the door to the world and eased him out, taking away all of my pain. And soon he was there on my belly, not quiet like his sister, but hollering in the shocking transition from belly to world. "I see you," I kept saying, over and over, "I see you." And like some sort of seasoned mother, I had the spark of presence of mind to latch him.

In one moment, after he emerged, the midwife said to me, "What was that about how you couldn't do it?" And she kissed me on the forehead.

I owe the deepest debt to practice. Indeed, one has to have the foundational motivation to practice, a reasoning that carefully balances ego with the organic love of the child, the willingness to let pass the negative energy that might surround a growing body; the willingness to let go of guilt and fear and tune way, way in. These are keys to the parenting to come. And it was a challenge on many days to imagine how I would get through from Surya Namaskara to Savasana. Here is Urdvha Danurasana on the day when my child turned 37 weeks:

When the legs and hips and belly grew exhausted, the upper body reserved strength to step in and assist the root of the body in pushing out my child. That great marriage of opposites: upward motion with downward motion, pushing and pulling, effort and ease...that convergence was critical to his birth, to the holistic understanding of one body becoming two, to the balance of the body's healing, and, now, to the undulation of changing hormones, the ebb and flow of milk, the shifting energy of our family as it swells with even more emotion.

Today, two weeks later, I sit and type. He sleeps in a basket in the window, and I use these words to anchor the experience. My mentor tells me that some of it is not meant to be grasped; she says that women have for centuries had to let go of needing to understand the mystery of pregnancy and childbirth so that they could exist in the world, in war, in a larger web of maternal connection. When you begin to mother, she says, you mother the world. And that connection of energy is a joining of understanding and not understanding: together, we accept that we do something, have done something that is largely out of the grasp of intellect.

This is what I aim to do in these days. To slow down time, to breathe into the present, I find I must release from needing to retrace and reimagine so compulsively so that I may fully understand what has happened. This letting go soothes the intellect and makes room for the raw, soulful love that lies underneath all of our imaginings. Baby blues can be rooted in a mother's fear that she is all done, and that it is only baby now. It can be fed by worries of aging, of the end of conception, of the shift in attention from the beautiful belly to the beautiful child. A mother can forget her uniqueness, her needs, her own sweet youth. But I find with the arrival of my son that I, too, have arrived in a new way, with a kind of mothering of the self that eases doubt, even as it tries to creep in. It quiets the mind-chatter, and I bravely sit in the silence of this mystery a little more each day. And, again, I find...we find...that this precious post-natal nurturing is, too, yoga.

Lessons in Opening the Back

My back has opened in remarkable ways in the last couple of years, and it occurred to me the other day that it might be useful to trace the invaluable lessons I have learned from my wise teachers, and how those lessons have collaborated to make space in this spine.

1. A few years ago, Jill Manning told me to release my tush in backbend. I have been releasing it in every backbend I do since then. And it hasn't always been easy (Laghu Vajrasana is a particular challenge for me), but it has consistently asked me to use my legs for strength, helped me to access the length of my quadriceps, and directed energy to the top of the back.

2. When teacher Luke Jordan was working with our community, he often guided us through drop backs by asking us to place thumbs to chest, then to nose, then to forehead, and then back. This gradual process helps to maintain an opening in the upper back, and to slow things down: the drishti, the breath, the opening of the thoracic spine.

3. Beloved teachers David Keil and Greg Nardi both shared critical wisdom about rotation of the shoulders, and thus the opening of the upper back and chest. My teacher for the last year and a half, Greg Nardi, suggested that I practice Kapotasana by first doing B, then A, then B again, and to allow the elbows to bend so that the shoulder can safely rotate externally. He also told me to be mindful of the external rotation of my shoulders in Surya Namaskara, Virabhadrasana, and Utkatasana. And he directed me here, to David Keil's wonderful article on shoulders in Downward Dog.

4. It was teacher David Garrigues who emphasized the importance of alignment in Chaturanga, and here, I think, is a place where back bending can gain so much of its development, but where we tend to rush through the practice. Strength builds in the legs, belly, and upper back when we exhale and engage in that downward motion of Chaturanga, and that strength can work to open space in the upper back when we use it and the breath to power us back up into Upward Dog. And every deepening Upward Dog is a deepening in the back bending sequence of Second Series, and of drop backs. It begins right from the beginning of practice.

And that is also something I have learned even more acutely in the last year: Ashtanga is a system. Trust it. Practice, and the opening of space is coming.



Kapotasana — 36 Weeks from Rebecca on Vimeo.

Laboring

If ever there were a time in my practice when I was viscerally connected to the speed of vinyasa, it is now. Slow, slow. The body supporting this belly stopped growing weeks ago, and now the belly grows out, out, out as my child develops into his readiness to be born. I feel the weight of him on my hips, now moving like well-oiled gears as the tops of my bones roll in their sockets. Arms and leg and back muscles continue to support the relationship with gravity through each vinyasa as I slowly move through the building summer heat, the steam of the shala, the beautiful chaos of the breathing around me in my sweet yogi community. It is like moving through water, each position entered ever so slowly, gently. Careful to protect the spaces that will soon break wide open on the day he decides to emerge. 

This practice has always been a form of its own labor. Now, it is an extension of my laboring this child. I remember so palpably the feelings of my water breaking at the shala while I was in Downward Dog on the day my daughter was born three years ago: the lightness of losing that water, the sweeping feelings of empty unknowing and worry, the pain, the utter release of pain when she emerged, and the gushing flood of love and relief and pride that we had done this together. It is different now; I anticipate what is to come, I wait for him with some knowledge, I find faith that my body will remember how to birth him with minimal intervention.

It will not surprise me if his first knock at the door of the world is during practice some morning in the coming weeks. Indeed, I would be honored to find him ready to face his life during the breath-led movement of this practice.