Belly...

I have been silent with my words these last few weeks, hushed by the challenge of writing about any of this heart|brain|belly connection without acknowledging here, with words, the tiny baby growing inside the belly now.

It still seems like a dream.

Every morning I practice, the baby and I flow and breathe together, and my mind has still not completely taken in the reality of being pregnant again, let alone the reality of having a second child. I have not forgotten the pain of delivery, but I had forgotten what it was like to have a baby in the belly. And yet, each step of this pregnancy illuminates a room I think I've been in before—or, at least, one like it. Maybe.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I was practicing only Primary series, with some Second put in by my teacher. Now, having practiced Second Series for two years, the body is softer and it opens more readily, even as it becomes slightly heavier each day. I leave practice with a bliss that is like pure water, and the two of us move through the rest of the day doing what we do. One is so very busy growing, and the other is so very busy...growing. These past couple of days I have felt "bubbles," little moments of saying hello.

I remember this feeling with my first child—of being parallel, attached but not getting in one another's way, respectfully letting one another be. With little moments of, "Hey, whatcha doin'?" I would rub the belly, she would kick me. I felt like I had known her long before I had lived.

But this baby is a great mystery to me...in the middle of a distant memory and a distant future, I find in the present a vast space of calm. The baby has no certain identity right now, no nickname...just presence, and an increasing pull on my heart. I worried in the early days that we had not "connected," but I can see now how easily my first pregnancy and I connected because I had been preparing for "First Child," for Mother, for pregnancy-at-all. Now, Second Baby is a real unknown, an endless space of openness and wondering. Even in all of our months of trying, I grasped to feel the reality of pregnancy, to offer my first child a deep blessing. I could not have imagined the serenity of this kind of unknowing.

Practice could not be more precious now, as the soft, openness of the body helps me to breathe into the tiniest corners, letting this little one know that I am here.