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.