How mindfulness affects your life — and your parenting
I’ve written about mindfulness before from a research-based perspective and also from a “how to get started” perspective , but today, I’d like to write about how mindfulness can impact your everyday life, particularly in early parenthood.
Some of us learn about mindfulness as we prepare for childbirth. In fact, Mindful Birthing by Nancy Bardacke is one of my favorite books for preparing for childbirth and beyond. Since being mindful -- that is, truly present and paying attention in your life -- is not only a tool that deepens your experience of childbirth and helps you cope with sensations that are more intense than many of us have ever experienced. But it is also a tool for deepening your experience of your everyday life in general.
Childbirth is undoubtedly hard, but it is a transformative experience like no other. The pain is part of the transformation, and being mindful and present in it allows us to simply experience the physical sensations. It makes the distinction between pain (a physical sensation) and suffering (an emotional reaction to pain). And it opens the possibility of experiencing pain without suffering. In fact, when we further identify the pain of childbirth (and parenthood...and life in general…) as being transformative, our experience of it changes further still.
Mindfulness is a practice in that the more we practice it, the more easily we can drop into the present moment, even at times outside of meditation. We practice meditation daily, so that we can access presence even when we’re activated in an argument or experiencing something physically painful. Or even when we are in nature, and being fully present allows us to fully soak in our surroundings. The more we practice, the more that state of full presence is available to us in all the moments of our lives.
Anyone who has ever meditated knows the feeling of sitting down and “trying” to meditate -- watching your mind race from thought to thought, from daydream to shopping list to what you’re going to eat next. That’s what our minds do, and that constant mind chatter is what many practitioners (somewhat) affectionately call “the monkey mind.” It swings from thought to thought. What we practice when we practice mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment. So, listening to our breath going in and out, paying attention to how cool the air feels going into our nose compared to how warm the breath feels coming out again, feeling the ground underneath us, the air on our skin -- these are all ways to get out of our heads. Since our heads are usually taking us for a ride away from the present moment, but our bodies are our connection to the present moment.
There’s so much of our life that we miss because we just aren’t here. Every time we’re preoccupied with other thoughts at dinner, during a drive...or during meditation :) -- we’re not really here. Practicing mindfulness is a way to root back into the everyday experience of living. And, when you start to really pay attention to your life, to the raindrops on the car window, to the warm air on your skin on a summer day, to the smell of cinnamon in your oatmeal in the morning -- life becomes a lot more lovely and a lot more fun. And you get to decide to get carried away on the jet stream of your thoughts or to stay right here, feeling and listening to your breath.
One place this really comes in handy is -- you guessed it -- parenting. When the routine of it all can start wearing on you. But when we approach it mindfully, we are able to see and appreciate the uniqueness of even the most “boring,” routine day. Even more, we are able to connect with our selves and with our children. Noticing what we are reacting to and then choosing if we are going to allow that reaction to continue. Taking a breath or a moment to ourselves (locking oneself in a bathroom for a minute is a tried and true way) to reconnect with our bodies and the present moment. Early parenthood is so intense -- but it is intense for the birthing parent in a unique way.
You may feel the loss of your individual self, the loss of your body as simply yours, the loss of a life that you feel a part of. Since early motherhood is often a very lonely experience in our culture, where new moms are in a completely new world, but they’re there alone, instead of with a community of other new moms and elders who have also been there before and get that “regular” life often just doesn’t feel compatible with our experience right now. Socializing with people whose lives and bodies and minds haven’t just been transformed can feel strange, like something that doesn’t really fit. And that’s because it doesn’t. Other people’s lives are business as usual, while early parenthood -- particularly for the birthing parent -- is anything but.
Where mindfulness comes in is that you can be open to and truly curious about this new world order. These new physical sensations and emotional experiences can be approached with interest instead of fear. You can watch your thoughts and judgments and emotions rise and fall and know that you don’t have to be carried away with them. You can stay rooted in the present and know you will be ok. The thing that is SO HARD right now will become less so with time and sometimes resolve altogether.
Sleep deprivation is a great example. As anyone who has gone night after night without adequate sleep, it is — to put it mildly — no picnic. Your brain and body aren’t firing on all cylinders, and it feels like we’re never going to sleep again. But that last part -- the meaning making of it, the forever-ifying of it -- that’s your thoughts. If we simply experience the feeling of sleeplessness: the physical exhaustion, the body weakness, the lightheadedness -- that is all relatively “easy” to bear. But it is the suffering, the meaning making, the not seeing an end to it (even though we know that everything is temporary) is what truly wears us down and leads us to hopelessness and sometimes drastic decisions in the hopes of making everything better.
And mindfulness helps as our children get older. Since, often we are around our children without being with our children. This is understandable, especially as work and life boundaries get more and more blurred. But we do have a choice in those (and all) boundaries, and we always have a choice about whether or not we are fully here in the present moment. Anyone who has put their phone down and played -- really played -- with their child for 10 minutes with their full attention on their child will tell you that that level of presence is not what they typically experience in their lives. And yet -- it’s always a choice. Meditation is simply a way to practice mindfulness, but there are countless others. One is staring into someone’s eyes, really seeing their face and eyes, another is washing dishes and feeling the soap on your hands, the water on your fingers, and yet another is playing with a child with full attention and truly experiencing that moment with them.
And it doesn’t just apply to the neutral or positive moments. When we learn to see and sit with our own discomfort: pain, dread, fear, grief and all the many other hard and uncomfortable emotions that are part of the human experience – we are also able to show up for our kids when they go through their own discomfort. We don’t try to escape our own pain in the face of their pain by fixing, advising, minimizing, or one-upping. We are able to sit next to them and bear witness to the very hard experience they are having – to both see them fully and to accompany them through all of life, instead of trying to escape the discomfort of their pain. It doesn’t mean we get it right every time, but we keep showing up and being present, seeing ourselves and seeing them and being awake and open to all the feelings and experiences that make up a human life.
It’s about paying attention in an effort to see things clearly. When we see ourselves clearly, we can see ourselves and our lives clearly (and what we’ve been missing, avoiding, and distorting). When we see ourselves clearly, we can see others clearly (and what we’ve been missing, avoiding, and distorting). And when we can see others clearly and are able to sit with the full range of human life and emotion – which very much applies to our children – we can build true connection with them. We all know the experience of someone responding to your pain in a way that left you feeling alone and unheard. Even if they said “the right things,” it somehow didn’t feel right. That’s disconnection. That interaction left you feeling alone because that person wasn’t actually responding to you, they were likely responding to themselves – pitying you instead of feeling compassion towards you, trying to fix the problem instead of sitting with you and how you were feeling, sharing how upset they were about what you went through instead of making space for how upset you were. We try to distance ourselves from others’ pain when we haven’t learned how to sit in, witness and survive our own pain. Mindfulness is a way to learn to sit in our pain so it is no longer a barrier between connecting with ourselves, with our lives, and with others.
The more we practice, the better we get at it. Soon, you will be catching yourself in a moment of “departure,” when we leave the present moment and get on the superhighway of our thoughts and worries and to do lists and what- nexts. And you will be able to root yourself in your feet on the floor and in the feel of your breath going into your lungs, and you’ll be able to choose to return to the experience of right now.
For those of you who are interested in taking a deeper dive into practicing mindfulness, see my other post “Diving into a mindfulness mediation practice.” Jon Kabat Zinn’s Wherever you go, there you are and Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting are also amazing places to start being here right now.
Since right now really is all we have.