Chapter 6
Awkward Pose

When Eliza agreed to play the cello in her friend’s wedding, she could imagine the day perfectly. She would play Bach’s cello suites, per her dear friend’s request, and her soon-to-be born baby would sleep on a blanket beside her. Or maybe the baby would sleep in the arms of Eliza’s wife. Either way, the baby would sleep, and Eliza would play the cello.

But now the day of the wedding has arrived, and the baby isn’t sleeping. He’s shrieking. Also, Eliza’s wife is on a business trip, so Eliza is alone as she drives through the Blue Ridge Mountains from her home to the once bucolic and now maddeningly remote farm where the wedding will be held. The baby has been screaming since the moment Eliza buckled him into the car seat. This is no surprise to Eliza; the baby hates the car. He screamed the whole way home from the hospital the day after he was born, and he’s screamed through every car ride since. Eliza and her wife have done everything they can to avoid getting in the car with him. They’ve starting having their groceries delivered. Her wife has pushed the baby two miles each way in the stroller to every pediatrician appointment. But Eliza can’t push him in a stroller all the way to this wedding. He’s just going to have to cry.

Which is just what he does, at first. But soon enough, he’s screaming. Eliza knows there’s nothing he needs: he’s dry and fed. He’s sleepy but not overtired. His sunshade is adjusted properly; he’s dressed for the weather. She’s done all she can. So she keeps driving. She sings to him, sings all the protest songs of her childhood—“Union Miners Stand Together” and “If I Had a Hammer.” She sings some Dolly Parton favorites, “Apple Jack” and “Coat of Many Colors,” and then moves onto a rather desperate rendition of “Shenandoah,” which under normal conditions has a miraculously sedative effect. But not now. Still, Eliza keeps singing, and sweating.

When the crying had been going on for forty-five minutes, and Eliza thinks she can’t take another minute, she comes to the terrible realization that home is now farther away than the farm, and there’s nothing to do but keep going. She starts to cry. She’s so tired. So, so tired. How is it even possible to be this tired? What had she been thinking, embarking on this trip with a six-month-old who hates the car? What in the world could possibly be worth all this crying? But she’s promised her friend, and she has to be there. And she’s looked forward to it for so long, the chance to play, to make some beautiful music. But she also just wants to go home, to end the baby’s—and her—misery. Has she ever been so stuck?

Life is going to unfold however it does: pleasant or unpleasant, disappointing or thrilling, expected or unexpected, all of the above! What a relief it would be to know that whatever wave comes along, we can ride it out with grace.

—Sylvia Boorstein

Yes, what a relief it would be to know we could ride life’s waves with grace! Surely Eliza would have liked to know that, would have liked to feel that her tense and conflicted ride through the Blue Ridge was something she could handle. Something she was handling. Eliza is so much stronger than she thinks she is. The trouble is that in early motherhood, we often confuse quiet and calm with mastery and competency. A quiet, content baby means a job well done; a fussing baby means a failure. What if we told you neither is true?

Alison’s first baby was, relatively speaking, a breeze, which made her feel like a competent mother. Erin’s first baby didn’t stop crying until she was three months old, which shook Erin’s nascent maternal confidence to its (already wobbling) core. Then we had our second babies (Erin’s easier, Alison’s more challenging) and realized that it wasn’t about us. A baby is not the measure of a mother. Just think about how inconsistent babies are. Happy one minute, shrieking the next; sleeping through the night at three months, multiple night wakings at a year. We can’t rely on them to accurately reflect our level of commitment or competence. Sometimes, even when we have made a decision based on awareness of our emotions and our values, things don’t go as we hoped they would. Remember there are no “perfect” choices, only ones that are better than others.

Eliza is keeping her promise to play music at her friend’s wedding despite how uncomfortable and stressful it will be because she deeply values herself as a musician and as a reliable friend. But even though Eliza was aware of her feelings and made her decision based on her values, she’s still going to need resilience to get through the day. Because even when you’ve done everything you possibly can, things are still going to go badly sometimes. Situations are still going to deteriorate—and quickly. This is when, as the saying goes, the tough get going. This is when we need extra grit and resilience and when we need to really understand just what true resilience is made of. This is when we need to acknowledge, to really absorb, the truth that we are strong enough.

Do You Fight or Fly?

But before we talk about resilience, it might be a good idea to back up a bit and think about how you tend to respond to stress. When life’s demands outweigh our psychic resources, most of us go into what psychologists refer to as the stress response: fight, flight, or freeze. Most of us respond to stress in the same way every time we feel overwhelmed. If you have a tendency to fight, you will most likely feel angry and irritated when under stress. If you lean toward flight, you will most likely feel afraid or anxious or restless when you hit a rough patch. And if you freeze, you feel stuck or spacey or numb when stressed. No matter your typical response, most of us don’t make great decisions when we are in a state of overwhelm. The more we try to solve the problem, the more intractable it becomes.

Like Eliza, you might sometimes feel trapped. She faced two tangled and opposing needs: the need to soothe her baby and the need to do the exact thing that was making her baby cry. She could just push through, exhausting herself and her baby, or she could pause and ease up her effort. She could take a break and allow her body and nervous system to relax a bit before figuring out what to do next. This isn’t easy. Most of us need rescue instructions for our self. This is a good time to return to our mantra from chapter 2 and the words of our favorite Buddhist grandma, Sylvia Boorstein, who had these instructions to herself: “Sweetheart, you are in pain. Relax. Take a breath. Let’s pay attention to what is happening. Then we’ll figure out what to do.” This phrase holds the secret to handling stress if we can remember it. This is key. Most of us don’t remember it much of the time. But we can learn to remember more often.

It helps if we can become better acquainted with our response to stress, so that we know we are in pain or discomfort or under stress. You could change Sylvia Boorstein’s instructions to the simple word stressed. You can put a hand on your heart and simply say “stressed” to yourself. Then relax, take a breath, pay attention. And then have a certain faith that with a pause, it will be easier to know what to do next. One of the simplest ways to do this is by practicing with the stress response on the yoga mat, where we can learn about ourselves with less distraction from the outside world.

You might be wondering, with all the real-life opportunities for stress, why would we purposely make ourselves uncomfortable on the mat? We do it so that we can practice finding ease and self-compassion in the awkwardness, with fewer distractions; so that we can keep going even when we don’t want to. To help us realize that we are stronger than we think.

Awkward pose is a yoga practice that gives us the opportunity to observe our responses to challenging situations. In awkward pose, we simply sit on an invisible chair. It is, as the name suggests, awkward. It can leave you feeling embarrassed, incompetent, edgy, tense, or unskilled. We practice awkward pose in yoga so we can practice holding ourselves in awkwardness with acceptance and kindness in the safe and private space of our yoga mat. Awkward pose can teach us how we feel and how we resist feelings. Or how we feel bad about even having those feelings.

Another reason we practice being uncomfortable on the mat is because this is a setting where we can safely greet those feelings with curiosity, not the need to fix or change them. When we reach our edge of discomfort, we can back out of the pose and rest, then reenter it when it feels right, having lost nothing. In fact, we’ve gained some strength by resting. Resting and resuming a pose creates more sustainable strength.

In awkward pose we also practice GRACE, with emphasis on self-compassion and ease. We ground our attention in the body through focus. Focus on how our feet feel on the ground and how our body feels in the pose. Then we breathe, relaxing the jaw and shoulders and hands. We ask ourselves how we feel, body and mind, and greet those feelings with kindness. When we want to, we come out of the pose to rest a bit. Then we reenter it, noticing what’s changed.

As life with a baby speeds up, we often can’t notice our feelings soon enough to catch the opportunity to pause and reflect. That’s normal. It’s a skill that gets easier over time, the longer we practice. At first (and for a while) we notice after we’ve reacted. We say, “Oh, I got stressed there and really flipped out.” This isn’t a problem. It’s actually good news. It means you’re growing more aware, learning about yourself.

On the mat, when we notice that we want to come out of the pose, we can practice GRACE. It takes a lot of practice before we can reliably access GRACE off the mat, in the heat of the moment. Alison has been practicing for years, and she still celebrates when she remembers it. Erin’s been practicing for far less time than Alison, and she’s thrilled when she gets from G to R before her mind is off and running somewhere else. The last thing we want is for you to have one more thing to feel guilty about not doing, as though GRACE is some sort of Kegels of the mind. If you remember, great. If you realize you didn’t remember, that’s also great. One thing we know is that it gets easier and comes more quickly off the mat the more we practice on the mat. And even when we are only able to practice GRACE on the mat, we are still giving our nervous system that all-important rest and reset. This alone allows for recovery and thriving.

Eliza sees a turnoff ahead, a place to picnic near a river. She slows down, turns onto the gravel. She gets out of the car, takes the baby out of his car seat, and walks down the dirt path to the river. The baby quiets as the heartbreaking aftershocks of his sobs shudder through his little body. It takes Eliza a little while to stop crying. When she does, she has what she will remember as her first conversation with her son. She holds him up, at eye level. “I think you know this already, but in case you don’t, I’m a musician,” she says. “It’s my job.” The baby drools onto her hand in response. She doesn’t bother wiping it away. “I’m sorry you hate the car,” she continues, “but driving is part of life here on earth, so you’re going to have to get used to it.” The baby’s eyes open wide in an expression that Eliza thinks is either wonder or defiance. She can’t tell which.

She kicks off her sandals, and stands in the shallows of the river, in the cool water. She bends down and puts the baby’s feet in too, and he pulls up his feet, smiles and hums what she will remember as his first song. Eliza walks to the car, puts the baby in his car seat. He starts to shriek, as loud as ever. Eliza starts the car and pulls back onto the road.

Eliza did the most helpful thing she could: she took a break; she stopped. She got out of her thinking mind and into her senses. The sensations of air and water and the sound of her baby’s giggles were just what she needed so that she could reenter her life with a bit more ease and to remember that she was strong enough to do what she needed to do.

Did You Know …

“Resilience is about recharging, not enduring,” Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan wrote in the Harvard Business Review. Occupationally induced stress (like driving to a job with a screaming baby in the car) without adequate time for recovery doesn’t build resilience but rather depletes it. What, then, is recovery? There are two kinds of recovery: internal and external. Internal recovery can take place in the context of caregiving. For mothers, this means finding a way to break the cycle of stress, the way Eliza did, by changing your focus from completion of the goal to rest—however temporary the rest might be.

There are other ways to internally recover. You can follow Sylvia Boorstein’s rescue formula by acknowledging that your baby is healthy in all ways but just cries in the car. And you could acknowledge that this crying isn’t permanent and that it’s not your fault. In other words, you reframe the default mode of over-generalizing (“something is wrong with my baby”), personalizing (“it’s my fault my baby doesn’t sleep in the car”), or seeing things as permanent (“oh god, she’ll be crying on her way to college”).

External recovery is a physical break during which you aren’t responsible for your baby, for a few minutes or a few hours. Getting on your yoga mat, taking a walk, or playing an instrument are all forms of external recovery. Workaholics never take breaks from work, and it creates an imbalance in their lives. “Mamaholics” never take breaks from motherhood and never take time to recover and thus are always depleted and in stress-response mode.

So, if you want to be resilient, stop. Recharge, don’t simply endure. And know that you are strong enough.

One Minute Yoga 6

GRACE 6

• Gather yourself in the present moment, no matter how difficult, knowing you are resilient. Feel where your body meets the ground.
• Rest with a few slow breaths. Inhale through your nose, and exhale through your mouth, slowly. Let unnecessary tension melt away.
• Ask “Right now, are my baby and I safe?” Most likely, the answer is yes, so now ask, “Am I trying harder than I need to?”
• Compassionately bring your hand to your heart and send yourself some loving kindness for all your efforts in the absence of adequate supports.
• Engage with your life knowing that you are resilient. Begin again.

Breathing 6

This month we practice some “locks,” or bandhas, by inhaling fully and holding the breath while pulling in the perineum and abdominals like a strong Kegel. You can add the chin pressed down on your chest. After the count of four, release and exhale loudly through the mouth, then take a nice long, full inhale and exhale. The benefits of the locks are thought to be derived from compressing and then releasing compression, which increases circulation. Experiment and see how you feel after one or two rounds. Many of us find this practice reenergizing.

Asana 6

Awkward pose is sometimes called “powerful pose.”

• Take a moment to arrive in standing mountain pose. Bring your attention to your body and feel your feet on the ground, rock back and forth, then sway a little side to side.
• With hands on hips and with your torso upright and chest lifted, bend your knees and sit back, as if you were about to sit down onto an imaginary chair.
• Bring your arms up by your ears or slightly in front, and breathe.
• Pull your navel in and up.
• Hold the pose for four slow breaths.
• If you need a rest, straighten your legs and stand up for a breath or two and then sink back in.
• Notice how it feels to take a break and then sink back in.
• After four full slow breaths, come out of the pose and shake it out.
• If you have time, come into child’s pose or lie down on your back and rest and feel the effects of the pose.

Congratulations. You are learning how to sit in a chair that isn’t there and to do it with strength and grace.

Mantra 6: We are strong enough.