Chapter 8
Tree Pose
Just as Maddie was slipping out the back door, she heard the doorbell ring. She cursed under her breath.
“Hey, Maddie, are you still here?” her husband called from upstairs. “Can you get the door? I think it’s my parents. I keep telling them they don’t have to ring the bell, but they keep not listening.”
Maddie considered ignoring her husband, pretending she was too far out the door to hear him. But she didn’t. “Got it,” she called.
Maddie’s in-laws were in town to help out with the baby because the nanny was sick. She opened the front door and greeted her in-laws with hugs and kisses and thanks, and she was just about to say she had to run out the door when another car pulled up in the driveway, causing Maddie to curse again, this time not entirely under her breath. She’d entirely forgotten that her husband’s best friend was coming in from New York for a wedding, and they’d offered—no, insisted—that he stay with them instead of getting a hotel. “Come in, come in!” Maddie said. More kisses, more embraces, all around. All the while Maddie tried to stay as close to the front door as possible, hoping she could still make an inconspicuous exit.
“Mads?” Maddie’s husband called down in a loud voice that seemed, to Maddie, to be at odds with his task, which was getting the baby to take a nap. He sounded frustrated. Maddie felt her heart sink. She put down her purse and keys. “Coming,” she called back brusquely, then turned, smiling, to her houseguests. “Make yourselves at home!” she said, hoping her invitation sounded more genuine than it was.
Four months before Maddie had circled this very day on her calendar and written “Piano sale!” in bright red marker inside the day’s box, a particularly noticeable announcement on an otherwise mostly empty calendar. Since becoming a mother, Maddie hadn’t made many plans. This wasn’t to say she had a lot of free time—she had no free time at all, in fact. She worked full-time and had an eight-month-old baby. Maddie knew there were a lot of things she should have on that calendar: date nights with her husband, that infant CPR class she kept meaning to take, Mommy-and-Me swim classes.
But there didn’t seem to be time for those things. There wasn’t really time for the piano sale either, but Maddie was determined to make time. Because if she didn’t, she’d have to wait an entire year for the sale to happen again. She’d already been waiting for what felt like forever. Maddie had played the piano since she was six years old. She wasn’t a star musician; she just loved to play and always had. All through her early life, whenever she had been worried or sad or trying to make a decision, she had always sat down at the piano. But since finishing college, she’d lived in a series of apartments on a series of small incomes, and she hadn’t been able to have a piano. Now she was married, with a better job and a house, and it was time. Every time Maddie walked into her house, she saw the blank wall she’d saved for the piano.
“I can’t figure out what’s going on,” Maddie’s husband said to her as she came into the darkened nursery. He was bouncing around the room with the baby in his arms. The nap-time music was playing on the portable speaker, the room-darkening shades were drawn, and the lavender mist was billowing from the essential oil diffuser. It was so sleep-conducive that Maddie could barely keep herself from lying down on the floor. She blinked hard, trying to stay awake. “Your parents and Keith are downstairs.”
Her husband looked confused. “Keith’s here?”
“Yeah,” Maddie said. “Remember how we invited him to stay?”
Her husband groaned. “Oh, crap, I totally forgot about that.”
Maddie wanted to be annoyed, but she’d forgotten too. “Well, he’s here, and so are your parents.”
“Great,” her husband said. “And this kid’s not at all tired.” The baby howled and lunged for Maddie. She stepped back a little.
“Maybe he’s dropping his third nap,” Maddie said, trying as hard as she could not to make eye contact with the baby.
“Already?” her husband asked.
“He’s eight months old,” she pointed out. “We’re probably lucky it lasted this long. Listen, I have to run. It’s the piano sale.”
“Now?” her husband said. “But everyone’s here.”
Maddie felt terrible. “I know,” she said, “but this is my chance.”
“Well, can you take the baby with you? Keith was going to help me stain the deck.”
Maddie shook her head. “I can’t. It’s going to be a madhouse.”
“Can you go tomorrow?”
“It’s one day,” Maddie said, feeling impatient. “Once a year, remember?” She had a newly familiar feeling in her stomach, a feeling that she was going too far in one direction. Sometimes it was the direction of work, away from the baby, which felt crappy, and then sometimes it was the direction of the baby, away from pretty much everything else, and that felt crappy too. It was why she needed the piano. So that she could finally do something else, something that wasn’t for the baby or work. Something that was just for her.
“I have to go,” Maddie said, feeling terrible, but doing it anyway, hoping that someday, somehow, all of this was going to get easier.
To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.
—Elizabeth Gilbert
A wise and honest mother Erin knows once said, “I love my baby more than life itself, but I still love life.” We think this is an extraordinary statement, one that has the potential to expand women’s lives in all stages of motherhood. And it is one of the many ways to begin answering the question that so often begins to arise in this time: How do we, as mothers, feed our personal and maternal passions, passions that seem to so often be in opposition to each other? Do we give things up? Do we carve out time for purely pleasurable experiences? For the things we create just for the sake of creating?
We’re not talking about painting frescos or writing the great American novel here (unless one of those is your passion, in which case, we are behind you!). But for the most part, we’re talking about more everyday creative acts and passions. Marathon running, banjo playing, political activism, knitting, surfing, meditation, movie watching, bulb planting, New Yorker reading. Taking pictures of flowers with your phone when you walk about the block. We’re really just talking about that fundamental—yet easily forgotten—human experience of joy for joy’s sake. And joy for joy’s sake (or should we say joy for your sake) is something that can be elusive in the early years of motherhood.
So then, how do we do it? How do we allow ourselves the time and space for our passions? We start small. We think about the small movements and adjustments that keep us standing. And we stay away from drastic proclamations, from fatalistic narratives (“I’ll never finish a project again, so why start?”). We also stay away from making rigid, ambitious schedules and plans that we can’t help but abandon. And then we get creative. We seek temporary, imperfect solutions.
When Erin’s first baby was around eight months old, all Erin wanted to do was read the New Yorker. She hadn’t made it through a story since her baby was born. So Erin took the baby to the childcare center at the Y and then sat in the lounge section of the women’s locker room and read for two hours. It was delicious. Of course she didn’t get any exercise that day, and her daughter caught a cold in childcare. It wasn’t something she would do everyday, but it was something she needed to do that day. It wasn’t a perfect or permanent solution; it was a small motion in the direction of her passion. It was a reach.
A Moving Balance: A Shaky, Imperfect, Often Chaotic, and Always-Moving Balance
At the intersection of motherhood and our other interests, there is balance. Balance is never static. We don’t achieve balance in motherhood once and for all. There is movement to balance. Like a tree, you have to continually move, making slight adjustments in response to your surroundings. Swaying is a sign of flexibility and strength. Fear of motion (and of falling) has a negative effect on balance, because we tend to tighten in reaction to fear, making it harder to sway and wobble. If we can see a fall—in yoga and in life—as both a consequence of bold courage and an opportunity to grow stronger, we will learn to wobble with grace.
When we practice balance in yoga, we actually create instability and asymmetry. This is also what Maddie did on the day of the piano sale, when she insisted on going despite the fact that it wasn’t a good day for her family. She leaned in one direction; she swayed and wobbled.
Willing to Wobble
Alison had been a potter for years before she got pregnant with her first child, but after giving birth to her son, she barely had time to look at the wheel in the corner of her basement, much less throw pots on it. But she was still thinking of pots. She kept her subscription to Ceramics Monthly, drew designs, and dreamed of glaze combinations for years and years. When her boys were teenagers, she began to take her love of pottery seriously again and made room for clay in her life and the life of her family. Looking back, she wishes she had been willing to find the time much earlier, to risk the wobble. She knows how much pleasure pottery gave her. But she also understands how hard it can be to put something seemingly frivolous ahead of caring for our children. Baby steps. There’s time.
Motherhood Is Less about a Perfect Balance and More about a Sustained Wobble
In yoga, we sway, we wobble, and we strengthen our vertical central core muscles to stay upright. We actually challenge gravity! We focus on a still point, called a drishti, to help steady ourselves in balancing poses. This is what we must also practice as mothers, so that we can have some of that life we still love, despite our overwhelming love for our babies. We have to create a little chaos, some instability. We have to let the dirty dishes sit there, disappoint people (including spouses, in-laws, and even our babies!), leave phone calls unreturned one more day, put off changing the crib sheet, delay registration for Music Together classes. We have to turn inward for a moment, strengthen that core that tells us what we want and who we are, and strike out in a new direction. And then we have to wobble, joyfully.
As we wobble, we remember that the goal isn’t to stay perfectly balanced. The goal is to get comfortable with the wobbling and, yes, the falling. Sometimes we can’t really know the feeling of balancing until we know what it feels like to fall out of balance, stand back up, and teeter some more.
If, at this point in motherhood, you have sacrificed large parts of yourself in order not to rock the boat, it might feel better to take tiny steps toward a different kind of balancing, experimenting with an hour alone—with your baby in someone else’s care—so you can have some time to reflect. Or if you’ve gone back to work and become accustomed to time away from your baby so that you can do your job, but you can’t imagine allowing yourself more time away to do something pleasurable, it’s also good to start small, maybe with an extra thirty minutes of childcare so you can walk around the block. When you take that time, you can begin to ask yourself, What is something that I love, something that I’ve sacrificed in order to keep life with my baby stable?
By now you've been practicing self-awareness and self-kindness on and off the yoga mat, so we hope that, while the answers to this question might not come quickly, you'll begin to allow yourself the time and space you deserve to consider them. Accessing answers requires a certain kind of creativity. It requires more relaxed mulling rather than focusing, and it might be easier to conjure up the questions and then, instead of trying to answer them, just keep them in mind as you take a walk or go about your day and see what images and thoughts float around in your mind.
Some women like to draw or doodle and see what comes onto the paper. Keep with the questions until you begin to feel a sense, however murky, of what might be missing from your days with your baby. Then start to experiment with small (and imperfect!) ways to add those elements back into your life, knowing that you will feel torn, that you will fall in and out of balance. The more we practice and strengthen those balancing muscles, the easier it is to move between taking care of our child and taking time for our creativity and passions to flourish. The movement is made possible by an acceptance of ambivalence, which, as you remember from chapter 5, is a good thing. In other words, it’s love that makes you wobble. Love on both sides.
Did You Know …
In yoga classes we are encouraged, while balancing in tree pose, to focus on a still point in front of us, a little above eye level. This is called drishti in Sanskrit. The practice of drishti develops concentration and stability. It steadies the mind, breath, and body. Drishti also means a larger point of view or clear seeing, like a bird’s eye view or wide-angle lens. By concentrating our gaze and quieting our mind, we can see where we are headed in a way that frees us from a binary equation of “me or my baby,” allowing us to instead see “me and my baby.” That what is good for your baby is good for you, and what is good for you is good for your baby.
You can experiment with drishti in tree pose. Try the pose first without focusing on a still point and instead let your focus drift from right to left, up and down. Then try the pose while fixing your gaze on a still point. Notice if there is a difference.
Off the mat, when trying to balance your desire to pursue something that is meaningful to you with caring for your baby, think about taking a wider view, one that zooms out and looks at the situation from a distance. Steady your mind, calm your nervous system, and see if an answer comes more easily. Or take a walk and look off to the distance, to the top of a skyscraper or the ridge of a mountain, notice your breath, and wait for the answer. A mantra is like a verbal drishti, keeping us focused on something larger. Try saying “There is strength in wobbling.” See if it rings true. If so, let it guide you in you decisions.
One Minute Yoga 8
GRACE 8
- Gather inward, in mountain pose, by finding something at eye level in front of you, one point to gaze at softly. Gather inward all the energy that you often spend outward. Gather it in with your breath, and bring your attention to your core. Feel your feet on the ground and the way your weight shifts from one part of your foot to another as you maintain your balance standing.
- Rest your jaw and shoulders. Notice your breath.
- Ask “Is there some important part of me that I have lost and that I want to reclaim?”
- Compassionately hold that part of yourself like you would a small baby, gently and with affection and curiosity.
- Engage with your day knowing you will fall in and out of balance. Begin again.
Breathing 8
Inhale to the count of three and at the top of the in-breath, sip in a little more air, just for you, as if sipping through a straw. Exhale with a nice long sigh. Repeat three times.
Asana 8
Tree Pose
- Start in mountain pose.
- Find a spot at eye level in front of you to softly gaze at to help you balance. Your drishti.
- Bring your hands to your hips or palms together at prayer in front of your heart.
- Engage your core. Shift your weight to the left foot and bring your right foot to the inside of either your left thigh or your left ankle. Feel yourself wobble, maybe fall out of the pose (if so, steady yourself and try again), but notice the constant of your breath and continue to press your palms together or press your hands into your hips. Press your foot against your ankle or thigh, engaging your core, and lengthening your spine and crown toward the sky. Feel the strength along the center line of your body; there is stillness there even while you wobble. Gather your energy in toward yourself rather than out.
- Repeat on the other side.
- Shake out any tension in your feet and ankles.
- If you have time, rest in savasana or child’s pose.
(Note: You will find that you can balance easily one day and not at all the next. This is normal. So when you try tree pose, if this is a day when you find it impossible to balance on one foot, allow the foot against your ankle to touch the ground like a kickstand for more balance.)