Do you remember the day you returned home with your baby? Maybe she was a few days old—or just a few hours. Perhaps your baby was born prematurely, and so your homecoming followed weeks of uncertainty and vigilance. Or maybe he was born in your bedroom, and your first journey was just a slow walk to the kitchen for a glass of water. No matter the circumstances, you traveled a great distance to an entirely new life. You stepped over the transom into motherhood, and chances are you are still acclimating to this undiscovered country. We want to welcome you. It’s noisy and beautiful and wild, and we’re so glad you’re here.
As you read this, your baby might be sleeping or feeding, or maybe you are pushing a stroller with one hand and holding this book with the other. One thing we know for certain is that you’ve got a lot on your mind: vaccinations, diapers, feeding positions, laundry. And you’re carrying a lot in your body too: healing incisions, swollen or even infected breasts, sore back, aching head. All this can make it nearly impossible to remember that you’ve recently been present at a miracle. Hell, you recently wrought a miracle! You made a baby. And because the experiences of birth and postpartum have such profound emotional and physical components, that miracle has changed you.
The answer to the equation baby+woman is not a simple one. Motherhood is a still-mysterious alchemy of hormones and experience and emotion that can’t be easily teased apart. People talk about motherhood as a wild ride, or they talk about learning to surf the waves with your baby, but the truth is that you’re not riding a wave, you are the wave, and you are being pulled toward the shore of your baby by the sheer force of her needs, which can’t be delayed to a more convenient or relaxing time. Because what she needs is you.
Which is why it can be so easy to abandon yourself in these postpartum weeks and months. You might feel your needs pale in comparison to your baby’s needs; you might feel selfish for thinking of what you need when there’s this little helpless baby to take care of. And chances are you’re not the only one whose attention is now entirely focused on the baby. You’ve traded a midwife or ob/gyn for a pediatrician, and no one is interested in your daily protein intake any more. It now takes significant effort to get the support you need, and so it can seem easier to just manage, to let things go and focus on the baby. “The baby is healthy—that’s all that matters.” We hear this all the time, in reference to everything from emergency C-sections to postpartum depression. But a healthy baby isn’t all that matters. You matter. Because while it might feel wonderful to have the people you love care so much about your baby, there’s no denying you could use a little care yourself. You are recovering from the strenuous physical work of labor and delivery. You need to take sitz baths or tend to a Cesarean incision, to feed yourself and mentally prepare for going to the bathroom. And as your baby gets older, you need to get some exercise or see a friend or get a little work done. You could use a whole team of supporting actresses to help you regain your strength and equilibrium. You could use some attention. You need to be seen and nurtured with compassion, even if everyone else in your world is entirely focused on the baby.
We want to pay attention to you so that you can bring some of your own attention back to yourself. In this book, every step of the way, we are thinking of you and how you are doing.
The self-improvement industrial complex works hard trying to convince you that now is the time to enter into an intense postnatal campaign. Your pants size! Your pelvic floor! Your sex life! You’ve just had a baby, and suddenly the world is telling you just how much there is to fix. We don’t think there’s anything to fix, not your abs and not your attitude. We want to help soothe your tired mind and tired body, work with you to practice pausing every now and again to tend and befriend yourself, the self you are in this present—messy and imperfect—moment. Breathing Space is about doing something—very small and very quick—that feels good right away and that takes almost no time at all. Something you can do with your baby.
Breathing Space is about tuning in to your body and breath, but even more than that, it is about noticing sensations and feelings, getting to know yourself as a mother. In the first year of a child’s life, her body and mind are changing at a rate that is never reached again, and is not seen in any other living creature. But you are changing too! This is a time of profound transition, one that has the potential for amazing self-discovery. But it’s a real challenge for a mother to give herself the chance to reflect on her own experience, her own feelings. There is so much information about how to get to know your baby. There are tips on attuning to her, sensing her needs, learning to distinguish a hungry cry from a wet diaper cry. (Something that, by the way, even with five children between us, we were never able to do.) We’re here to talk about finding yourself in motherhood so that you can grow into the mother you were meant to be, which is the only mother your baby needs.
Breathing Space is anti-advice. Advice has an odd way of making a new mother feel less capable, in the same way that just hearing the words “sleep while your baby sleeps” makes it nearly impossible to take a nap. We don’t want to tell you what to do. There are more than enough books telling you how to be a better parent. It doesn’t really matter if you use the Five S’s, push your baby in a stroller, or carry her in a baby wrap. What matters is that what you are doing feels right for you and your baby. There are as many ways to raise a healthy child as there are cultures. In hunter-gatherer societies, three-year-olds wield machetes. In central Africa, the Efe women nurse each other’s babies. All around the world, we see babies growing up to be competent and well adjusted in their communities. Research shows that your satisfaction—your sense of competence and pleasure—have a great impact on your child’s sense of well-being. That satisfaction is what Breathing Space seeks to cultivate.
In early motherhood, when you’re faced with a vast array of advice, ideas, methods, and practices, the first question to ask isn’t, “What should I do?” The first question is, “What will work for my baby and me?” Finding the answer to that question can take some time and experimentation, and it starts with noticing how you feel in the moment and what your baby needs now. When you discover how strong, capable, and resourceful both you and your baby are, decisions become easier. When you are able to read your own signals and those of your baby with less worry and more realistic expectation, you can begin to know—and grow—your motherself.
But this takes a little while, and at first it’s hard to figure out what your baby needs. When a friend of ours brought her two-week-old baby to the pediatrician with a list of questions, the doctor just smiled at her and said, “You’re the one who knows this baby best. What do you think?” Our friend thought, What?! I know her best? I hardly know her at all! This baby is screwed!
While surely this pediatrician was trying to instill confidence in a new mother, his declaration had the opposite effect: panic. Getting to know your baby takes a while. But just because some things about him remain a mystery doesn’t mean you aren’t giving him just what he needs.
There are cultures in which postpartum mothers get attention and care, but contemporary American culture is not one of them. We live in a country with virtually no institutional support for new mothers. Paid maternity leaves are abysmally short (if offered at all), postnatal care is often perfunctory, and breastfeeding and childcare are seen as personal responsibilities rather than the public health and education issues they are. So we’re going to deviate slightly from our anti-advice stance here, and gently suggest you put down any book about parenting—or close out any parenting website—that has the name of another culture in its title. French, Danish, German. Whatever—wherever—it is, whatever parenting method is being lauded, it’s a parenting style that simply can’t exist outside a country that sees the care of mothers and children as a collective responsibility. And in America we’re not there yet. We’ve got a loooong way to go.
There is so much work to be done. We want to be clear that we know there is work to be done. We know that it takes a village and that, chances are, you don’t have one. And we know that if a woman lacks financial security, if she doesn’t have a safe and comfortable home, a shift in perspective or the practice of mindfulness won’t alter her circumstances. We don’t subscribe to the idea that it doesn’t matter what’s happening, it’s how you think about it. What’s happening matters very much! We know that. And we know that many circumstances are stacked against even the most privileged American mothers, and that it can be nearly impossible not to internalize our culture’s unbearably high expectations for you.
We also know that the more aware you are of what you feel and what you need, the easier it can be to ask for help. It’s our great hope that mothers can begin to speak honestly with each other, their families, and their communities about their needs, and that such conversations can be a force for change, the beginning of a new way of talking about motherhood. We also know that it isn’t your job to change institutions while caring for a baby. It is the responsibility of a civil society to create systems of care for mothers and babies that include generous parental leave and affordable, high-quality care and education for all children over one year of age. And we take that responsibility seriously.
It’s not only unrealistic expectations that can make us feel anxious; new research tells us that our postpartum brains are wired for anxiety. In pregnancy and postpartum, brain activity increases in regions that control empathy, anxiety, and social interaction, and in this way, our brains orient us toward our babies, making it easier for a new mother to fall in love with her baby and also making us sensitive—perhaps overly so—to potential dangers. This increase in activity, coupled with a complicated cocktail of postpartum hormones, all predispose new mothers to be more emotional, attentive, and empathic.
In evolutionary terms, being hardwired for vigilance makes sense. But in the context of contemporary motherhood, it’s more burdensome than lifesaving. Our babies are safe from the vast majority of threats that might have endangered our ancestors. We don’t have to protect our babies from wild animals, plagues, or famine. But because our brains haven’t caught up to these changes, we find new things to worry about. We chart sleep schedules and weight gain. We fret over progress toward developmental milestones; we cast sidelong glances at other mothers, convincing ourselves that they are doing it right, and we’re not. We worry about brain development. We worry about allergies. We worry about swaddling and not swaddling. And when we’re not worrying about something specific, we often feel a vague sense that something is wrong, with us or with our baby. This sense of unease is entirely understandable, for many reasons, chief among them the fact that new babies can be hard to read. A new father we know summed up the puzzle of newborn care perfectly when he said, “Who knew that the signs of perfect contentment and life-threatening dehydration are exactly the same?”
Because we are also experiencing such a profound increase in emotional openness, our feelings of love and attachment can leave us feeling raw, and our baby’s vulnerability can seem nearly unbearable. So we become anxious. Who wouldn’t? Breathing Space is about acknowledging and understanding that anxiety and gently training our minds and bodies to let it go. Because just noticing how often we are worrying—how often we think something is going wrong when nothing is actually going wrong—can be liberating.
Chronic anxiety—and its partner in crime, relentless self-criticism—are two of the biggest obstacles to enjoying motherhood. They drain available energy and distract you from your deeper feelings and from the present moment. And they drown out the voice of your nascent maternal instinct. When we talk about maternal instinct, we don’t mean an innate sense of mastery or a preternatural knowledge of your baby. We are talking about a sense that you and your baby belong together, that you are a capable mother, and that your baby, even in his fussiest moments, is vigorous and well.
We have to learn to sort out unnecessary worry from helpful worry and to turn off unnecessary worry from time to time so we can rest and reset our own new and vigorous nervous systems. We need some breathing space. There are things you can do to settle the worry, although it will take some practice to get your postpartum mind on board, to gently remind your brain that no, the most relaxing use of your baby’s naptime is not getting on the internet to confirm—yet again—that your jogging stroller isn’t the model that was just recalled.
The word grace means many things: elegance, finesse, agility, dignity, goodwill, generosity, kindness. A grace period is a time during which a demand is suspended, a debt forgiven. It is a respite and a reprieve.
Grace can also mean a blessing.
I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
—Anne Lamott
In Breathing Space, GRACE is an invitation to step out of the fray, to feel your feet on the ground, to relax tension in your body and mind. To reboot your hardworking nervous system.
GRACE is an acronym that guides you through a simple five-step exercise designed to create a clearing in body and mind.
This ability to pause is so important right now. We know it can seem impossible. We know it might seem irrelevant. We know the world is saying hurry up. In the chaos of life with a baby whose needs are endless, who cares about your needs, your feelings?
We do.
Because we’ve been at this long enough to know that this motherhood gig just doesn’t work unless you keep track of how you feel. Of how you’re doing. Of what is working for you, and what isn’t. Pausing, it turns out, is the single most important tool we have as mothers. Pausing is how we practice the art of recognizing that this is not an emergency. There will be emergencies, of course (and let us be the first to recommend you invest in a stack of navy-blue washcloths, as those tire-swing-to-the-nose trips to the emergency room go more smoothly when your child can’t actually see the blood). But the emergencies will be infrequent. Mostly there will be decisions, chaos, conflict, desire, and disappointment. There will be children who refuse bedtime and baths, children who want piercings and skateboards, coed sleepovers and R-rated movies. And you’ll need a moment to think of how you feel about it all. To think about what matters to you.
We repeat the five steps of GRACE in each of Breathing Space’s ten practice sessions. Because the more you do it, the more empowering it becomes. And at some point, you will find yourself having a moment of GRACE in the heat of the moment, and you will feel grateful. For now, we just experiment and practice on the mat for a minute or two.
The practice of GRACE cultivates self-compassion, which is the cornerstone of Breathing Space. Self-compassion reduces anxiety and the sense of isolation in mothers. Self-compassion is not self-pity. We’ve come to understand self-compassion as a kind of friendship with ourselves. From an early age, women are taught how to be good to our friends, to listen to their stories, to bolster their spirits in difficult times. To look at them with generous eyes. This is how we can see ourselves. We can be curious, loving, patient, impressed with all we have accomplished, excited by the great adventure of our lives.
At first it can be hard to see ourselves this way! But early motherhood is the perfect time to learn how. In this period, we have more capacity for love than at any other point in our lives. So why not include yourself in that expanding circle of love, protection, and care?
Sylvia Boorstein says, “let me greet the present moment as a friend,” which seems like a great place to begin a practice of compassion. Because if you can greet this moment as a friend, you’re greeting it with generosity and love. And by greeting it, you are, in a way, greeting yourself. Not the self that you were—or that you hope to be or wish to be or think you should be—but your present-moment self.
As mothers, we need connections, not comparisons. And we need compassion. The shift from a comparing mind to a kind mind is more important even than mindfulness. You can practice self-compassion by practicing GRACE. By pausing and resting long enough to ask yourself how you feel—and long enough to wait for an honest answer.
The seeds of Breathing Space were planted at Kripalu, a yoga retreat center in western Massachusetts where we—Alison and Erin—both attended retreats when our children were young. Those retreats were twenty years apart, and as different as night and day, but they changed us both in similar ways. Alison went to Kripalu first, when her first two sons were young. She left on a snowy morning in late spring, and still—to this day—remembers the sight of her husband and children standing at the window as she opened the car door to leave. The whole family had been sick with colds and was still recovering. She had planned her short getaway months before, her first since becoming a mother. Was she selfish? Abandoning her family? She was too worn out to answer those questions and too worn out to stay home. She got in the car and drove, hoping it was the right decision.
From the minute Alison walked through the doors of Kripalu, she knew it had been the right decision. The center was peaceful and bright, the people kind and caring. It was the perfect place to find some breathing space. Yoga at Kripalu was different; the teachers encouraged students to move slowly and to listen to their bodies with kindness and acceptance. She didn’t know it at the time, but the word kripalu means “compassion.” She left feeling deeply relaxed, more open, and patient with herself and her life.
It turned out that going to Kripalu for brief stays made her a better mother at home. So Alison returned to Kripalu again and again over the years. When her sons were grown, she earned her certification as a yoga teacher at Kripalu and began to dedicate herself professionally to the work of integrating psychology and yoga and mindfulness for new parents. As a result, Yoga of Parenting workshops and Breathing Space were born.
Erin also went to Kripalu in search of rest. And she also left her family—a wife and two daughters—with a hefty measure of ambivalence and guilt. But the purpose of her retreat wasn’t to do yoga. It was to read a novel. That’s right—she went to one of the country’s most renown yoga and wellness retreat centers to read a book. Reading is how she makes sense of herself and the world, and it has been since she was a child. Books are her home. But since she’d had kids, Erin hadn’t read much, and it was starting to feel like a piece of her—a very important piece—had gone missing. So Erin went to Kripalu and read a book. She read in the silent room and in the cafeteria. She read outside on the patio while the sun was setting. And by the end of the day—and the end of the novel—she felt like herself.
Like Alison, Erin didn’t know that kripalu meant “compassion.” And, like Alison, she was only just beginning to understand how to extend the same compassion she offered to her children to herself. Both Alison’s and Erin’s retreats allowed them—in different ways—to experience compassion in the literal sense of the word: they were “with” their own feelings of worry, desire, exhaustion, sadness, and love in a way that it wasn’t possible to be with them at home.
Retreats are wonderful. But they can also be nearly impossible to arrange, for a host of financial and logistical reasons. Thankfully, you don’t have to go away on retreat to learn to pause and relax. You can do it without leaving home or your baby. You can cultivate compassion right at home, right now.
The “yoga minutes” you will find in this book reduce stress by focusing the mind on movement and breath. They increase flexibility and strength, and they help you to feel at home in your changing body. Yoga minutes give you a way to quickly and regularly check in with yourself in a calming and settling way. Each chapter of the book focuses on a theme and practice, then ends with a yoga minute, each one building on the next to create a ten-minute practice. But each practice also stands on its own, and you will find some that resonate with you and become your favorites for a while. You will become stronger and more resilient with each passing month, getting to know and accept your ever-changing, developing motherself and your baby.
There are three different and short practices in each chapter: GRACE, breathing, and asana practice. Each practice can be done individually, but they also build on the previous chapter’s practice, so that—when you have the time and energy—you can complete the book’s full ten-minute practice. In this same way, you can dip in and out of the book at any time. It’s all here for you.
Whether you have been practicing yoga and, like Alison, feel a disconnect between the yoga class and the practice of parenting, or if, like Erin, you are a person whose idea of yoga is a good stretch after a long nap, the practices of Breathing Space are for you. And no matter how young or old your child is, is it is never too late to benefit from yoga and, in the process, improve your most important relationships. Like a well-crafted yoga class, we begin with centering, move through warm-ups and postures, and we end with deep relaxation. At every step of the way, connections are made between yoga and parenting. The heart of yoga is compassionate awareness, the tools are breath and inquiry; it is rooted in the body. It is practiced with GRACE. Your mat is your safe haven for exploring and feeling and refining. There is no external ideal to match, no goal to achieve. We want you to make every breath, every pose your own. Modify the practices to meet your evolving needs. Now—take a slow deep breath and sigh it out.
Welcome.