7 Mini Mantras You Can Share With Your Kids

As a new mother, I am getting in the habit of making sure my daughter gets empowering messages on a daily basis. Rather than only hearing she’s adorable (which, granted, she is), I want her to hear about the volume of her power, depth of her compassion, and the scope of her abilities. I recently wrote an article for Inner Fire on this topic: 7 Mini Mantras You Can Share With Your Kids. Although it’s presented as suggestions for others, I wrote it as a commitment to myself; these are the yogic messages I want my daughter to grow up on.

Some of these messages I emulate naturally: from the day she was born my daughter has struck me with her sense of determination and purposefulness. To convey other messages, though, I have to overcome my own quirks and reservations. One of the hardest messages for me to commit to when the baby topples over or gets scared is:

5. “It’s okay to have feelings”: Accepting loss and change is not easy. It is normal to feel grief, sadness, frustration, and anger. Resisting these feelings or pretending they’re not there only creates more suffering. Being okay with unpleasant feelings (santosa) and expressing them in healthy ways won’t make them go away immediately, but it will allow you to move through them with grace.

When she falls or gets startled, my automatic reaction is to swoop in to hug her, kiss her, cuddle her, distract her from what happened, and prevent her from crying. I like to think that my daughter is getting 24/7 on-call private yoga instruction from me, but this is the exact opposite of how I encourage my yoga students to face challenges. When I’m being more mindful with my daughter, I put a hand on her to let her know I’m there, and say, “How was that, little one?” Often, once she gets past the shock, she goes back to what she was doing as if nothing happened. Sometimes she cries, and then I hold her close if she reaches for me and reassure her, “It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to process what happened.” I think she picks up on it. I notice that from the safety and security of my arms, she immediately looks back to the location of the fall or to the stranger who surprised her and moves through the negative emotion so she can go back to exploring confidently.

Read the rest of the article over at Inner Fire>> 

Mindful Pregnancy Table of Contents

This blog series is not meant to express an opinion about how anyone else should navigate pregnancy, childbirth, or parenting; this is simply the story of how one urban yogi in America moved through her own normal, relatively uncomplicated first pregnancy and childbirth. Although my posts end on positive notes, many parts of the process were challenging for me, and writing this blog helped me stay sane. My hope is that by being authentic about my experience I will empower other mamas to do the same. Because I shared what I was going through, friends from near and far reached out to support me, which made the difficult moments manageable and the joyful moments ecstatic. I thought it would be the birthing process that was empowering, but it was the solidarity from other women that gave me the fortitude to rise fully and completely to the challenge of motherhood. My hope for other mamas-to-be is that you will acknowledge your experience as it is (whether whether that’s blissful, horrible, or somewhere in between), will be unashamed to express that, and will be able to attain the resources you need to navigate your path.

I blogged my whole first trimester after-the-fact (alternating with present day posts), which makes it a little hard to navigate my Mindful Pregnancy posts in order. Here is an ordered week-by-week list of all my posts:

2 – Conception
3 – Pre-Conception Nutrition
4 – First Symptoms of Pregnancy

Bound Side Angle

4 Weeks Pregnant.


5 – Peeing on a Stick
6 – Secrets
7 – Nausea
8 – Surrendering Control (Or Not)
9 – New Joys
10 – Sharing the Joy (And Splitting My Pants)
11 – Hypermobility and Pregnancy
12 – Head Cold with a Side of Morning Sickness

12 Weeks Pregnant

12 Weeks Pregnant.

13 – Ascending From the Haze of the First Trimester
14 – So, What Type of Birth Are You Having?
15 – Beginning to Plan for Birth
16 – So When Do I Get That Baby Bump?
17 – Big Feelings
18 – Pregnancy Firsts

18 Weeks

18 Weeks Pregnant.

19 – It’s a Girl!
20 – Coping with Insomnia
21 – Beyond-The-Basics Nutrition
22- Pregnancy Book Reviews

22 Weeks Bump

22 Weeks Pregnant.

23 – To Work or Not To Work?
24 – Horizontal Growth Spurt
25 – Tis the Season to Dress to the Nines
26 – Baby Movements
27 – Home for Christmas
28 – 13 Misconceptions I Had About Babies

28 Weeks Pregnant

28 Weeks Pregnant.

29 – Nursery Mania
30 – Things I Love About My (Early) Third Trimester
31 – Healing an Eroded Body Image
32 – Birth Prep Class
33 – Dessert Decoration, Dog Deodorizing, and Dutailier
34 – Commitments to my Daughter
35 – “Lightening,” An Early Sign of Labor

35 Weeks Pregnant

35 Weeks Pregnant.

36 – Thoughts About Labor
37 – An Epileptic Mama’s Postpartum Plan
38 – Selfie Photoshoot, Stuck Rings, and Staycation

prenatal-belly-gaze

38 Weeks Pregnant.

39 – Encouraging Labor Naturally
40 – Equinox Firestorm’s Birth Story
40+ – Mindful Pregnancy Epilogue: The Fourth Trimester

17 Weeks Pregnant: Big Feelings

October 13 – October 19: 17 Weeks 0 Days – 17 Weeks 6 Days.

I may have freaked out this week.

A few years ago I took a yoga training with Hala Khouri about teaching at-risk youth. She explained kids’ emotions in a way that stuck with me: kids have big feelings. When little Jimmy drops his ice cream on the ground, his emotional response is not the same as an adult’s. We may dismiss him: “Don’t get so upset. It’s just ice cream;” but for him, it’s a death in the family, an amputated limb, the rapture and he was left behind. In order to hold space for little Jimmy to process this experience, we must acknowledge that what he’s feeling is enormous. A more compassionate response might be, “I understand that it’s hard to lose something. It’s okay to feel upset.”

I don’t know if it’s the yoga or just my personality, but I usually have the opposite of big feelings. Rage and jealousy are rare for me, I can’t be bothered with grudges that last more than a couple hours, and I’d describe my experience of excitement more as joyful anticipation. Pregnancy put an amplifier on all that.

In my first trimester I was introduced to pregnancy crying. I’m okay with shedding some tears and all, but, just like little Jimmy who dropped his ice cream, once I start crying I can’t stop! On top of that, it escalates: sniffling progresses to sobbing, sobbing progresses to wailing, and when I was at the height of my nausea, wailing progressed puking. That equanimous part of my psyche that stands back to observe my experience understands that my reaction is way out-of-proportion to whatever the trigger was, but instead of doing anything about it she stares on in helpless disbelief and mutters, “WTF.”

This week wasn’t my first freak out: early on in pregnancy, I got mad at some movers for having too long a truck (our apartment building had two large parking garages, and they either had to block one garage door or the other). When I confronted them I wasn’t trying to leave the building, I was just upset on principle. Maybe this reaction would be normal for people with a more confrontational disposition, but I wouldn’t usually expend energy and circulate a bunch of stress hormones over a problem that would most likely solve itself. Sure enough, after moving the truck back and forth several times to let tenants in and out, the movers separated the cab from the trailer to accommodate both garage doors. What happened this week had less of an external me-telling-people-off component, but the internal emotional experience was immense.

Patio before and after

I replaced my patios wood mulch gardens with black Mexican pebbles.

When we were looking for our new home, the intention was to find The House. You know, the one you pour blood, sweat, and tears into making your own, raise your kids in, and retire in. The house we bought and now live in has plentiful outdoor space, and my first blood, sweat, and tears project is to zen-ify the front patio.

Last Saturday I picked up my fourth and final 200-300 lb load of black Mexican pebbles, which Richard diligently loaded and unloaded for me (my low back hasn’t been tolerating heavy lifting well). As soon as I poured the first bag into the garden, I knew something was wrong—they didn’t match the other rocks. I dug them out of the garden and put them back in the bag. A couple days later, Richard loaded the rocks back into the car for me, and I took them back to landscaping store first thing in the morning to suggest that my pebbles may have been mismarked. After examining the rocks through the dusty bag I’d packing-taped shut, the man at the landscape store kindly insisted that the stones were black, but offered to exchange the bags for different ones anyway if I really wanted to. “No, it’s okay,” I sighed, feeling kind of silly, “I must have overreacted.”

Mismatched stones

I poured water over the stones compare their colors. The stones on the left are the ones in the rest of the garden, the ones on the right are the last batch. (See, they -are- different!)

I took the bags home (where Richard had to unload them yet again), and immediately dumped all six 50-lb bags into the garden. And then I really overreacted. The new rocks definitely did not match the others. The old rocks were exclusively shades of gray, the new rocks included shades of green and orange. Overwhelmed, I ran back inside the house and took a couple deep breaths, then went back outside hoping to have a fresh perspective. I kid you not, when I saw those motley stones my life literally flashed before my eyes: I saw 5 years, 30 years, 50 years into the future, how every time I stepped out into my patio for the rest of my life I would cringe at the sight of the rocks. I put my hand over my mouth and ran back inside.

I repeated this melodramatic (but very real to me, at the time) sequence several times, each round featuring a different train of thought tragically crashing in an explosion of big feelings and sending me running back into the house near tears:

Maybe it was just the lighting… Oh God no, they’re so different. Why do they only have men working at the landscaping store?? Men are much more prone color blindess!

They look like rainbow-colored aquarium pebbles! My patio is lined with giant aquarium pebbles. I can’t even…

The colorful rocks aren’t so bad. I can just mix them in with the others so the garden looks more uniform. Then I looked at the side of the patio that was completed to my vision. No! Green and orange accents were not what I had in mind. These rocks are a bastardization of my vision. I hate them and I can’t even handle looking at them! But they’re already all in the garden. What am I going to do??

By the time Richard told me it was time for me to drive him to his bus stop I was beside myself, fanning a hand next to my temple like a swooning southern belle. While driving, I tearfully redirected my frustration toward myself, “Why didn’t I trust my intuition? I knew those rocks weren’t right, but I didn’t exchange them even though the guy said I could. Why didn’t I trust myself enough to just exchange them! I was right there, it would’ve taken less than ten minutes.” I don’t think I was actually expecting an answer, but I got one anyway. Richard said plainly, “Because you don’t like asking for help, and you didn’t want to make those guys unload and reload the rocks for you.” In that moment, that didn’t make me feel better and didn’t stop me from continuing to lament (I think Richard was pretty glad when he got to get out of the car), but wow, how accurate.

In retrospect, that clear statement from my husband, my mirror, was invaluably informative. I was willing to completely disregard my knowledge and intuition to avoid inconveniencing someone, even if the result would be life-shattering (or at least feel that way for an hour). I will have to reverse that habit before attempting a natural birth in a hospital setting where medical interventions may be offered as often for your health as for convenience, comfort, and liability reasons. From everything I’ve read and learned, natural birth is all about intuition and self-trust; one of my affirmation is: my body knows exactly what to do.

By the time I got home I’d calmed down and started focusing on the solution rather than the problem. I went to work digging the rocks out of the garden and repackaging them. I put my low back out of commission for the rest of the day by lugging one of the bags down to the landscaping store and exchanging it for a bag of black Mexican pebbles that beautifully matched the rest of my garden. The next day Richard obligingly loaded the rest of the offensive rocks back into the car and then unloaded the ones I exchanged them for. I tried not to feel guilty about asking him for help.

My patio

Here’s how to patio looks now. Looking forward to adding more plants!

My matching rocks were all in place or the housewarming party on Saturday and I even had time to put in some more potted plants. My vision is coming together! As for the big feelings: I’m continuing to take them in stride, allowing myself to laugh about them in retrospect, and trying to remember to thank my husband for being so incredibly supportive.

Succulent cupcakes

Succulent cupcakes for the housewarming party to match the plants in the patio.

ps – If you’re interested in making the succulent cupackes, I used this tutorial.