Being Held
yoga as a nurturing practice
supported easy seat
Capacity
“The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel pain.”
-Jennifer Aniston
“Not by age, but by capacity is wisdom acquired.”
-Plautus
Motherhood is so much about holding: holding the baby, holding your pee, holding in your frustration while your kid freaks out, holding the diaper bag and snacks, holding the ball of trash your kid just gave you instead of throwing it away, holding onto thoughts that get interrupted by little voices, and holding space for the family.
Sometimes it might seem like yoga is also about holding: holding a yoga pose, holding your breath to a certain count, and holding your thoughts and feelings. That’s the popular notion of yoga, anyway, and it’s easy when you first start out, to feel like you are just being told to hold these postures and patterns.
But yoga is more about noticing and it brings us face to face with the things we already hold. Some of those things need holding (especially that little baby!), but some of the things we hold onto and carry around are thoughts, emotions, and old tensions that inhibit us in our day. Yoga is letting go; it is a process of undoing the things that bind us up. That’s the kind of strength we can build with yoga — it’s not just muscular.
We let go and release stress, disappointment, confusion, anger, self-doubt, and grief. If we are wise, we know those things will come back; yoga is the process of letting go again and again.
Motherhood is all about letting go, holding on, and letting go again. It is a series of cycles and fluctuations. You can be the container or holder of things, but then sometimes you need to be held, too. And when we are finally held is when we can truly let go of pain and tension.
Being held is not a luxury - it is a real human need, and it’s physical and emotional. Mothering yourself is all about holding yourself. Really, everyone needs this in these stressful, modern, fast-paced times. Feeling held and supported is key to building our capacity in life, and it’s not just about gaining more tolerance to stress, but about building capacity for all the emotions and situations that arise, pleasant and unpleasant.
If you’re new to these concepts, here’s a lovely article and video by Irene Lyon on How to Build Somatic and Nervous System Capacity.
Has motherhood built your capacity for challenge and change? Or have you hit a point where your capacity feels worn down? We’re all likely to hit a rough patch now and then, and we could all use practice building capacity! This Mother’s Day, I thought I would share my thoughts on this because happy, relaxed, nurtured mamas are ones that have built up their capacity by getting grounded and practicing containment. Read on for the details:)
Getting grounded
Being a mama can be so grounding: you are constantly on call to meet very basic, physical needs (yours and your children’s). Then again, there are moments where we can get swept up in the relentlessness of it all and we lose our footing. Not sleeping well, attending to a crying baby or tantruming children, and just generally trying to remain functional during it all can be really destabilizing. Our own needs can easily be left on the backburner.
Just when it feels like we need to speed up so we can get everything done, that’s usually the time when we most need to slow down and get grounded. I know I’ve found myself in moments when everything feels urgent, overwhelming, and stressful. Those are moments when we are more in our heads and less in our bodies. That’s the time to root down through our feet or get low to the ground and practice embodiment.
It can be as simple as sitting or lying down and just feeling the full weight of your body resting into those points where it is in contact with the surface you are resting on. Or maybe you feel the urge to be more active physically; in those cases, it can be more grounding to walk, dance, or do something active like squats or one of the Virabhadrasana poses (Warrior Poses). Then again, a mental approach might help, like when you visualize roots coming out of your feet and anchoring you gently to the Earth. It’s all about what works for you in a given moment.
Getting grounded is all about noticing and directing your attention to your body, thoughts, emotions, and sensations.
“Embodiment is a malleable state of being in which you feel connected and attuned to your body and senses. It is a state of being that is meta-aware, which is to say attentive to the feeling body without deconstructing it. It is a state in which the mind listens to the body. Ultimately, it is a state of being in which the division between mind and body dissolves.”
-Willa Blythe Baker, PhD, Embodiment
getting grounded in Vrksasana (Tree Pose)
Containment
“Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very lives?”
-Carl Jung
“My soul is not contained within the limits of my body; my body is contained within the limitlessness of my soul.”
-Jim Carrey
Getting grounded connects to the earth and to our bodies. Containment gives us a tangible experience of our boundaries - where we end and everything around us begins. It sounds ridiculously simple, but in times of overwhelm, it can help to feel the solidity and strength of our bodies. Two simple ways of practicing containment:
Self hug: bring your right hand to the side of your ribcage under your left armpit. Then bring your left hand to the outside of your upper right arm. Hold yourself with love.
Get a hug from someone else!
Sit down and place your hands on your thighs, palms down. When you exhale, gently squeeze your thighs with your hands. Repeat as many times as you want. I learned this one from Jodi Dodd in her course Restorative Yoga and Nervous System Regulation.
These are just a few practices to help you feel more embodied and grounded. Sometimes, though, containment is about putting thoughts or emotions aside for later (oh so useful for motherhood!). We take images, ideas, emotions, and sensations and picture some container or box where we can store them, not forever, but just so we can take a breather. This kind of containment reminds us that we are not our emotions, thoughts, and sensations; they are only ideas and feelings we are meant to contain and release.
many babies love being worn - it’s a form of mommy and me containment!
Relax and Restore
“We teach best what we most need to learn.”
-Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
Mama, you deserve to relax and restore your energy. “If only I knew how,” you might think. Or, “If only I had time,” many of us say. There is time. There has to be time, or else we’ll burn out. If you could take a brief moment each day to do one yoga pose to get grounded, practice containment, and increase our capacity for life’s stresses, which one would it be?
Your answer might be different than mine or the next mama’s. Your answer might be different every day, but the point is that if we are to maintain capacity for the challenges of motherhood, we need to hold ourselves with love a little bit each day.
I’m writing this for myself, too. We’re on this journey together as mamas. I can be your yoga teacher sometimes, but if there is one very important thing I want you to really feel in your bones, it’s that you are also your own teacher. I’m here to share ideas, experiences, suggestions; your part is to pause and take a moment to sit with it all and decide what works for you.
So here’s an idea: what if I took a few minutes at the end of each day to luxuriate in a restorative yoga pose? The support of props can be such a powerful grounding tool and I can practice containment while in the pose. Would you like to try? I won’t give super detailed guidance on the poses here (I’ll save that for future posts) because I want you to play with the props and positioning. Let it be play; let yourself experiment.
This is a little Mother’s Day gift to you all! May you feel held, grounded, comforted, and nourished by your yoga practice.
Also, here’s a lovely book with detailed guidance for practicing restorative yoga:
Relax and Renew: Restful Yoga for Stressful Times, by Judith Hanson Lasater, Ph.D., P.T.
restorative upavistha konasana
mountain brook pose
supported easy seat (see beginning of post for a birds eye view of this)
Notes on sacred space
When we incorporate mini yoga sessions into our busy lives, it can be helpful to make that moment or the space where we practice sacred. Sometimes I shy away from using that word, because not everyone that seeks refuge in yoga considers themself religious. But what if we framed sacred in the light of these definitions:
“reverently dedicated to some person, purpose, or object” from Dictionary.com
“highly valued and important” from Merriam Webster online
On this Mothers’ Day, I think of my mom’s name, Sagrada, which is Spanish for ‘sacred.’ What a beautiful suggestion to me and all mothers, that we mothers are sacred; we are special, highly valued, and important. So let’s practice like we are special, with simple gestures: maybe we use some essential oils to bring scent to the air where we practice, or we light a candle to dedicate our mini yoga session to something personally meaningful. Or, we might put on some music, or drape a warm blanket on ourselves while resting in a restorative yoga pose. Make it your own, make it pleasurable, something to look forward to!
Share the love with another mama!
my mom, Sagrada, holding my daughter about 7 years ago
This is an amazingly thoughtful post. And you had me holding my heart with your wisdom and quotes and laughing with "holding your pee..." That brings up some stories!