I was born in Santa Cruz; my daughter was born in San Francisco. Both of these California cities are yoga meccas, oversaturated with yoga classes and yoga teachers and the yoga culture is so pervasive that it’s basically become mainstream.
Yes, I did say yoga culture. It’s a culture that has crossed cultural boundaries. Now, yoga is a household word and most people know that downward dog is not an animal! When I first began doing yoga, yoga pants hadn’t been invented, yoga was still an esoteric, mysterious thing for many, and it was generally put out there as a formal practice. That’s how old I am...or at least, that’s how long I’ve been practicing yoga!
I love my formal practice and by that I mean the practice I get to do on my mat, uninterrupted for a long enough time to really release stress, relax, and be fully present. But since becoming a mom, I’ve had to get creative about fitting my practice into my day. That also means I’ve had to become more flexible, not physically, but in my attitude toward what it meant for me to say, “I did yoga today.” As a teacher, I would always tell my students that 10 minutes of yoga a day is better than doing yoga for an hour once a week. Even 5 minutes is significant, because I believe yoga should be practiced consistently. It is a relationship with yourself: with your body, mind, emotions, and any relationship needs regular attention.
Did I take my own advice when I became a mom? Not really. I still went to yoga classes, but I did not do a very good job of integrating short spurts of yoga into my daily life. Why? Simply because I didn’t adapt my practice to my new lifestyle with my daughter. It would have been so easy to do it while she was less mobile, sitting in her bouncy chair or swing. Oh well. I’ve finally begun to roll my mat out on the living room floor now, near her pile of toys and she often joins me or runs in circles around me as I practice. She loves it!
Even though I sort of let go of my posture practice in the first 6 or 7 months of my daughter’s life, I did much better at sticking to my meditation practice. It worked well when she took more than one nap a day and I craved that stillness, possibly to make up for the interrupted nights of sleep. But now that she naps only once a day, I tend to use that time for house cleaning, writing, and other projects, and so my meditation either happens after she goes down for the night, when I have insomnia, or when I wake up before her. The moral of my story as a new mother has been: keep adapting. Just when I figure out how to work with the situation, my daughter changes, so my practice also needs to change.
Hence, spontaneous yoga moments such as noticing my breathing while nursing daughter and relaxing my knees and shoulders while I’m folding the laundry.
Throughout my years of yoga practice, I’ve found that for me, what is most profound is not necessarily a super long yoga session that leaves me feeling like jello, although that is nice, too. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali state that yoga must be practiced constantly and for a long time. I can’t think of a more constant, long-range endeavor that compares to motherhood with all its physical and emotional demands. It’s a great opportunity for impromptu moments of awareness and introspection that can make yoga an automatic practice that has real connection to our lives.
If you hang out in the yoga community long enough, you begin to notice the popular phrase to take the yoga ‘off the mat.’ Indeed, Sean Corn made this phrase famous with her work with yoga and activism. I commend her work, but what I’m talking about here is simply expanding your view of what yoga is. I’m here to assure you that yoga isn’t just putting on tight clothes, rolling out a yoga mat, and going through a sequence of postures, breathing practices, and meditation. All that is important and integral to yoga, but there’s so much more to it than that.
But enough talk about it. While there’s so much to say about yoga, the magic is in the doing. On the spring equinox last week I was thinking of getting grounded before we enter into spring. So, to invert and butcher the saying, “What comes up must come down,” I’d like to claim that “What springs up must first squat down.” Here’s a practice on squats and building lower body strength, good posture, and releasing tension all at the same time. I was a little late on this post, but hey, it’s still the beginning of spring now and anyways, I was busy bending my knees and breathing while I was washing the dishes.