Here is an excerpt from the rough draft of my upcoming Yoga Mama Manual! You can also follow me on Instagram @urbanyogamama for more updates on this manual, to be published in 2021:)
“Actually, the Guru is the teaching. The teacher may not always be present, but the teaching will always be there. The teaching is the Guru. With the help of the teaching, you will realize your own Guru within. And that Guru constantly guides you in all your efforts in life.”
-Swami Satchidananda
When I was 18, I decided to become a yoga teacher. I had been practicing for a couple of years and wanted to share what I felt from my practice with others. That’s how most teachers get inspired. I never met a teacher that got into it for the money.
This year I turned 40, and over the years of teaching, there have been so many “I don’t know” moments. It is common for students to approach me before or after class to ask questions about yoga, their bodies, or injuries. When I had an answer, I’d offer it; and when I didn’t know, I offered possible solutions prefaced with an “I’m not sure, but…”
Mothering is a little bit like that. Sure, there are classes and books about how to be a better parent and most of them have some value and good advice. But, in my four years of parenting, I’ve noticed that no matter how much you read or learn about parenting (and it’s way more than our parents ever learned through books and classes), if you’re stressed, tired, or dissatisfied with your current situation, all of that knowledge goes by the wayside and emotions take over. That’s when we react rather than respond. When I realized my own stress was affecting my relationship with my daughter, I started reading parenting books by Dan Siegel (The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline). In those books, he offers many techniques that actually help parents with their own ‘tantrums’ as much as those of their children. My favorite is the Wheel of Awareness. It’s a creative, visual way to bring some light to what we are experiencing in our minds
Why do we react? We’re tired, frustrated, overstimulated by the business of our lives, sad that we don’t have the same freedom in our days as we used to. Add to that list if there are other reasons you react instead of respond. It’s easy to feel bad for snapping at our kids or going off at our partners for not helping around the house as much as we want. It’s also easy not to even notice that we are irritated or giving off a vibe that something is annoying us. And of course, we’re so much more likely to flip our lids if we’re not giving ourselves the time to do yoga.
Did you notice I said ‘giving ourselves time’ rather than ‘finding time?’ The time is always there, but we have to decide yoga is important enough to take time for it, even if we practice just a few minutes.
There’s no reason to be ashamed of these so-called ‘negative’ feelings that come out when we’re stressed. We are human and we are mothers, and part of being a strong, loving mother is holding space for all our human feelings, pleasant and unpleasant. It’s not just having patience with our kids’ tantrums and outbursts, but realizing that we hold those same emotions from time to time. I love that in her book Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Power and Freedom Through Yoga and Tantra, Uma Dinsmore-Tuli explains that the postpartum period can be a time of grieving as well as thanksgiving. We have gratitude for the life we helped create and for our new lives as mothers, but at the same time we mourn the loss of the women we were before motherhood. For more on this, I recommend the chapter on the Mahavidya called Chinnamasta in Dinsmore-Tuli’s book mentioned above.
I used to get on a downward spiral of getting exhausted, snapping, then feeling bad about it (okay, I still do sometimes…or even often, since having my second child a few months ago. I haven’t attained perfection, but that’s alright). Sometimes I wonder what the heck is wrong with me. I can be one grumpy mom! As I tell people often, I literally need yoga to keep me from getting to that point, and even then, sometimes even when I am practicing daily and still on edge, I find that’s usually a sign my practice needs to be changed or adjusted.
But I had a realization: when I notice myself flipping out and then feel bad about it afterward, that’s at least one step better than not noticing that behavior in myself at all. It sucks to see that I can be an asshole, but...it’s worse to be an ignorant asshole! It’s hard, I know. For the last 3 months, I’ve been navigating how to be a mom of two; I now have a 3-month-old son and 4-year-old daughter. Man, can she be a jerk. But children can be our gurus, too and in her moments of big emotion, she is unknowingly teaching me how to accept the current situation: that she is 4 years old and still in early stages of mental and emotional development and that her grumpiness, tantrums, and whining are just messages, not to be taken personally by me.
It’s the same with my own mood swings and suppressed emotions that come exploding out at the ‘wrong’ time: these are messages from me to Me about how I’m doing with my yoga practice. So when I feel on edge, and I actually notice it (that’s a big step, remember!), then I take my practice to my yoga mat, even for just a few minutes and play with my ‘edge.’ At the very least, I take a few deep breaths, drop my shoulders, and feel my feet on the ground when I don’t have time for a formal yoga practice on my mat.
Yoga is a relationship between the self and the Self. When we become mothers, we become mothers to our kids as well as to ourselves. No matter what kind of relationship we had with our own mothers - or maybe we didn’t have a mother at all - we find that we still need to fill in the gaps where our needs weren’t met as children. Sometimes we won’t know how to meet those needs, and that’s when we can turn to the Mother of mothers, or Higher Power as the Divine Feminine. If the words ‘divine’ or ‘god’ make you cringe, then choose a symbol, a word, or an image that brings you peace and reminds you to breathe and let go of the things you can’t control, which is most things when it comes to parenting.
One Sanskrit chant I love reminds us of all the various ways the divine can have a relationship with us. It goes like this:
Twameva Maata Cha Pitaa Twameva
Twameva Bandhus Cha Sakhaa Twameva
Twameva Vidya Dravinam Twameva
Twameva Sarvam Mama Devadava
Here’s the English translation, as I learned it at Satchidananda Ashram - Yogaville:
Thou art my mother, my father Thou art.
Thou art my family, my friend Thou art.
Thou art my knowledge, my wealth Thou art
Thou art my all, O Light of all Lights Thou art.
One of the gifts of motherhood is that it gives us the chance to feel how important it is to mother ourselves. And in our imperfect attempts to mother our children, we might also find some impetus to forgive our own mothers for their imperfect efforts to raise us. We can each be gurus to one another and as Swami Satchidananda says, the teachings are the real guru. It’s not just to be found in one person.
And who are You, with a capital Y? I can’t really tell you without sounding super cliche and New Age, but I’d like to invite you to experience that You; that’s what yoga’s all about! This Yoga Mama Manual is an invitation to join me on the path, not as my student but as my ally in creating a community of Yoga Mamas! Traditionally, a yogi would receive the teachings from a guru, which is a sort of vertical transmission of knowledge. But, I am not a guru and so I am not handing down wisdom from a point of having achieved — instead, I picture myself taking hands with other Yoga Mamas as we stand in a circle or a spiral and share our collective wisdom horizontally, as equals on a spiritual path.