Also, this is a great time to learn mindfulness because you are already open and somewhat vulnerable. The downside of this can be feeling off-balance or a little exposed, needing more help from others than usual and being at the mercy of your body's functions and your baby's needs. The upside is that this state of being provides a sort of malleability-some of your defenses are down, you may be feeling more sensitive than usual, and this is a great time to learn new skills! It makes you open-minded in a way that perhaps you are not when you've got everything under control. Since mindfulness has a lot to do with being in touch with the sensations in your body, and being aware, new moms are in a prime state to learn it! In fact, pregnancy and early motherhood, nursing and sleep disturbance, weight gain and weight loss-these all in some way force you to be in your body. For those of us who live most of our lives above our necks, this can actually be a great blessing.

What Inspired You to Start Mindful Motherhood?

My own interest in mindfulness started in my early twenties, before I had a child. I'd had a rough time of it as a teenager, encountering frequent bouts of depressive and anxious moods, ups and downs with addictive substances, and floods of negative thought patterns. While I had many potential resources to draw from for help, none seemed to strike home for me. Even when things evened out and I went to college to become a psychologist, I couldn't explain what the source of my suffering was. An awakening came for me when I took a class on Buddhism. 

In Buddhism, psychology is intermingled with spirituality-the two are inseparable. The psychology and philosophy of Buddhism is in large part directed toward identifying the causes and solutions to human suffering. From this perspective, pain, imperfection, injury, impermanence, and eventually death, are all parts of life.  Suffering comes from not really accepting this fact. Mindfulness trains us to accept whatever is happening in the moment, without judging it good or bad. It just is what it is. Mindful motherhood, as a way of being, encourages you to attend more fully to what is already present, to who you already are, to what is right in front of you, rather than striving to make things different. 

Increasingly, a mindful approach to my experiences helped me through graduate school, through the initial stages of my career, and it informed my research and clinical work-particularly with respect to finding new ways that people might deal with addictions, mood disorders, and behavioral problems. I began to study mindfulness in my work, and received grants to develop mindfulness-based approaches to treating addiction. Then, I had a baby! 

Mindful awareness practices helped me so much during the adventure of pregnancy and early motherhood that I began to turn my professional interest toward how mindfulness might help reduce stress and improve mood among pregnant women and early moms, enhance their connection with their babies, and really thrive through the transformation of motherhood. Personally, since motherhood leaves very little room for taking time away for self-care practices, motherhood taught me a more embodied form of mindfulness practice-forcing me to find ways to incorporate mindfulness more into each day-both as a mom and in the rest of my life.

How Does Mindful Motherhood Incorporate Yoga?

Yoga changes for many women during pregnancy. Your degree of flexibility changes, breathing patterns change, posture changes, and some women experience more or less vitality than they did before. Also, while you are pregnant, one thing that is physically different is that your placenta is causing the hormone relaxin to course through your body. Relaxin softens the connective tissue and ligaments in your body, making yoga a perfect accompaniment to pregnancy. This suppleness of the body is at its peak in pregnancy, but this can allow you to overstretch. 

For most women, yoga becomes more restorative during pregnancy. The strengthening component is still there, but this is a time to slow down and connect with your breath, your body, and the baby. In Mindful Motherhood, the focus of the yoga series is not so much physical prowess, but instead is a practice of cultivating mindfulness while moving. All of the ways we can bring attention to our breathing and our body in sitting meditation, can also be brought to this moving meditation. And since you are moving a lot when you are a new mom, it's good to be able to stay mindful while your eyes are open and you are moving.

Practicing mindful movement makes you into an explorer. With your ever-changing pregnant and postpartum body, there is a vast arena available for exploration. Every day is different; your belly expanding or contracting, "mystery" pains, shifting or gaining weight-all of these changes are an invitation to connect with your new self and your baby.

What Does it Mean to End Our Argument With Reality?

Mindfulness is grounded in the awareness that things are always exactly as they are. This may seem very obvious or even philosophical. But when you take some time to explore the idea, it becomes clear that a whole lot of struggling in life comes from not settling in to this fact. Things are the way they are.

When you argue with reality, who usually wins? Reality always wins. What is, actually is as it is, despite how much we want it to be not that way, or more, or less, or slightly different. 

This might seem like bad news, or may sound a bit harsh. In fact, it's the good news. It gives each of us permission to let go of the struggle-to give up the tiring and essentially futile project of trying to wrestle reality into what we want it to be, and suffering quite a bit when it refuses to be tamed.

So much of our time and energy is spent trying to get things to be the way we want them to be. We do this in conscious awareness, but we also do it unconsciously. We attack a problem in our minds like a dog wrestling with a rope, pulling it this way and that. And our behaviors, especially in relationships, can become dominated by attempts to control or modify the person or situation rather than moving into each situation as it is and responding from that place.

Acceptance, the way I use it here, is not approval. It does not mean you decide to like the way things are or that you accept the situation in the sense of it being good, right, or even okay. It means that you recognize that things are they way they are, and no amount of resisting, struggling, thinking about, or wishing they were different will change that.

It's meeting each moment with an attitude of "This is, as it is." Only from that place can you make real choices about how to respond. 

Can You Explain the Balloon in the Breadbox