Motherhood is under attack.
Marketing and media would have us believe that motherhood is the ultimate burden. Children come along and ruin your body, empty your wallet, steal all of your time, and then eventually grow to resent you. They claim that you must surrender what it means to be you to be a ‘good’ mother. You must suffer through the experience not because it benefits you or your child, but because others have suffered before you.
New mothers are bombarded with this message day in and day out, and this conditioning starts when we are children, learning from our own mothers. The expectation they created has become a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.
I remember those early, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants days (weeks and months, too). I remember feverishly googling in the dark, with only 3 hours of sleep under my belt, hoping that someone might be able to understand and advise my situation. I always left those moments feeling deeply alone and hopeless.
Motherhood is intense, full of unknowns, and marks the definitive ‘end’ of one part of our lives… but motherhood is also expansive, beautiful, sacred above all else, the beginning of something entirely new.
Struggling is often seen as a right of passage, and it is many people’s rightful truth… but struggling through motherhood does not have to be your truth.
We do not only learn by suffering through pain and intensity. Growth also results from love, bliss, and the pursuit of pleasure; from finding joy in the mundane and recognizing vibrational alignment when you feel it in your heart. We can navigate the transition from maiden to mother with a sense of grace and ease by deeply understanding ourselves and supporting newness as it enters, and releasing oldness as it departs. We can nurture ourselves while nurturing our families.By becoming our own wellspring of inspiration, health, and advice, our entire family can bloom.
By turning inwards, we can find our own, personalized answers to some of motherhood’s biggest questions and feelings, like…
- What do I enjoy anymore?
- I feel like I don’t have anything else going on besides my child.
- I have no time for the things that make my body a good place to live.
- How can I nourish and honor my new, postpartum body?
- There’s no space for who I was before my baby.
- How can I feel good when I feel like a victim to circumstance?
- I don’t like who I am nowadays.
- I am constantly frustrated with my child or co-parent.
- How little sleep can a human possibly get, and survive?
But we’re not only looking to survive. We want to thrive! The good news is if we don’t know the answers yet, then we certainly have access to them. All we have to do is open ourselves up and ask.
Soulful motherhood is a concept that I became familiar with when I was pregnant with my daughter, Jasmine. I was led to believe, directly and indirectly, that my value as a mother was related to how hard I work, how much I can provide for my family and how must quality time I dedicate solely to my daughter (all at the same time). I must have all the baby products to solve every possible issue that might result from my baby, well… just behaving like a baby. I saw photos of mothers’ tear-stained faces on Instagram and new moms trashing their co-parents in popular mommy Facebook groups. I was so excited about this new stage in my life — but was motherhood really destined to be as awful as all these women said it was?
Mentally, I was preparing for the worst. Unfortunately, when you have such a focus on the ‘bad,’ then bad is all you’re able to recognize.
Even after Jasmine was born, innocent questions such as ‘does your baby sleep through the night?’ felt like an attack on my self-worth — because no, my baby did not sleep through the night. She did not take a bottle or a pacifier. She wanted to be held 24/7, and you know what? It felt good to give in to my motherly instincts and allow my child to depend on me. So I held my baby. I nursed to sleep. I coslept. By doing so, I turned the mundane into ritual and ceremony. Everything (okay, most things) was beautiful
My motherly instincts spoke so loud, and it clearly distressed me when I attempted to stifled it, so I began to question every one of the expectations society had set for me and my baby. It wasn’t long before I saw how many ‘problems’ I had stemmed from these unfair expectations. These ideas didn’t seem realistic, nor beneficial to place upon myself and my newborn daughter. Some even felt downright harmful.
I knew that I must unlearn everything that was taught to me about being a mother and find guidance from within myself and from the collective consciousness of all mothers that came before me, rather than the miserable few who sought validation.
I chose a different course.
Sometimes an artist’s most beautiful work comes from their lowest periods. I certainly learned a lot from the moments I lashed out at my husband out of frustration or those nights I sobbed right alongside my baby.
However, I found that inspiration came more bountifully alongside smiles and laughter, from simple pleasures, from feeling confident in my intuition and at home in my body. That is not to say suffering does not have its place in change or motherhood. There is much to be learned from the short naps and missed sleep, painful breasts, and deep experiences of loneliness. Adversity and intensity show us our edges, but you cannot neglect to return to your wounds — the experience — and deeply internalize it so that you know yourself better than ever before.
Yoga and breathwork gift us with the magic to transcend the dogma of motherhood. No one is born knowing how to be a mother, after all. We must learn how to bond, we must learn how to feed, and we must learn to support ourselves through self-care and self-love — self-devotion.
It is our responsibility to become familiar with our minds and souls, using the body and breath as conduits to our deeper understanding of what it means to mother, and to be a mother.
Yoga helps us to navigate this change, the yawning chasm that exists between before and after your baby.
In Sanskrit, yoga translates to ‘union.’ What are we unionizing, here? We are bringing together body and mind. We bring together our past, our present, and our future — our legacy. We take ages-old wisdom from all the women who have ever been mothers before us and balance it with the kind of insight that comes from the glimmer of light deep within our intuition. The insight that comes from no one other than universal sacredness itself; the delicate dance between masculine and feminine; the part of you that is so original that the likes of it have never before been seen on this planet. We bring together a sense of community as well as the need for solitude. The highest of highs and the lowest of lows.
The ability to feel so deeply is one of motherhood’s biggest gifts.
I had big ideas about what motherhood would be to me. I felt so deeply disappointed by being unable to meet my goals that I didn’t see how my expectations were toxifying my satisfaction as a mom. Every time I judged myself, my partner, my baby, or other mothers, I revealed a part of my self that I was out of touch with. I needed healing.
Deconstructing our well-earned expectations is no small task, but it gives us a clean palette in which we can build a life that is truly representative of our desires and intentions. Who doesn’t want to feel seen and recognized as a mother? Who doesn’t want to feel grateful at all times, or if not that, at least neutral in strife? Who does not want to be encouraged to step so fully into her power that people around her are drawn to her inherent glow, like moths to a flame?
Motherhood is the art of becoming.
There are few things as purifying as the fires of parenthood, because it is absolutely, completely transformative. Nothing that existed before was ever the same afterward, and this is true whether the child is born of your womb, born via a surgery, born with complications, born without life, is your second (third, fourth, or fifth) child, or surrendered and adopted at whatever age you two found each other.
No matter how you become a mother, the change unlocks a special ability within us. This special ability to tap into your intuition, as well as seek, interpret & value universal guidance, is akin to magic. Yoga helps you to harness this magic and parent purely from your soul and heart space. Nothing is ever taught — instead, everything is remembered.
Trust that it all comes with time and practice. In the meantime, soulful motherhood teaches that, when you seek pure happiness and find divinity in even the smallest of things, soulful enlightenment will follow. Soulful motherhood is rooted in the yogic concepts of karuna (compassion, to yourself, to others and to the earth) and ananda (divine bliss), guided by the ancestral teachings of tantra. When these ideas come together, what results is what I like to call the ‘art of life.’
You know, when you are totally in your flow.
When you have found vibrational alignment because you feel happy and fulfilled.
When you are confident in your instincts and don’t second guess your inner voice.
When your body is a healthy and properly-functioning host for your divine spirit.
When you lead and work with others purely from your heart space.
When you have the tools to quiet your mind and anxieties so that your divine feminine can blossom.
When you create from a place that you can’t explain with logic, but feel with your gut
When you are not afraid of the inevitable change that always finds us once we are comfortable.
Joy is your birthright just as much as it is your child’s — but we have to make the conscious choice to seek it. That’s the art of life. That’s soulful motherhood. The many generations of wise women who came before us have mothered from a soulful place… so why shouldn’t we?
