Mommy’s Going to Yoga
For as long as my children have understood language, they have heard me say, “Mommy’s going to yoga.” Before they acquired words, they linked my absence with the mat under my arm; they could identify the happiness with which I left the house and my calm upon returning. When they were tiny, I sprinted out of the house every Tuesday and Thursday night to practice at a nearby studio, and nothing — not breastfeeding, not colic or a total lack of bandhas — could have stopped me from attending that class. It was, although I didn’t yet think in those terms, a sacred encounter with myself, with that presence (to borrow a line from Krishna) that cannot be made stinky with spit-up or stained by pureed beets: that unnamable Julia who abides in silence. Ujjaiy breathing restored my sanity and prepared me for another day of basic training in the barracks of motherhood.
This is a common experience, and it’s evident that yoga classes, while restorative for most, are especially important for the mothers of young children. During those ninety minutes your body once more belongs only to you, your ears rest from crying and whining or, even worse, children’s music; the tension in your shoulders from all that carrying and nursing seems to abate and something might even happen in your pelvic floor after the train that crashed right down its middle. I imagine that other people find such peace in the open spaces of a golf course or in the underwater hush of a pool. The particulars of the landscape don’t matter, but we all need to rest in that place of remembering. For me, it was a guided class of Ashtanga Vinyasa, and I will be forever grateful to my teacher Carlos who gave me back my body and, dare I say it, my soul.
I loved yoga before I had children, but the challenges of motherhood have encouraged me to deepen my practice. While it was crushing to feel my identity dissolve after the kids were born, yoga seemed to suggest that this was good news. I was shocked by the changes my mind and body underwent postpartum, but in asana I began to discover a whole new way of inhabiting my skin. The kids were so demanding of my time, attention and energy, that there was nothing of “me” left over, yet when I gave up and let go of whatever I thought I wanted (having dinner at a restaurant without hollering or tantrums), I experienced the blissful vaccum of renunciation. Was this what Patanjali called detachment? I had never felt so attached to my own desires (just three hours of uninterrupted sleep!) and yet motherhood continually taught me to let go. The kids and my practice were intertwined, at odds, as similar and dissimilar as inhalation and exhalation.
The first time I left the kids overnight was to do a seven-day teacher training course in Mexico. I will never forget the wild luxury of waking up with the sun to have breakfast by myself before heading off for a day of study and practice. This freedom in which I had lived for years as an adult now felt like undiscovered territory, and I savored every moment, along with the new flavor of guilt. In order to do the thing I loved, I had to leave the ones I loved. But all of this yoga practice would make me a better mother, I told myself; taking care of myself was taking care of them. This felt both like a convenient lie and the honest truth.
With every workshop, seminar and class, my connection to practice deepened, and the kids also associated my absence increasingly with yoga. There’s a saying in Spanish that people burned by milk cry when they see a cow, and my daughter did actually burst into tears once when she saw me carry my mat to the door. I went back to Mexico for another training, I flew to San Diego twice from Buenos Aires to participate in the Ashtanga Yoga Confluence (something like a yoga Superbowl), I spent weekends in New York to study adjustments, journeyed to Tulum for a course with Tim Miller and I stayed in Colorado for an entire month with Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor. During that incredible time in Boulder (for me), the kids were starting school and settling back into Argentina after a year in the US. The rishis didn’t create a Sanskrit term for Bad Mommy points, but I have accumulated a lot of them while studying Sanskrit. On top of all of these trips, my karmashaya is full of countless Saturday mornings when I rushed out the door after a quick kiss and hair ruffle, calling, “Bye! I love you! I’m going to yoga!”
These are undoubtedly the most oxymoronic words I have ever spoken, in both the language of semantics and that of the heart. If I have learned anything over time, and that’s up for debate, it’s that we must resist the urge think in these terms: to believe that yoga can be in one place and not in another. Over the years, I have searched for more ways in which to breach the imagined distance between the practice of the eight limbs and the challenges of daily life. After all, every day we face far greater complexities than the shoulder alignment in Virabhadrasana (unless, of course, you are a student of Mr. Iyengar).
In search of a more perfect union, I made the difficult decision this year to teach fewer classes, to take fewer trips and to practice more in the small room at the center of our house that we call “the yoga room”. It’s where we keep the pictures of our teachers, our mats and cushions, and it’s reserved only for “practice.” Of course, here we fall into another linguistic pothole, but language is a good reminder of what our brains and egos do all day long: simplify, classify, remove the subtlety and ambiguity that make the world beautiful in the first place.
It sounds like a new age cliché when people say that the real practice is off the mat, but of course they are right. The true practice room in most houses is the kitchen, where tired kids struggle with homework after a day spent trying to figure out the difference between being cool and being cruel. Or the bedroom, where two exhausted adults try not to blame each other for the vicissitudes of modern life. And it’s also out there on the road where we swear at strangers or in the line at Starbucks where we ogle our phones instead of looking at the human taking our order. This “practice” might even include not vilifying people we find ideologically repugnant.
I hope that I will never stop engaging in the formal contemplative practices of asana, sitting meditation and pranayama, but I do hope to blur the edges between those moments of solitude and my daily interactions with “the real world.” Over time, I hope that I will be able to conjugate the (perceived) opposites with more love and agility and, as Patanjali prescribes, “overcome their play.” This happens, I think, by interrupting my workday to drop off my son’s shin guards and water bottle at school, or by celebrating my birthday with too many people at home the night before a celebrated yoga teacher arrives to stay, or knowing better than to confuse my husband’s fatigue (after a long day battling the Argentine bureaucracy) with lack of love. What good will a steady drishti do me in Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana if I cannot gaze upon those I adore with kindness? This is so simple and so much harder than it sounds.
Pattabhi Jois wisely suggested that we start with asana. We start there because we have forgotten so much, like Hanuman who can’t recall his divine powers and thinks he’s just a monkey. But concentrating on how we move and breathe and gaze prepares us for the real job of yama and niyama or, in plain English, being good people. As Richard Freeman says, a little compassion is worth more than a thousand years of pranayama. If I am honest, and that is always hard, what has really changed in the past 15 years of my enthusiastic and nerdy approach to yoga has not been the flexibility of my hips but rather the openness of my heart. This also sounds like a new age cliché, but it is true. These days I am more reluctant to screw people over or leave a job half done or to lie out of convenience. It seems improbable that a daily practice that looks like jumping around and stretching could accomplish this internal shift, but I know that to be the case. I see a little more clearly now, not too much, but my range of vision has expanded and within that expanse are other people.
For that reason, I have tried to be more careful when I rush out the door with my mat under my arm. These days I try to say, “Bye! I love you! I’m going to practice!” And hopefully the kids will know that I am practicing for them, once again rehearsing a little kindness, patience and humility.
Last night my ten year-old son Oli came home after a playdate with a friend. I was practicing, doing what I could after a long day of work and familial logistics. Oli came into the yoga room with my husband and burst into tears. He and his friend had fought and said some mean things to each other. His eyes filled with tears again and he hid under a pillow. We talked for a while, had a hug and the boys left. I heard my husband say, “Let’s let mom do her practice and we can keep talking.” Before, I would have kept going in order “to finish.” I would have justified this attitude by reminding myself of all the things that I do for the kids, that their dad is better at giving advice anyway, etc. Instead, I gave a small nod towards the altar, rolled up my mat and went downstairs to sit with the guys. We moved on from friendship to long division, there were some more tears and then it was time for bed.
I don’t want to go to yoga anymore. I want to stay there, to live inside its elastic and unlimited expanse. I am not yet up to this challenge, but I will keep at it, making time for a beloved friend when all I can think about is getting some more work done; or pulling my daughter close in the pool on a weekday afternoon when I still haven’t gone to the supermarket; or answering my emails instead of leaving someone hanging in the void of a non-response.
One of the yamas that we tend to gloss over is asteya or non-stealing. It’s easy to feel good about this one on the most basic level. I won’t steal your car, your purse, your husband, your lunch. But the other side of asteya is generosity itself. I won’t steal my presence from you or deny you my heart or my kindness. As Pattabhi Jois says in Yoga Mala, “Heaps of gems fall before the yogi who practices asteya, and he becomes the abode of all gems.”
Yoga isn’t our destination; it’s the place in which we are truly ourselves, the abode of all the gems that fall in heaps around us everyday.
