"because I'm meditating, goddammit!"
many call meditation coming back to the breath. others call it connecting with the divine. i've also heard it referred to as communing with 'THE FORCE'.
i cannot bring myself to call my sitting practice, if you will, any of those things. especially that last one. mainly because I was never a star wars fan. more mainly than that, I live with a baby, toddler and Kindergartener.
in our house, meditation means this and only this: leave mommy alone. that's it. and for 5 whole minutes. why moms everywhere aren't meditating every morning, I'll never know. its amazing.
even my husband knows not to need me.
so what if he's staring at me through a sheetrock wall holding a fussy baby the entire time. doesn't matter. no one is allowed near me (or my boobs) for 5 big ones. that's the rule.
“BECAUSE I’M MEDITATING, GODDAMMIT!!!"
buns on a block. unclenched jaw. straight spine. spiritually in-tune resting face. potted orchid. good hair. the works.
PSHT. please. I'm sprawled out like a slob on a BEANBAG chair in the corner of our mudroom, donning a grubby bathrobe and monster set of teenage mutant ninja turtle headphones.
one morning, a friend slipped in through the side door, directly into my, ahem, 'space', and told me I looked like a mental patient, released too soon. this is my friend who visits us from NYC every couple of months, but never ever tells us when she is coming, which is part of her charm. She always comes bearing a dozen fancy donuts because she enjoys watching my kids squeal. (also part of her charm.)
Mudroom, BTW, is really over-doing it.
It's more like a dude's locker room with a cracked concrete floor. And appears as if the previous owners tried to fix the situation by painting over the slab--in peach of all colors, but either ran out of paint or quit halfway through the job because the peach is decidedly so, not a good peach.
it's a puke-peach. (ask anyone.)
which is why when I caught my then 5 and 2 year olds drawing ON our mudroom floor with big fat black permanent markers one sunny afternoon last spring, I said have at it kids! Then swiftly (ok, not swiftly because I was 9 months pregnant).. but I definitely power-walked it to the freezer, and with a no joke pivot foot, moved it to the backyard, where I went on to sit on an upside down sheetrock bucket, making my way through back-to-back ice cream sandwiches.
This. Eating something without someone small humping you for a bite.
...is bona fide meditation for mothers everywhere.
If it were up to me, I'd give 'moaning through your own meal' it's very own limb (of yoga). I'd put right up there with the big dogs, the yamas and the niyamas.
Alas, it's not up to me. I'm just a mom in a mudroom trying to meditate.
Why I went with the only room in the house not heated, I'll never know. but I think the peripheral presence of a busted bird feeder and couple cases of discounted beans stacked off plumb in the corner actually adds to my practice.
nothing to be intimidated by here, universe! it's just a mom and her garbanzos, for God sakes! goosebumps, come hither!
Even if I'm making that part up so I don't have to fix our bent bird feeder--there's something about sitting on a puke-peach slab tattooed with my kids names spelled wrong all over it.. that feels right.
this is JUST the space, I decided, just the respite I need from all that "keeping up" I do otherwise.
ie: making sure all sippy cups and 28-ounce cans of diced tomatoes in our house are BPA free, fanatically spacing out my children's vaccines, making my own elderberry syrup, wedging healthy friggin fats into every meal, calling my senator and giving her a piece of my mind, escorting ants from my living room to the backyard so my children don't know we kill living things, force feeding my toddler chia seed pudding, and my latest, scrutinizing FB marketplace for a mechanical lawnmower to help save the planet.
the mudroom is a nice break from all that.
sure, it might be freezing 6 months out of the year, but it's here where I get to sip on a legit cup of caffeine all by myself. out of a mug, it's worth mentioning, I tell the precious people I live with, if they ever break--they're dead meat. and not because it was my great grandmother's.. because, God help me, it's the only thing I own from West Elm.
once in awhile, if I'm feeling extra prop-y, I'll go big and diffuse a little frankincense in the mudroom. which has to befuddle Mary and Jesus since a consistent part of my meditation practice also involves telling my kids to SCRAM.
but Mary is handing me passes all the time. mainly for my potty mouth. also for my short temper. because she gets it. I mean even Jesus had to get on her nerves once in awhile.. or so she admits whenever I go off the deep end and power walk it to the grotto around the corner where I stare at her until she finally spits it out:
yes, dear. baby Jesus was a lousy sleeper. and toddler Jesus was bit of a handful. but I didn't have a cleaning lady or a nanny, either. so stop your whining and get back to work.
I normally storm away like a teenager who wishes she had a bedroom door to slam. but me and the Mother of God always manage to make up by the time I get home. I think the weighty double stroller I'm up against helps. (this way, I have somewhere to put any remaining aggravations.) this one time in particular, the wheels got stuck in the grass when I tried to leave and I felt a pat on my back. I turned around and Mary, sun shining on her face, perched on a high pile of sturdy stones, swear to God, winked at me.
(and She's been showing up to my morning meditation ever since.)
besides the fact I think the Blessed Mother is partial to frankincense, diffusing it feels like a fair compromise to the alter I refuse to set up in our mudroom. nothing against the alter, itself. altars are in fact, a wonder. there's this one at my yoga studio that I don't even have to look at to get the goosebumps. All I have to be is within 10 feet of it or so.
I actually can't think of anything better to stare down while meditating--a sparkly, tended to, gasp—DUSTED!, spiritual offering in one's home and heart space. I just have this built-in defiance of setting one up in the same room my son airs out his smelly hockey gear 3 nights a week..
but essential oils. alters. broken bird feeders. yoga blocks. even donuts. when it comes to a steady meditation practice, these props are--trust me, totally optional.
here's what's not, mamas: the headphones.
in my case, the teenage mutant ninja turtle headphones.
these goofy lookin' things were the end result of a desperate situation my husband and I found ourselves in, in the middle of the Minneapolis airport when my son was 2 and we missed our connection. and let me tell you--they were worth every stupid inflated cent. because after we let him eat a cinnabun. after we read him every book Eric Carle ever illustrated. and after we let him wander waywardly up and down the international wing, pointing out every flag along the way--we looked at the clock and noticed we had 7 more hours to kill. and that's how we crushed that whole theory I had before kids which went something like this: I will not have a child who, at the tender age of 5, will know how to SCROLL.
pft, my husband and I had those turtles in a half shell wrapped around his noggin before either of us could wrestle the tags off. While splitting, I believe it was, a plate of airport sushi and couple of IPAs, we witnessed our son's doughy little finger cruise across a neon orange nickelodeon tablet. only instead of 5, he was 2. (cheers, husband.)
and it's these laughable headphones, that literally carry my meditation practice every morning.
otherwise, I think it'd be total torture. that whole sitting there and doing nothing, thing. and since I am already tormented by 3 very small children on a daily basis, I opt for the JV variety of meditation. the kind that calls for a little help, a little music perhaps.
I realize it's very 8th grade of me to need a fat set of headphones in order to do something responsible, like meditate, but it's not like I'm listening to ACDC.
Like everyone else, I went straight to Enya's Greatest Hits.
Alas, Enya started to sound exactly like the moaning I get out of my toddler whenever I say no to more bunny-gummmies.
Enya therefore, had to go, leaving instrumental music as my only other option.
soundtracks to movies, specifically, seem to do wonders for my nervous system. sad, dramatic--doesn't matter. as long as it has no words, whining, moaning, or even chanting, it'll work.
theme songs are especially lovely. like that one by Jerry Goldsmith from the opening scene of Hoosiers when Gene Hackman is driving across the state of Indiana in early September. I used to take that one in on repeat on my way into a desk job I loathed for 3 straight years in my 20's.
I'm not sure what it was about that song, but I always got out of my deadbeat car, smiling like a fool. then made my way into an office where I spent the entire day reviewing applications filled out by pretentious 17-year-olds. this song, I decided, could get me to the other side of anything.
except childbirth, as it turned out. it was during that song in particular (so I'm told), that I ripped the charger out of the wall, and hurled my cell phone across the room like a great ape, where it later landed, quite possibly, in Russia. (birthing playlist, my ass.)
which is why I have to take that song off my meditation playlist, lest I get labor flashbacks. instead, I've been leaning hard (for years now) on this one instrumental piece from the Family Stone Soundtrack.
could be the violin. or the flute. or the fact it's impossible not to think about Diane Keaton in a worn out bathrobe, spitting out unfiltered comments toward her family.
or MAYBE it boils down to the fact the song is exactly 4 minutes and 59 seconds long, which feels like the very opposite of my day, where the edges are so blurry and illegible and there is no real end to it.
what I AM sure of is that I need my hit every morning.
I don't pretend to understand how this yoga, or meditation business works. if it's the song, the frankincense, the time honored practice of being still, the beanbag chair, or what.
but collectively, these 5 minutes manage to save me, and daily. because by the end of 'em, I swear, someone sacred and invisible whispers this to me:
You don't need to fix anything.
which, of course, is the very OPPOSITE narrative of what goes on all day long in this amazon-cart-filling-brain of mine. where I try to fix everything you can imagine. my son's abdominal pain. my daughter's middle-child-ness. my husband's refusal to drink half his weight in ounces of water daily. (read: GF grocery lists, low-acid coffee, and countless trips to the chiropractor, to name a few.)
but that's yoga for ya. it's never the pose we pour all of our effort into that gets us. it's the counter-pose that slaps us awake again, and gives us those goosebumps that keep us coming back for more.
and my invisible morning friend says it again: You don't need to fix anything, mama.
Do you know what this means, guys? (or at least how I understand it.) This means:
I don't have to fix the bird feeder, my bad bangs, my friend's celiac, my less than perfect marriage, my neighbor's loneliness, or even my bad mood. I don't even have to find a way to make my lasagna dairy free.
I don't have to renovate the mudroom. (BOOM.)
or start composting. or switch over to organic toothpaste, if I like crest.
In fact:
I can have one too many kids than I can handle. I can have one too many beers than I can handle. I can eat meatballs and teach yoga at the same time. I can put on Daniel Tiger and walk away. I can drop f-bombs. I can give them up for lent. I can give up giving up things for lent. I can feed them toast for dinner. I can breast feed them until they are 5. I can show up to a level 2 class in a wet nursing bra and zero chance at a full wheel. I can squeeze 3 carseats into the back of a civic. I can get distracted. I can come back to the breath, or stay distracted, doesn't matter.
What matters is that I am here.
A recovering perfectionist, I can't tell you what a relief it is to hear this every morning.
I may be taking this a little too far when it comes to the asana side of things, given the amount of times I show up to class late, are innumerable. (Thankfully, the yoga studio I go to is a forgiving one.)
But I've been doing this long enough to know that it's true:
When it comes to yoga, what matters is that you show up.
in my case, to a cold mudroom and monster set of turtle headphones.
to another mom friend of mine, it's to a life size cardboard cut out of Michael Jordan, who happens to be the cornerstone of the alter she set up in her kid's playroom. another one bought into the whole oil pulling craze, just so she can stand over her kitchen sink and not be spoken to for 10 minutes every day.
bless us…
for we are brilliant, fascinating, creative, do-what-it-takes, creatures. but we are also bone tired, in desperate need of some eye brow grooming, and about 6 months overdue for a date with our husband.
which is why when I run into you at Trader Joe's, I do not question what is in your cart, talk to you about what's in mine, or even ask how you're doing. because chances are, you just got done telling your 4-year-old to stop calling his little sister BUTT-CHEESE. besides, even if we try [to chit chat], someone small will tug our pants down, or fall out of the cart.
but I do make sure to catch your eye, and smile.
then walk away wondering.. is she in on it? the best kept secret in all of yoga?
that there's nothing to fix.
no trait to improve on.
no parenting style to nail.
no meditation practice to master.
and no other mom to keep up with.
there is just this one song.
and our only only job is to lean into it while it's here.
and let it change when it needs to.
