The Mindfulness Course That Deepened My Mothering and Birth Work
By Barbara D’Antonio
Mindfulness, or the state of being mindful, is turning your attention towards yourself: your thoughts, emotions, circumstances, memories, body sensations, breath, etc. Meditation is a focused concentration on any of these experiences. We can fall into the trap of striving to “get good at” meditating. But this is not why we meditate. We meditate to get good at life. I compare it to getting a good night’s sleep. Why do we care to do this? To be a champion sleeper and win sleeping contests? Find out our ranking? No. We seek to get enough good quality, rejuvenating sleep so we can enjoy life’s waking moments as much as possible. In other words, good sleep isn’t really for sleep’s sake, but for the effect it has on everything else in our lives. Meditation isn’t for meditation’s sake, either. It’s for the undeniable effect it has on us.
I have done a great deal of work on mindfulness and meditation in the last ten years. The Palouse Mindfulness: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction is an excellent compilation of the best information on this topic. Much of it was a worthy review, but as I was nearing the end I wondered why I had bothered to do it. What was truly new for me?
My answer came in one of the very last articles, In the Service of Life by Rachel Naomi Remen. In this piece, Remen breaks down the difference between helping, fixing, and serving. Helping denotes a certain inequality between the helper and the one being helped, a score that needs to be settled. Fixing is a matter of superiority, the relationship is master to apprentice or even rescuer to victim. Serving is fundamentally different because it is equal. A whole person serves a whole person, with absolutely no inequality or imbalance of power. Someone younger, smaller, poorer, less experienced can serve someone wiser, stronger, more capable. And exactly the reverse: someone richer, more successful, more worldly can serve someone in need. Acts of service benefit both the one who is served and the one providing the service.
This was what I needed. As a homeschool mom I easily feel depleted. I am always helping, fixing, and emptying my cup. To take on this additional responsibility as birth educator - do I really have more to give? I strongly feel called to serve mothers, and this beautifully described a way for me to reframe my desire to give so that I can show up fully for my clients (and my own children!) and not be drained or emotionally spent. This is a way for me to recharge and rejuvenate without needing a wellness retreat every month!
This program is a reminder of how a simple reframe: a turning, or rather a tuning (if you remember old radios and TVs), can help us to find beauty, meaning, and purpose in our lives without actually needing to change anything. When you are stressed, maxed out, overwhelmed, sometimes the answer is not a major life change (like changing careers), but a simple one: turn inward, notice, STOP, breathe. From that place, find the reframe that gives you peace.
Birth is a miraculous experience. It is challenging. It will stretch you (literally) and help you grow into your full self as a woman and a mother. These tools can be the difference in getting to fully experience this rebirth, this metamorphosis. We can do hard things. We can hold space for ourselves and others. We can meet the challenges without letting them consume or define us. We can rest in BEing.
