News and Notes

I know it feels like there isn’t time to brush your teeth so how can you fit time for self-care practices into your life?  A daily practice of calming the central nervous system and regrouping can have tremendous impact.

1.  Yoga for Living!  

Find it hard to get to your yoga class?  Lack confidence to build your own practice?  Can’t imagine taking an hour on the mat today?  Try waking every day to this simple ‘wake up’ for your body and soul.  Visit Yoga Journal for more instruction and images.

Cat/Cow stretch.  Waken your spine, and slow down to move with your breath with as much precision as you can.  Start your inhale and fill your belly, finding that neutral place on hands and knees.  Start your exhale, and hollow out, pulling in your belly, tucking your tailbone, and drawing up your pelvic floor.  End your outbreath. Start your inbreath, and begin to uncurl from your tailbone, one vertebrae at a time.

Downward facing dog.  Move from hands and knees into downward facing dog as you exhale.  Take several breaths here.  There is no rush. 

Forward fold.  Linger for several breaths, allowing your hips to open more fully and your chest to come closer to your thighs. 

Mountain pose.  Let the blood flow back into your head and arms as you reach up and feel the ground below you.  Lift up to lengthen your spine.

Half moon pose.  Stretch each side of your body, slowly, and again with your breath.  
Enjoy the waking up of your body as you bring more flow into your day!

2.  Self Massage.

Start your day by giving your ankles, feet and toes a massage with essential oil. Lavender is calming. Peppermint or tangerine/ orange can help you feel more awake and rejuvenated if you feel you’re a little depleted from a less than restful night.  Ask an aromatherapist about a blend for your needs. There are many acupressure points on the feet that will bring balance to your whole body.  No rules, just massage and push into the points that feel tender.  Breath into those spaces and slow down to notice how you feel.  Stretch and pull and make space around your toes.

3. Breathe.  

Just a few deep and cleansing breaths can begin to calm your central nervous system.  Count to discover the duration of your natural inbreath and outbreath.  Gently guide your breath to lengthen.  Can you encourage your inbreath to last for 6 seconds?  Your outbreath?  If you feel like you’re struggling, stop and let go of any goals.  Go back to just noticing.

4.  Set an intention.

As a new parent, it can sometimes feel like you don’t have a focus to your day or perhaps that you are always in reaction mode.  It might be very different than your ‘pre-baby’ life when you made plans.  An intention isn’t a goal or a to do list, but just a thought to align your day.  Maybe your intention is to feel peaceful or confident.  As you go about your day, notice if what you are doing is aligning with that.  Are you about to do a google search about infant sleep that is likely to derail your confidence?  Are you calling a friend?  Does that friend help you to feel peaceful and centered?  Have that intention be the place you return to as you become more mindful of your thoughts and experiences.

5.  Eat mindfully.

Set a spot at the table for yourself.  Clear away the clutter.  Choose something nourishing, a sweet, fragrant peach, perhaps, and slow down.  Notice each bite. Welcome the nourishment and think about the energy that went into that peach. Consider the roots of the tree, the soil that it is grounded in.  The nutrients that are collected in that soil and drawn up into the tree with the moisture from the rain and water underground.  The sunlight that bathes the tree and the synthesizing of energy that happens in each and every leaf on the tree.  The peach blossom that was pollinated (and the bee who did the pollinating) and that, once fertile, swelled to create the beginnings of the peach.  Consider the farmer who tends that tree, who planted it and cultivated the soil to nourish it.   The hands that picked that fruit, that brought it to gather with others that would make its way to the market.  All that energy nourishing you.  Just like you nourish your baby, there is much that is nourishing you.  Take it in fully.   

About the author and the Mindful Parenting series at Birthways

This article was written by Karen Laing, Founder, Birthways Labor Support and Postpartum Doulas as a part of Birthways Mindful Parenting series.  Please see our Mindful Parenting learning center for other posts and resources, and join us on Facebook for the month of May, where we'll be featuring our favorite tips, resources, and special events. 

Keep walking, though there is no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.  Move within,
But don’t move the way fear makes you move.
-Rumi

When you begin mindfulness meditation, 2 minutes of just being is a noticeable struggle to most of us.  Labor, especially from the position of the partner or support team demands us to ‘just be’ for perhaps 48 hours or more.  Helping families prepare for this prolonged engagement in the moment has always been a significant focus of our childbirth preparation.

In my childbirth classes I show 8 minutes of labor in real time.  Not the edited professional birthing videos produced to condense 36 hours of an experience into a 6 minute ‘birth story’ but a home-made scratchy super 8 video of a mom in second stage.  She hovers in a hands and knees position so still you wonder if the tape has frozen.  Then a midwife moves across the room exchanging a cooled rice sock for a heated one.  She then sits quietly, sock dangling like a heavy hammock between her hands which rest on parted knees.  She looks gently at the mother’s hips, which are not moving except for the barely perceptible rhythm of her breath.  

The partner, who is off camera, and the midwife move in towards the mother like a three person waltz and their hands and the heated sock reach the mother’s hips at precisely the same moment.  The music of the mother’s voice begins.  She is singing low and moany - a single note that rises to a crescendo as you see the dark hair of her baby come into view.  The baby disappears as the curtains of the mother’s body close back around the baby and the mother returns to stillness.

The midwife seats herself again, sock in hand and the partner again falls off camera.  150 seconds pass and the same movements unfurl like a time elapsed blooming of a morning glory flower, opening, and then closing.  The midwife, the partner, the moaning, the bulging bloom of the baby, the closing, the resting.  It’s like a Buddhist tea ceremony.  That precise.  That quiet.  That slow.

When I show the video, I notice my students in front of me.  They fidget, they check their phones or blackberries.  They are relieved that it’s black and white.  They flip through their packets of information to see what lesson comes next.  I try to gently ease them into the reality that birth looks like this.  For an average duration of 1400 minutes.

I fully appreciate the struggle and have infinite compassion!  I am grateful to my work and my clients that give me the opportunity to be ‘trained’ in this full attention.  In my own life, it falls away and I have to reconnect with that skillful attention every day.  I’m a regular student of patience.  I can do it with ease with my clients (so thank you for that experience) but when observing my child put on shoes, I am aware of how painful this being present can be!  

Preparing for birth challenges us.  We learn to trust in something greater than our schedules and our to-do lists and our thoughts and plans.  We learn to observe without fixing.  We learn to accept sensations that are new and often overwhelming.  We learn to move into our deepest fear, that place of stillness and uncertainty, and rest there.   But it’s not easy.  Thankfully, we don’t need to BE anything but who we are, and can cultivate gentleness and compassion for all the reactions that may come up.  Boredom, impatience, fear.  A softness can surround those thoughts.

Practicing this patience, this mindful attention, creates more ease in childbirth, but moreover, it builds a deeper trust and patience that we will need as parents.  We will be called upon to cultivate this acceptance in the wakeful pre-dawn hours, the hours of cluster –feedings when our baby seems intent to stay suckling for a lifetime, when we watch our baby pull up and fall back, up and back as they learn to cruise and walk.  And, I promise you, when it takes your child forever to put on her shoes (she is now 8!).  We learn to accept and embrace each moment and we learn to trust that all is, indeed, well.  And with gentle attention, we notice its perfection.

About the author and the Mindful Parenting series at Birthways

This article was written by Karen Laing, Founder, Birthways Labor Support and Postpartum Doulas as a part of Birthways Mindful Parenting series.  Please see our Mindful Parenting learning center for other posts and resources, and join us on Facebook for the month of May, where we'll be featuring our favorite tips, resources, and special events. 

It is a commonly held view that meditation is a way to shut off the pressures of your world or of your own mind, but this is not an accurate impression.  Meditation is neither shutting things out or off.  It is seeing things clearly and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life"

A little science about neural pathways

As we come to discuss mindfulness practices, we love to talk a little science.  As some of you may know, at Birthways, we’re pretty fascinated about the science behind the biochemical changes of the childbearing year and how it affects our mood, behavior and overall wellbeing. When it comes to seeing how mindfulness and other practices can help our brains thrive we get really excited, in an alert and connected kind of way!  You’ll see an article linked at the end of this post that illustrates some of the theory about meditation and the brain. But we’ll start here with a quick tutorial about stress and neural pathways. 

We have many neural pathways, or circuits, in the brain. There is an input, the message gets delivered and received and our brain plugs into a response. We have such rapid fire ‘inputs’ from our many information sources, our constant and fast-paced ‘plugged in’ world.  Our brain is convinced that it should respond in some way to nearly all of these inputs, even if it’s deciding what emails to delete.  
Some pathways get used with more frequency than others and cause greater activation of the autonomic system that regulates our stress response.    

While these fight or flight reactions were established in our species a long time ago, our modern lives not only activate these stress reactions with greater frequency but also with less ‘discharge.’ We aren’t running through the woods to the safety of our cave after a stressful event, we are sitting at our desks and moving on to the next stress-filled exchange. The chronic pulsing of stress hormones eventually fatigues our system, impacting our wellbeing in many ways. Regular cardio exercise, especially jogging or running allows the body to discharge these stress hormones that accumulate from our everyday stress.  It’s no wonder that this kind of exercise reduces depression and anxiety, and increases our physical and emotional health.  

Mindfulness practices can serve to prevent some of the stress hormones building up to begin with and can provide a response that brings balance back to the system in ‘real time’ as it were. A run this afternoon can ‘clear things out’ but your mindfulness between now and then can keep you from having such big spikes of adrenaline from all the stressors, large and small, that dance across our awareness each day. 

Here’s an illustration of creating alternate pathways for a common ‘input’ of stress: You are pulling out onto Lake Shore Drive to get to your baby’s pediatrician appointment when you notice the traffic packed onto the drive like a nearly complete jigsaw puzzle. Your baby, who you thought you had transferred gently into the carseat in a deep sleep, is now waking and starting to fuss. This everyday scenario is not a life or death situation and there is no immediate danger from which you must escape but we all can recognize that it is stressful and we are likely to get, in a word, stressed out by it. 

With practice you can find a mechanism for noticing and acknowledging the steps that are surging along at lightning speed in your brain. You might notice that you are irritated, panicked about soothing your baby, worried about being late, or frustrated about the timing of your appointment. But you can then expand past it. The first step, however, is the noticing. 

If you’ve been practicing mindful attention, you might be able to keep following the path of your thoughts while offering an alternative response to your brain. You might remember to take deep breaths, or simply noticing how it feels to sit in your car. Noticing your hands on the steering wheel, you might start to soften your hands, relaxing your arms and your shoulders. Perhaps straightening your spine and reaching your neck from side to side to soften it would be your reminder. You notice that the lake from this place you sit is extraordinarily blue today. You might start to describe this to your baby, sweetly telling her stories of how fun summer will be when she gets to put her toes in the lake. Everyone benefits from this alternate response.

This response might be available to you more readily at some times than others. It is only through practice does our brain come to accept and embrace an alternate response pathway.  If you always get angry and agitated in traffic, that pathway is fairly well travelled and taking another route (in your neural pathways if not through the city) will take some nudging on the part of your thoughts.

An essential part of mindfulness is compassion and acceptance. And if you find yourself a hot mess about your day, you can also have a trained response to bring kindness and softening to your awareness.  There is no goal–oriented fix with mindfulness practice, just gentle attention. 

Now, for instance, you start to pick up more speed and traffic is clearing. Suddenly, someone cuts you off and your razor sharp reflexes stop and swerve just enough to avoid a collision.  Good stress hormone for making you alert and responsive!  That extra acuity that comes from being a parent with a young baby may have helped too.  You are exceptionally attentive, even on diminished sleep.  With practice, that helpful neural pathway training can put your system back into “it’s all over now so return to what you were doing” and will down- regulate your surging adrenaline.  Your heart rate will return to normal and you can start to unclench muscles, allowing blood flow to return and your blood pressure to slow. The alternative keeps you amped up well beyond the immediate crisis and begins to diminish your digestive & immune function, cognitive function, and constricts blood flow.  Now what did you need to ask that doctor anyway?

We have long agreed that stress-related conditions have been eroding the physical and emotional health of both adults and children over the last decades.  Neuroscientists are validating that meditation can shift us out of these ‘reactions’ and teach us new ‘responses’ that help increase flow and wellbeing in our brains and bodies.

Learn more

Check out this article “This is Your Brain on Mindfulness” on the work of Dr. Michael Baime, a neuroscientist and founder of the Penn Program for Mindfulness.  Dr. Baime has demonstrated that the brain is actually changed during meditation practice but also experiences growth over time in those who meditate with some regularity. The illustrations in the article are beautiful too!

About the author and the Mindful Parenting series at Birthways

This article was written by Karen Laing, Founder, Birthways Labor Support and Postpartum Doulas as a part of Birthways Mindful Parenting series.  Please see our Mindful Parenting learning center for other posts and resources, and join us on Facebook for the month of May, where we'll be featuring our favorite tips, resources, and special events.

Consider Kristy Ralston Photography.  Kristy is a former Birthways doula - come see her sample photos here.

As you may know, we were experiencing difficulties with our phone system provider earlier today.  It is now back up and running.  If you need to reach us with an urgent matter during non-business hours, please use the phone system as usual (dial 888-506-0607 and follow the prompts for the emergency page).  If you experience any difficulties, please use our backup on-call phone - 773-401-0110. Thanks for your patience!

Many Birthways families ask us where to get good information online about perinatal mood disorders.  We always refer them to Katherine Stone's blog, Postpartum Progress.  She has currently launched a fundraiser in support of efforts to educate others about mood disorders.  To learn more, visit here.

With one doula heading to midwifery school and another to Texas, it is time to welcome new doulas to our group!  Are you an experienced doula or someone experienced with new moms and babies interested in transferring your skills to a career as a doula?   Learn more at our upcoming information session.