Motherhood and the Spiritual Arts

This article is for the women practitioners out there, who are conflicted about whether or not to become a mother due to their perceived loss of time to practice. It is also for all the men who love their women, to help you understand a little more the dilemma that women who value their spiritual journey can have about parenthood.

For many women, for millennia, motherhood has been seen as an automatic disqualifier to traversing the higher realms of spirituality, especially in many Eastern and monastic traditions. In fact in most traditions being a woman at all is a bit of a disadvantage, one that might even take another rebirth or two to sort out! Overcoming this idea was a big theme for me. I came to motherhood after many years of intense spiritual practice. Supporting my spiritual life was at the center of every decision I had taken for many years, so when I uncovered the deep feeling to have a child it threw me into turmoil, and questioning. All the messages around me seemed to be placing me into the center of an impossible conflict. How can I continue to have the depth of spiritual practice I need and become a mother? How will I have enough time? Will motherhood signify the end of my time to practice and irrevocably immerse me into the nappy driven mundane of ordinary life! And most importantly will I become one of those boring women who can do nothing but talk about their children! (Yes I was young, a bit arrogant and a bit of an arse!)

Recently I have been having some conversations with some of the younger women in the school and in my work life, who are worried about this seeming dichotomy, continuing to develop spiritually and having a child. I am mother to two amazing daughters (now 17 and 22 and stepmother to a wonderful stepson 28.) The journey with all 3 of my children I see as my deepest spiritual work to date, so I wanted to try and offer some thoughts to those women who may be struggling with these same questions.

Did I get to train uninterrupted for 4 hours a day….NO…. I got to train about 12 -14 hours a day! Did I get to choose when I would push my limits in my training by going on a retreat or just deciding to do so….No they were constantly pushed by the demands and needs of my children. Not when I felt like it, but at two in the morning when sleep deprived and faced with a crying child who needs you to be present, really present, and all the other countless times when there is a need to respond deeply, spontaneously and without emotional baggage.

It is of course important that women have a real choice not to have a child; that we experience the freedom that we are as much of a woman if we focus our immense creative energies in a different direction. It is just important that if we make the decision not to have children, that we don’t do so because we are afraid it means we will not be able to spiritually progress. This is a conflict that many women have in the spiritual arts. This seems to me to be part of the masculinisation of spirituality which most female practitioners have ingested whether consciously or unconsciously. So if you decide not to have children do so for a good reason, not because motherhood will not give you enough time to train….if you go ahead, also do so for a good reason, make it a deeply conscious decision, and then you will probably come to realise that the training has only just begun!

When undertaken consciously motherhood will take you to the depths of your being and back again, over and over again. You will (if you are willing) see aspects of your nature that have laid hidden deep inside the recesses of your control mechanisms, layers of your acquired nature reflected back to you by the open mirror of your young child. You will discover the capacity of your heart in a way you cant possibly imagine, discover resources you haven’t dared to think might be yours, and a connection to the whole of creation in the most exceptional way. You will work for it, sweat within it, be pushed beyond your limits, in a way no standing posture can ever do, and you will learn to let go, you will have to! Motherhood, when entered into from a correct intent will test you, with knobs on, all day long 365 days a year! To give you a sense of this here’s an illustration from my own life:)

Its 3am, your baby wakes again. You have not slept for more than 2 hours stretches in 2 weeks. You have a lot of work and its going through a tricky patch. You have a cold. They have a worse one. They are frightened because it’s hard to breathe and need soothing. You try to breastfeed (least effort, might be able to doze). It doesn’t work, they can’t feed as they cant breathe. You are becoming frustrated but control it. They cry harder. (They KNOW!) you know they know and feel bad……but I am so tired. You try all the other things, bouncing, singing, driving, everything, anything. It doesn’t work…..you are useless, a failure as a mother. NOTHING IS WORKING. They scream harder. You have an overpowering desire to throw your beloved baby out of the window…..then you wake up, out of your entirely self created hell! You breathe more deeply, you relax, they scream, you let them. Not in a detached disassociated way, you REALLY let them in. You stop resisting, you open up, you let go, you become soft, wide and without conflict, you are still, present, amongst and with your stress, their stress, your tiredness, their tiredness. You stop being attached to them needing to be a certain way for you to feel like a good person/success as a mother and…….they look at you, really look at you…stop crying, smile and go to sleep. Look at the learning potential in such an event. (One I went through many, many times). The difference between ‘normal’ mothering and conscious mothering is the critical moment when we wake up out of reactivity. We apply what we have learnt and we do our training. We open up, we breathe, we allow discomfort. This time not just our discomfort, but our child’s too, we soften, we sung…..we let the moment be as it actually is rather than what we want to force it to be (asleep, not tired, no crying etc) we let ourselves be as we actually are without judgement, and in that moment we find stillness and peace. We balance. The thrusting meridian opens up and we have far more access to our spiritual self. Our child feels that too, we are passing on the capacity for them to develop the same resources one day as there is no separation in truth. They absorb the ability to be with life in its moments of imperfection, with openess. We get to learn that profoundly, and experientially every minute of the day and night. The more we train it, which is constantly as that’s the nature of parenting, the easier it becomes and the less and less we go anywhere near the throwing out of the window moment!

Of course we still need alone time to practice, and if you are determined you will find it, maybe not the 4 hours you think you do before children, but an intensive hour when they are sleeping, or engaged with something else. You find amazing creativity in meeting your and their needs, so you get to do some Qi Gong and they get to play with a favourite toy that you hid precisely so you can whip it out at such a moment! You resource yourself with friends, family so that your needs for time alone can in some way become addressed. When you don’t polarize training from life the conflict goes out of it, you come to see training is happening every minute, every decision we take every move we make!

There is another, deeper aspect to the spiritual process of being a parent, the in depth detail of which is beyond the scope of this article; but to give you some idea this relates to the fact that young children are mirrors. They are beings who have not yet learnt to be separate, they are naturally energetically sensitive. They, particularly in the first 7 years, mirror that which lies in the unconscious of the mother/parents. What lies buried within us, experiences of which we may have no idea still reside and are in some way active, will be felt and expressed by your child. The congenital essence of your little one is ever present, and in that shinning, you will see yourself. If you don’t or can’t, they will help you out by embodying what within you has become hidden.

Here is an example from my own work of this complex territory. A woman comes to see me who has a 7 month old baby that mysteriously develops a rash. He is breastfed, the mothers diet is good, all possible physical causes are eliminated. The baby is well mothered, held a lot, carried, very loved and physically nurtured. Most skin/allergic reactions I see in babies/people, which are not diet based, are often to do with a need for more contact with the mother, who unconsciously avoids it. In this case this is not the reason so we have to go deeper. It becomes necessary to explore with the mother her history around touch, intimacy, how does she feel about her sexuality, how is touch within her relationship. We are exploring her relationship to her skin. Remember it is her babies skin that is the ‘problem’. It turns out that she is lonely within her marriage, not for sex, but for loving non demanding touch. She had a loving yet physically cold childhood with her need for reassurance through hugs and cuddles woefully lacking. Her parents were kind, but with problems around physical intimacy. The woman becomes aware of all this, thereby energetically taking possession of it. She begins to grieve for her untouched self and talks to her partner, making demands related to her own needs, and within two weeks her child’s rash has disappeared never to return. The baby was simply giving the mother information she needed and luckily she had the resources to listen to what she was being shown. She had to be willing to go beyond the surface, to reject the steroid creams or endless obsessing by alternative practitioners into the minutiae of her diet and look into the energetics, the heart/mind energetics of the situation, wake up out of her blind spot and heal. Her little boy no longer had to carry her unresolved grief and longing for touch. His skin was never the problem. She became closer to herself, more honest, less defended and took a huge step upon her spiritual journey, one that she may never had taken without the rigours of motherhood.

So does your life change when you become a parent..hell yeah. Of course there are losses. Or it might seem that way initially. No two month meditation retreat, not two hours at the beginning! No being able to rest when you need to, sleep when you need to, eat your own food without it being spread over all your clothes. No leaving the house without a four hour process and a small lorry of crap you are told you have to carry with you (most of which you don’t need, a breast, a piece of linen and a sling, I got it down to). But all these things pale into insignificance when you remember why you have had your child in the first place. To support another being into their life with as much awareness as you can muster, to learn and cultivate your own nature through the process, and most importantly to fall ever more profoundly and madly into love. The real, sticky, four in the morning kind. Motherhood does not stop your spiritual journey it accelerates it, deepens it and can take us women perhaps further along the pathway to the Dao than you can possibly imagine.