Motherhood is the Ultimate Yoga

Motherhood is the Ultimate Yoga

It’s a practice. 

Sometimes it’ll feel easy and lots of times it will feel hard. If you don’t practice your yoga within motherhood, you’ll feel like you’re failing. 

You’ll let the weight of the failure of all the ways in which you’ve let down the most important people in your life and possibly fucked them up forever hold you hostage. 

This won’t heal the past but it will impact your future. 

Yoga of motherhood is allowing everything to be. To accept the wins and the failures. To know that you have a lesson to learn at every turn. 

It is the ultimate test of presence. Will you stay stuck in all the things you have done and forgo what the future holds both good and bad.

Have you ever noticed how the people who tell the same stories over, time and again, are stuck. They never grow, they never change. 

This happens with all things and all people. 

Children growing up is the ultimate yoga. 

Allowing them to grow up is the practice. 

Seeing them and really soaking them in is pure presence. 

I notice as my kids get older I have more and more compassion for myself, but it could easily go the other way. They are at the age now where I was learning to figure it out and the choices feel urgent. I pushed myself to be something on the outside but neglected my insides. 

I feared change and I craved it. I wanted to be the best mother, the best partner, the best at everything. I don’t really understand why I wanted that other than to avoid the pain of seeing who I really was. Imperfect. A person trying her best and failing while succeeding. 

The duality of life is that we are both failing and succeeding at all times. While we are present for someone, we’re absent for another. We want to be soft but end up hard. The hardness comes from being too soft on the inside. Too full of pain that isn’t released and leaks out everywhere. 

It sucks to sit alongside the painful things. To see the experiences of our lives that make us cringe, but not accepting that they are there, whether you like it or not, only magnifies those feelings in the present reality. 

Avoidance creates rigidity. Acceptance creates space for something new to grow. 

Motherhood offers a new opportunity to grow because our kids don’t stop growing. There should be a manual but each generation seems different. Definitely different challenges to face.

The yoga is happening. 

Life is happening whether you’re filled with pain or joy. No one at the end of the gate is going to ask you if you suffered enough for your sins. That kind of hell is happening right now if you do that. 

The gift of yoga through motherhood is learning to be present with what is real. What is true. Then learning the acceptance part alongside that. We all carry regrets and shame. Don’t let it become your personality. 

I write this because I have listened to myself and I’ve listened to other moms. We all wish we could’ve done better. We can. Right now. 

That’s the gift.