Moms Finding Time to Meditate
Recently when I was conducting a workshop I was asked this question: ‘I am a single mom with two young children and work fulltime. Between the times I wake up, to the time I go to bed, I do not have any time to sit quietly, let alone meditate. Can you help me?’
Here is my simple reply to her:
Self help is the best help. You are blessed with infinite potential. You just have to look within and around you and acknowledge the blessings in your life every day. You wanted to be a mother, and it was not easy. The labor pains you endured to give birth were a labor of love. They transformed you into a mother responsible for each baby’s life and well being, as they grow to adulthood. You are a co-creator with this infinitely creative universe. The entire Universe supports your every effort in your mothering.
Observe Mother Earth, in whose womb so much is continually being created. She is the very embodiment of patience and love. Be kind and patient with yourself and your children in their tender years. The age from 0-6 is called ‘the crowded years’ for very good reason. Put all your love into the care you give your children. Retreat into the point of stillness in activity as best you can. Pour the heart of the Infinite Divine Mother into your service to them. Make that your meditation as often as possible.
Be creative. Depending on your children’s age, find a way to include the stretching and breathing exercises into your mothering activities. If you are breastfeeding, rocking or otherwise quietly holding your child, try using one hand to do alternate nostril breathing. Make the breathing a meditation in which you include your precious child in the beautiful balancing, healing, renewing energy of the breath.
If your children are a little older, play some beautiful music each day, and do the stretching and breathing as a dance with them. Teach them to do the stretches with you, in their own dance and include deep abdominal inhalations and exhalations as they stretch and relax. Remember, this is an art. You patiently and lovingly weave the artistry from the raw material of your life. You weave it into the fabric, into the realities of your life circumstances.
Finding the heart of your own playful, inner child and giving it expression in your practice is freeing. Your practice becomes a celebration of life. Observe your children’s natural playfulness. Learn from them. Enter into playful expression with them as you discover new ways to bring this practice into your life with them. Share the joy of this art with them.
Do this, and you will find time to meditate deeply in the years to come. Opportunities to meditate more traditionally may present themselves sooner than you think, even if that meditation is brief. If no such opportunities arise, rest assured that you are laying the foundation for a more meditative life for both you and your children through your prayerful and conscious mothering today.
Being a mother is a beautiful gift. Your children still live in their innocent, pure being state. Let that state in. Let it inform you. Let it awaken the child in you that will lead you home to your own being.
First, break the rut of your old mindset that your life as a mother prevents you from practicing the breathing and stretching and brief meditation. Meditation can be 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes. It can be one breath wholly entered into.
Resolve to unearth the opportunities you do have. Say to yourself, ‘I am born to be happy. The whole universe is always working with me, flowing through me, to bless me in my motherhood.’ Wake up every morning intending to find those blessings. Look for every opportunity to lift yourself up and find and express the joy of your Spirit. You will find yourself calming down, slowing down, all while being dynamic in your responsibilities.
Your spirit is the inner source of the calmness of your mind and heart. The more you connect to it, the more you will flow from inside out all the time. Do what you do consciously, as a conscious act of love for your children, rather than getting lost in the single dimension of doing, in the busy-ness of your day. From the center of your being, the universe dances through you. You are born to be the dancer in the dance of universal consciousness.
If possible, practice stretching your body and breathing, and very briefly meditating. It takes only 10-15 minutes a day. You can do rhythmic abdominal breathing while you are driving. You can do alternate nostril breathing when stopped at traffic lights. Life will give you many opportunities, if you only have the playfulness of a child in looking for those opportunities.
The run-run-run, do-do-do quality of your life is a practice you created. Look back to your childhood, to your adolescence, to your youth and its struggles. You got into the habit of doing, always doing, but the thing we all must learn, though, is to undo. We have become unbalanced in the process. We have to learn to be. With all our doing, we feel frustrated and run down. We start complaining, grumbling and finding fault with things around us, and with ourselves. We have to undo. We have to unlearn. We have to become innocent. We have to learn to play again, with the enjoyment of a child, expressing the spirit that is eternally free.
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