I’ve been practicing traditional mindfulness in one form or another since I was a little kid doing visualizations with my mom to new age music back in the ’80s. And sometimes it really helps. Focusing in on the little things, turning off the worries and thoughts by concentrating on a single breath in and out can be a powerful calming tool. But sometimes that kind of inward focus doesn’t work; sometimes focusing on the minutiae, narrowing your focus to the immediate present, can make it even more stressful and uncomfortable.
My daughter is twelve weeks old and I spend all day, every day, with her. And when I say with her I mean with her pretty much in my arms for nearly every waking minute of my day. She won’t nap anywhere other than on me and has only just begun being okay spending time with her dad for anything more than 15–20 minutes. I love my daughter and I love being home with her, being home to her, I cherish our time nursing and snuggling on the couch, and my ability to do so is an incredible privilege, but sometimes it can be a little much. Sometimes I get a desperate urge to just be on my own, to be able to stretch or move or lie down without watching her head and worrying about her fussing.
And at times like this, traditional in-the-moment mindfulness exercises only make it worse. Focusing on how my body feels only heightens the tension and stress I feel over not being able to move and act freely.
Dwelling in the moment when the moment already feels impossibly long and uncomfortable doesn’t help me get through the day. But zooming out the other direction does.
When I feel that closed-in feeling, when I’m nursing for the umpteenth hour, when I’m struggling to stay awake after a sleepless night or cringing at the squirm that I’m certain precedes another crying jag, that’s when thinking about how this moment fits into the larger picture helps. That’s when I think of how my mothering story is playing out and find myself able to be grounded and grateful and happy in that thought process.
In thinking of my broader life story, I automatically reorient the current situation relative to my values and mothering ‘mission statement’, for lack of a better term. I am reminded that I am forming attachments and emotional security for my baby, that every time I bounce and sing and walk her while she cries I am telling her that she is loved and that she is not alone with those feelings. Every minute of every day that I spend ‘stuck’ on the couch, nursing and snuggling and entertaining my daughter is a minute of my life devoted to my overall goal of raising a strong, happy and loving child.
By connecting to the larger story of my life I am connecting to my capacity for gratitude, my freedom of choice, and my image of who I want to be, and that makes it manageable and, most times, even pleasant.
And this works for other scenarios too.
When in the middle of a hard run (back when I had the time and energy to run), I found it helpful to remind myself that this run made me ‘a runner’ and that each run I completed added to the portion of my story that focuses on health and wellness. These thoughts helped get me out the door when I didn’t want to go and it helped me tackle the entire route I’d planned instead of cutting it short when the sun was too hot or my legs were too tired. I thought of runners as a cool group of people, people who take time for themselves, who set goals, who spend time outside and withstand discomfort for the sake of a simple and pure endeavour. By positioning my participation in the story of myself as a runner, I was able to focus on that identity and my desire for it rather than my aching feet or tired legs.
Asking myself who I want to be in my life story and what story I want to be a part of helps guide my actions when I am faced with an uncomfortable decision or struggling with a task that part of me really doesn’t want to do. It helped me get through grad school (I wanted to finish, not walk away mid-program), pushes me to have honest and uncomfortable conversations (I want to be a good partner, sister, friend), and helps me achieve my goals.
This kind of narrative focus also helps me experience a deeper sense of gratitude for what I have by recognizing the bigger picture. Acknowledging how lucky I am to be able to stay home and look after my daughter makes the difficult parts easier to manage. Focusing on my desire to be a runner helped me appreciate my physical ability and the resources that allowed me to take the time for those runs.
Gratitude can have a range of positive impacts on your life including physical health benefits, decreased stress and a higher sense of self-worth and, as in my case, it can make the decision to do the hard thing easier because you appreciate the chance you have to do it. Nursing for hours or running up the long hill mid-run, feeling gratitude for the positive side of these experiences helps make them feel more possible.
By locating my immediate uncomfortable experience within my broader life story I’m also able to see my agency within that experience because I am reminded that there are alternative options to what I’ve chosen. In framing my experience as part of my story I’m able to see other possible stories that I’ve not chosen, making my current situation more personally meaningful and manageable because I don’t have to withstand it, I choose to experience it.
In the early days of parenthood, this process has helped ground me and keep me focused on what I really want, focusing my attention on my life as a whole rather than the specific minute of immediate experience. It has given me room to breathe when I felt like I had no space, no air of my own, it has shone a light of gratitude and awe on the hard bits, softening them in their own beauty and authenticity. It has allowed me the ability to write the story I want to live, no matter what else was happening around me and made this unfathomably life-altering experience something manageable and doable, something enjoyable and empowering.
