Last week, Lily was awake during my acupuncture appointment.
Her newfound alertness was one of those developments you look forward to in theory, only to realize once you get there that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sort of like when I used to stay up half the night anticipating a trip to Disneyland only to get there and find more in the way of crowds and heat than personal audiences with Mickey Mouse.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the way Lily and I now make my already favorite chore of folding laundry into a game where I wave each item of clothing in front of her rapidly darting blue eyes on its way from basket to drawer. I cherish the puckered little smile that blooms across her face when I bluster, “B-B-B-B-B,” to her. And I’m pretty proud of how I cobbled together parts from two partially functioning mobiles to make one under which she kicks and coos in wonder.
But what you gain in moments of unexpectedly woozy love when your infant approaches two months you lose in sleep time. Hers. My own is, thank goodness, increasing. Which is a good thing because I’m reduced to a pretty complete state of exhaustion at the end of a day spent trying to cram just as much dish washing and cooking and, yes, writing into the shrinking hours during which she now naps.
This cramming includes acupuncture.
The first time I brought her with me she was sound asleep in her car seat by the end of our ten-minute drive there. The most stressful part of my appointment was worrying that she’d awaken as I lay there full of needles, forcing me to tug at the ones sprouting from my wrists as the acupuncturist had advised me to do in just such an event.
This time, however, she proved her new prowess at staying awake by — quite amazingly in the context of our new world together — staying awake during the car ride there. And then sitting in her car seat in the waiting room gazing suspiciously about herself as she decided whether I was going to release her or she needed to complain. And, when we settled into the treatment room, finally letting me know it was most definitely not okay to leave her in the car seat stationed in front of what I took to be some lovely shadows.
Whether it was my anxiously fluttering pulse or his own worry that he wouldn’t be able to fit a proper treatment around a fussy infant, the acupuncturist was as nervously creative as I at suggesting things that might — one could always hope — placate her for long enough to make a difference. We moved the car seat around. I took her out of it. I swaddled her. I rocked her. I spread her blanket on the floor and assured her that we were in a very safe place. He offered another blanket to put under it as if to prove how safe and welcome she was.
Lily settled back cautiously. “Pretty comfy,” she seemed to say, still reserving judgment on the larger situation.
She looked around. “Decent shadows up there,” I could hear her say to herself as she gave a few experimental kicks.
“Okay?” I asked.
She kicked again and ignored me. “Okay,” was her answer.
And, true to her promise, she didn’t utter those first clicks of I-might-cry-ness until the acupuncturist started removing the needles.
“You are a generous spirit,” he told Lily graciously.
And thus defined her and my good fortune in a few short and honest words.
Traveling with Two — Bring Along the Generous Spirit
A few days later, I was, for the first time, attempting to pack a suitcase for three to take on our weekend trip to Louisville for my grandfather’s headstone unveiling.
Packing for two was never easy, though I always took comfort in the fact that Jake’s clothes are small enough to allow me to grossly over-pack for him without it making an appreciable difference in suitcase space. Packing for three only increased my anxiety. Especially when I was dealing with the aforementioned shorter and less consistent naps. Naturally what suffered was my own wardrobe, a cause of moderate shame during the weekend, tempered by the fact that few people expect a new mom to know how to dress herself.
Greater still was the mass of other anxieties just waiting for me to look up from my present task and confront them. A five-hour drive with a baby who needs to eat every couple of hours and her big brother who I could only hope would just love the new Mama Mirabelle’s Home Movies DVD I bought him. Three nights in a hotel room and three days of eating out in restaurants accompanied by said baby and two-year-old. Family with which to visit instead of holing up inside the hotel room with the remote control and the requisite hotel-room binge on trash t.v.
But, it turns out, temper your anxiety with a dose of an eight-week-old generous spirit and it dissipates quite nicely. (Not so much the crankiness engendered by having to leave the hotel room to be social, but I suspect my baby was merely the excuse, not the cause, of my orneriness.)
The drive? Sure, I found myself feeding Lily in the picturesque environs of a WalMart parking lot in Newport, Tennessee and — making the WalMart seem like a warm Hawaiian beach — sandwiched painfully between the car seats in front of a Hooters restaurant off Interstate 75 between Lexington and Louisville. But other than a bit of complaining at being plopped right back into her car seat after her feedings (I am now genuinely skeptical of my sister-in-law’s claims of breastfeeding while her children were strapped in), Lily most generously stared at the mirror with the bright, happy lion lounging on top of it until she fell asleep. As for Jake, Mama Mirabelle was a big, endless-loop hit, played on demand even during five-minute drives to restaurants during the weekend.
Three nights in a hotel room? Never mind the divide-and-conquer approach that had me and Mike in separate beds with a child each. The arrangements were just fine with Lily, who didn’t much care that the angle for placing one’s pinkie finger in a fussy baby’s mouth in the middle of the night is completely thrown off when one is lying on a mattress next to her rather than at the higher vantage point offered when she is in her co-sleeper at home. Matters would have been greatly improved had I not had the lack of foresight to suggest that Mike and Jake take the king-sized bed in the bedroom because the sofa-bed mattress Mike had dragged to the floor to prevent Jake falling off in the middle of the night was a tad small for Mike’s lanky frame. Why I felt compelled to leave it on the floor where I could feel every useless spring in relief for two nights is a question I will likely never answer.
As for the restaurant meals, my only complaint is that I still haven’t found the time to wash the pink-and-brown polka dot furry blanket that Lily loves so well and in which she was swaddled in my lap as I attempted to eat stir-fry (Friday night) and sushi (Saturday). Having already had her dinner in the parking lot beforehand, she barely complained even if bits of food fell on her face. Jake, for his part, absolutely loved the Japanese restaurant where the waitress brought him paper umbrellas to play with and smiled sweetly as he banged on upside-down soy sauce dishes he called “drums” with wooden chopsticks. It was a noisy place, so he had a blessedly small audience for his music.
Lily even — bless her heart — acquiesced to my weird fascination with watching episodes of VH1’s Tough Love while breastfeeding. (Yes, I feel compelled to shamefully admit, I have TiVo’d it.)
Which just underlines my main point. She is a truly generous spirit. And my reason for writing this piece is nothing more nor less than to express how profoundly grateful I am to her.
Taking the Time to Appreciate Generosity
One frustration I frequently return to in my daily practice is the line between being compassionate and being a doormat.
Compassion teaches me to overlook the differences in others that strike something in me, whether it is as small as my husband’s propensity for leaving cabinet doors open (oh, such destruction of the peaceful orderliness I crave in a home) or as big as hearing someone utter cruel judgments of other people. To be compassionate is to try not to be judgmental myself, to allow others to differ from me, let it go, and move on without telling anyone to change.
Except, of course, I’m only human, and sometimes, dammit, I want credit for being so undemanding. (Yes, I said “undemanding,” and every single one of you who is laughing hysterically right now is welcome to stop laughing and understand that I am repeating these thoughts with a modicum of self-awareness.)
Here, of course, is where generosity gives way to selfishness.
Not that there’s anything wrong with being selfish. We are human, and human beings must, at the very least in some primal way, be selfish to survive. As I wailed during my dramatic adolescent navel-gazing, other people can always let me down, so I have to take care of myself first and foremost. The potential subtleties of such an approach to life were well beyond the ken of a sixteen-year-old, but there is some kernel of truth in there. At the most basic level, for example, I practice yoga to make myself feel good, and part of what makes me feel good is being generous and compassionate toward others. So there is a relationship between the two.
On the other hand, to truly appreciate our connection with all other living beings — to understand what love is — we have to let go of selfishness. We have to transcend the stubborn idea that we are separate from everything else.
How to find the connection? Through generosity. By which I mean opening our hearts and giving from them, without fear of the consequences. (“But someone will hurt me!” cries my sixteen-year-old self. At that age, most likely true. But while the result may have seemed catastrophic at the time, from the wisdom of my forty-two years, I can assure myself that I am unlikely to be harmed by, say, Mike failing to see the deep well of kindness that allows me to hardly ever complain about his cabinet habit.)
Here’s where Lily is teaching me an enormous lesson at her oh-so-tender age. She doesn’t have any fear of the consequences of generosity because, frankly, she has no concept of consequences. Or, for that matter, of fear.
Instead, she is pure heart. She is able to act from that heart. To be generous with her time and her love and her attention. To let me have my acupuncture treatments and my morning yoga practices and my weekends in hotel rooms with Tough Love.
This is not to say that all babies are so generous — because here is where I have to do a mommy-plug for the particular stunning beauty of my child’s soul. Lily is — truly, sincerely, astoundingly — a generous spirit. What compounds her unique beauty — and where years of living and thinking and reasoning cripple those of us old enough to be her mother — is her ability to express that generosity without reservation.
Here, finally, is where a yoga practice becomes a practice. It is in learning to express, generously, what is in our souls that we overcome the things that hold our spirits back. Here is where we transform our lives from expectations that may cripple us into revelations that may free us.
Or, at the very least, make someone else so happy that our own hearts open up just a little bit further.
Generously Expressing Your Own Asanas
My initial invitation to you here is simply to choose an asana you love and to express it fully. Without the challenge of opening somewhere you aren’t open or learning how to love a pose you generally find pretty difficult to appreciate, you can truly let your thoughts go and find the connection between an asana practice and freeing your soul.
If you’d like to extend the practice, I invite you to follow your own flow. Experience the joyful motion of a flow from your heart instead of your head. Follow the basic outline below and let your body express the same generosity you hope to express with your actions.
And here’s a tip from Lily: Make it child-like.
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nice and informative post!!!