The Yoga of Parenting
By Theresa Shay
I’ve moved into a Presto Parenting Experience, stepping in to help care for two pre-teen boys.
There is a definite rightness to this situation. I gave Mom Heather my “yes” immediately when she asked if Glenn and I would take care of the boys. She needed to fly them home to the USA while she stayed in Scotland with daughter Fern, who’d just been diagnosed with leukemia and could not travel.
Dharma in the yoga tradition can be translated as “responsibility” or “duty.” My favorite description of the word, however, lies in the understanding that dharma is what would be impossible for you NOT to do. Teaching TriYoga, being with Glenn, and loving Cypress, Sylvan, and Fern like family, appear to be dharma for me this lifetime.
I am committed to and enthusiastic for this dharma. I have much to give to parenting. I have much to receive from parenting. I have much to learn from parenting.
No part of my rational mind believes anything less than that I am doing a fine job of providing care. In fact, the biggest upset so far has been a misplaced yoyo from friends at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center, where Dad Will worked before he passed away.
Nevertheless, during a recent phone call Heather said, “There is something I need to process with you.” Just then, someone at the hospital came in to ask her a question. In the minutes before she could begin the story from her walk earlier in the day (having nothing to do with my parenting), my mind jumped into the well-worn groove of self-doubt.
Even as the thoughts began, I knew it was extremely unlikely that this friend who encourages me in every way would be wanting to critique my parenting skills from a hospital room in Scotland. These were thought waves of imagination, yet I could not stop the waves from rolling in.
I flashed through the 36 hours I had spent with Sylvan and Cypress. I knew I had failed to be soft enough around bedtime. I had failed to be firm enough around Minecraft. I had failed to return calls from friends offering to help. I had been frustrated by texts coming through the day I was trying to figure out where to lay my toothbrush. I had stayed awake worrying. I had cried from disorientation. So many things I could be doing better.
I watched this review move through my mind, so very familiar, so very fast. As I have not been a parent in this lifetime, the superficial content was fresh, but the vibration was as stale as ever: I could be doing more, and doing it better. I’ve tried so hard but still I’m disappointing someone I love.
Of course I would like not to have this pattern. But I do. Yoga has made me wise to it. I know to take a deep breath when waves of harshness pass through. I have learned that just because I experience the thought does not make it true. I have learned to stand in the observer mind and tell the striving mind that now is a good time to step back. I have come to take responsibility for these echoes of criticism, my own creations formed long ago, and apply the practices that help me rise above them. My long-held anxiety that I’ll disappoint someone is entirely habit: absent of presence, void of failure.
We all have deep patterns that throw us, but they also can be used to call us forward when they appear. The muddiness rises because we’ve stepped toward something unknown. These are the conditions required for growth. Maybe it happens when you start a new school year, get sick, receive news that stuns you, experience a loss. Understandably, our strongest habits will appear on the new landscape. Until we clear out all the tension, our first reaction will be to default to the most familiar.
“Maintain common alignments,” we say when we transition from one posture to the next in yogaflow®. Life throws you into parenting? Ok, keep doing what you know works. When you feel like a failure, when you doubt if you made the right choice, when you imagine you’re about to be told how you could have done better, keep observing. Breathe. Wait. Listen. See what the Universe is showing you.
In the moment it took for me to lay out my list of failures, I received the opportunity this experience is giving me to become more solid in my Self. The mind can eventually become so clear that absolutely no scenario can trigger the old pattern. The only way to get there is through each experience with heart held high and the highest wisdom guiding.
Beyond the gifts to my internal journey, my life is packed with daily joys: picking sungold tomatoes, learning to yoyo, studying the ridge lines from the opposite side of Egg Hill, and most precious, giving boys hugs until their mother can hold them herself. I could not be any more grateful for this Presto Parenting moment.
Theresa Shay is the founding director of TriYoga of Central Pennsylvania, where she teaches weekly yoga and meditation online and trains others to teach TriYoga®. Each week, she shares wisdom cultivated from decades of TriYoga study and practice.
Learn more about her here. Theresa can be reached at Theresa@PennsylvaniaYoga.com. Find her on Instagram @theresa_of_triyoga for more inspiration and light.