Three Things Yoga is Teaching Me as a Mother
My twin children will be seven next month, and I am beginning to understand the sentiment behind the countless older parents who have urged me with “time flies!” since that day they were born. In many of those early days, time couldn’t seem to fly fast enough. And yet here I am. Time is a strange thing.
Motherhood has been the joy of my life. I feel so much aching love for these two silly humans that sometimes it does feel that they are still physically connected to my body. I am also realizing that it has taken me the better part of these past seven years to fully inhabit my body again — it was a little foggy for a while there.
Despite all of my best attempts to control the situation, with two babies clocking in at a near 14 lb total at 38 weeks — one of whom was breech and the other lounging fully lengthwise on top of her — I required a C-section. I was then seemingly catapulted into a new world of healing from major surgery, navigating breastfeeding, holding two hefty babies without any regard for back support, and the subsequent years of little hands poking and prodding and climbing over me. Somewhere along the way I detached from a body that was no longer familiar.
It was yoga that brought me back. (That, and an umbilical hernia repair and pelvic floor therapy— which I wish I had known to seek out from the get-go!). Through the practice of intentional movement, meditation, and breath, I began to let go of my tendency to stay in my head and come back to union with my body. Through the gift of incredible teachers at Sama, I also began to understand the depth of yoga’s ancient wisdom and how much it offers us today.
There are three unconditional truths that I keep circling back to, and which I hope each person in my class walks away knowing:
You are enough. Despite living in a world that feels orchestrated around you believing the contrary, yoga offers a reminder that we already have everything we need within us. This is a practice in letting go of what we think we need to look like, achieve, or accomplish — you are enough as you are. Especially for parents in our comparison-fueled Instagram-era, we can place so much pressure on the persistent myth of doing, having, and being “it all.” It is a welcomed and necessary relief to remind ourselves to let this go.
You are not alone. For me, entrance into motherhood felt really lonely. I was the first among my friends to have kids, and we moved to a new state two weeks after they were born. Call it oldest daughter syndrome, but somehow along the way I was programmed to default to doing everything by myself and wearing that like a badge of honor. It took me a few years and a pandemic to realize how deeply I needed to seek out community instead of waiting for it to find me. Here at Sama, I have met so many beautiful people and fellow moms who collectively have created a space where we can be our vulnerable, imperfect selves, as it turns out most of us are struggling through the same things. Yoga reminds us to strip away the beliefs that do not serve us. For me, that has been realizing that just because we can do it by ourselves doesn’t mean we have to.
You are worthy of rest. So often the story we tell ourselves is that we need to earn rest — our sense of self so easily entangled with a constant state of doing that embracing stillness feels hard. In concluding our practice with Savasana, we allow ourselves to take up space and relax into deep rest without guilt or apology. I treasure this time because I am so thoroughly in need of this invitation again and again: to quiet the endless to-do list, to soften and let go, to allow myself grace when my mind eventually wanders back to a task forgotten. It might feel like a quip, but I know it to be true that we can only fully show up for those we love if we allow ourselves to rest. Rest is here to refuel and sustain us — so that throughout our day, we can come back to our breath and relax into the knowing that we are more than our productivity.
In this season, I have been reflecting on how grateful I am that we welcome children to our classes here at Sama, and thankful to this community for practicing with me. I hope that my children grow up knowing these three truths above so deeply in their bones without question — as this is one of the best gifts I could ever hope to give them.
By Mary Noel
Mary has been practicing yoga for over fifteen years, and is proud to be a graduate of Sama Academy’s Yoga Teacher Training. She is mother of six-year-old twins. She currently leads partnerships for Thirty Madison, a platform increasing access to virtual specialized healthcare. Prior to Thirty Madison, Mary led strategy and growth initiatives for the non-profit DoSomething.org, as well as at mission-driven tech startups Andela and ZocDoc.
