Meditation

Three boobs

Meditation, Motherhood

I sometimes look down at my belly and a character comes to mind from one of those old Seventies American cop shows. He’s an amalgam of them all: a good guy, he likes doughnuts with his coffee and he says things into his walkie talkie like ‘Mac, we gotta prawblem heeyah.’

Because postnatally (oh alright, prenatally too), I pee a lot, I get lots of glimpses of my belly all day. The cop says: ‘We gotta do somethin’ bout this.’ Then the day goes on and I run around and I think, I’ll do that Tupler technique thing later. I’ll work on my transverse abdominis possibly another time. Note to self: must start doing something about this belly.

A few weeks ago, I was leaning over to put my jeans on and my son said, as if observing an orangutan in the wilderness, ‘Look Mummy, you’ve got three boobs.’ From where he stood, yes indeed it did look like I had three boobs. The usual two – then my stomach hanging down in a sort of cone shape. I had that diastasis recti thing in my last two pregnancies, where your stomach muscles split, never to find each other again unless you spend 20 hours each day doing some weird deep abdominal pulsing thing. I had an umbilical hernia too, which is where part of your intestine sticks out of your abdominal wall. That was a real gift, I must say.

Anyway, I look down at my tummy and think, yep, we’ve got a problem here, but I haven’t done anything about it yet. For a while, I went down the route of thinking ‘oh my body is destroyed but look, I have three darlings to show for it and it’s all been worth it’ – but the truth is I do mind what the hell has happened to my body and how radically it has changed since I had three children in four years. My poor body had no chance whatsoever to ‘ping’ back, because I let cravings rule me in pregnancy and ate far too many salt and vinegar crisps. When I did pregnancy yoga, it was mainly the kind where you just lay down and relaxed.

My strategy was ‘I’ll deal with it when I’ve finished having babies’ and now this Seventies guy eating a doughnut is on my back all the time but with no solutions. I work a lot on my mind because I feel, what with all the mental illnesses and neurosis, it’s fairly flabby. I meditate because it has been scientifically proven to change your brain, and I get such a kick out of that. You can change your brain. I love that. There’s so much hope in it.

Yet my body waits, quivering in expectation. When will it be my turn, it says. You can’t just be an ace brain walking around on two legs. Your body is just as important as your mind. Then it comes out with this cracker: We are one and the same, you know.

Only connect

Meditation

As a child, I found Catholicism appealing. It was dramatic and scary. There was the crucifixion. The resurrection. Taking holy communion on a Sunday and being told you were actually eating the body of Christ. The spectre of sin hanging over you, coupled with the thrilling fact that you were probably sinning quite a bit, but you’d be forgiven for it. As long as you confessed it.

I loved the singing. Lines from hymns pop back into my head often, like this one: Be still and know that I am God. In primary school at lunchtimes, I even used to go into the church next door. I’d sing with other small, similarly bewitched friends. We’d do the stations of the cross. We felt very holy.

I grew into my teens. I drank. I smoked. I had sex. I lied. None of it married well with Catholicism, even though in between bouts of extreme sinning, the ingrained doctrine meant I felt incredibly guilty and sorry a lot of the time. As an adult, there is a Catholic part of me that cannot be removed. It’s tattooed into my cells. I’ve made peace with it, scraping by with my own patchwork version that’s female-friendly, all-inclusive and without a paedophile in sight.

What was present in me as a child – faux-holiness and all – and then missing as a teen and young adult, was simply this: Spiritual connection. I see now that it’s what I was desperately looking for when I was drinking heavily, or having yet another doomed love affair, or succumbing to the somnambulance of depression. I needed to find a connection to something that had already been inside of me all along.

I catch glimpses of it now. Wispy and dark clouds part in rapid winds, revealing a periwinkle perfect sky. During meditation, I sense the isness of the self. Like the trunk of a tree or the foundation of a carefully built house. It is stillness absolute – and yet it vibrates as fast as the wings of a hummingbird, sucking nectar from the infinite offerings of the earth.

The Walden of suburbia

Meditation

‘To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.’ So said the great Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Each day, during his two-year sojourn in a long cabin in the woods near Walden Pond, he would get up to bathe in the pond at dawn, calling it his ‘spiritual discipline… a religious exercise and one of the best things I did.’

Now, I’m sure he didn’t necessarily want to do it every morning. I’m quite certain some early, pitch-black deep cold mornings he woke up and thought: There is just no effing way I’m getting into that pond. I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ve got, like, forever to do this.

But he did it. Every morning.

I like to read about other peoples’ daily routines. I’m an absolute sucker for those ‘I’m winning at life’ spiels you read about, you know, I go to the gym, run, drink a turmeric shot, smear chia seed jam over my face, deal with all my emails, all before 4am. I’ve been reading them for years, but the most fundamental habit I wished I could adopt was simply ‘I get up early.’ I love the idea of those pencil-quiet morning hours, profoundly peaceful moments in which you can create your hopes for the day ahead, and by default for your life. But I’ve never been able to get up early. In my 20s and 30s, I took lie-ins to the max; there were lie-ins so epic that the promising pink of the day would regularly fade into the stifling dark of the night (this is depression).

Now, I have no choice about getting up at Silly o’clock because of my three babies. I’m awake by around 6am, so getting up ‘earlier’ would mean 4am and not much sleep. That will change. Until then, I affect the quality of the day by meditating each day, without fail. It is my spiritual discipline and the rock that I sit on daily – staring into my own version of Walden Pond, a refreshing dip into the reliable immensity of the universe.

The (four) barbers of Seville

Meditation, Motherhood

When my eldest son and I came out of the cool, hipster new barbers’ near where I live yesterday, he hung his head and quietly said ‘I look like Violet Beauregarde. But that’s ok.’

Well, it was not ok with me. He wasn’t going for his first school photo today with a retro 20s bob – no way! Being afraid of confrontation as I am (meditation is not a panacea) I took him straight to another barber. She assessed the situation in a fraction of a second and barked out ‘I don’t do corrections here. No way. Cutting kids’ hair is hard enough.’ We left.

I took him to a third barber, who looked at my son and nodded sagely. I thought no words were needed, really. It was clear that my son’s awesome, shaggy cut had been hacked into a style more suitable for a grande dame of fashion like Anna Wintour and not a 5-year-old at the tail end of his Junior Infants year. I turned for a moment to the other two boys, who were running wild with clutches of free lollipops in their hands, and by the time I turned back, this barber had merrily hacked off all of the hair on one side of my son’s head.

So this is when I totally lost it. Something exploded inside of me, an absolute fireball of foul temper. A beat passed. The barber looked at me, scissors hovering over the child’s head. ‘You didn’t want… short?’ he asked hesitantly. No, no, no I raged and wept internally. In real life, I calmly said, ‘Ok, you must have misunderstood me. We need to even it up now and make the best of it.’ But then, I legged it – three straggly, sticky boys in tow: he’d brandished the buzz cutter thing with clear intentions to completely decimate what was left of my son’s floppy, wavy blonde hair.

We went to a fourth barber. He was a broad and big man called Teeno. He took one look at Kit’s hair, shook his head, whistled, exhaled and said: ‘Let’s fix this.’ He gave my other two sons cars to play with, he made me a coffee. His lollipops were shaped like feet, so the boys were beside themselves. He made my (patient) son’s hair look normal again.

Meditation boosts this thing called adaptation energy. It gives you more rope to work with before you snap. It’s all relative; I get that hair is not a big deal. But before I started a regular meditation practice, I would have probably lost my temper at barber No.1, barber No.2 or barber No.3. I’d most likely have cried when barber No.3 lopped the entire side of my son’s hair off. And I might not have been quite as ecstatically grateful when barber No.4 – Teeno the Conqueror – remedied the whole mini-saga with lollipops shaped like feet, coffee and some skillful cutting.

Having that little bit of extra rope elevates your daily life, making things easier for yourself – and so for everyone around you.

Treeclimbing

Meditation

Do you notice trees? Often I do, and I’ve been doing it a lot more in the last few years. There is something about meditating that gently prods you into noticing nature more.

Why is this? It’s probably because it helps you see that you are part of nature. I know that sounds a little annoying, a random platitude. The ‘me’ from, say, five years ago would probably be rolling her eyes upon reading this. She’d mentally check out, her eyes scanning over the rest of the words without really reading them. ‘Yeh, yep, we are part of nature. Snore. Whatever the hell that means.’

But it’s true. We are. I can sometimes see this – I mean really understand it. Not all of the time. Not in the lightly grisly moments of everyday life, when I’m shouting dire and dark warnings to the kids like, if you touch your seatbelt again, there will be no more Lego. Ever.

Since I started meditating, I’ve started to really dig nature more. The two just go together. I look at a tree and think a lot about how it’s been there for a long time before me and how it will be there for a long time after me. And flowers. Sheesh. Don’t get me started. I thought they were pretty before but now often I will stare at them for a number of minutes and think: ‘Who made you so beautiful?’

And when you start to meditate you see – as Rumi wrote in What Was Told, That: What was said to the rose that made it open was said/to me here in my chest – that which made the trees, the flowers, the beautiful, exquisite planet… made you.

Put a sock in it

Meditation

The sock situation when you have three small children is out of control. In our house, a pair of socks is worn once and then rarely reunited.

The baby wears my socks sometimes. I wear the boys’ socks sometimes. I’m pretty sure my husband has gone to work with one of my socks uncomfortably stretched over his foot at some point. He’s long squirreled away a secret stash of brand new socks somewhere that I have no access to because as soon as I get my grubby hands on them, it’s game over.

Dotted around the house, there are bags of teeny tiny socks. Stuffed in Tesco bags. A little dinosaur drawstring bag. Gift bags, cloth bags. The socks pile up, procreate in the washing machine, and come out in multiples with no other half in sight. The bag thing works fairly well. Anybody who needs socks will now trot happily to the nearest bag station to select a non-pair of socks.

I think the socks are like thoughts in your brain before you meditate. All different sizes and colours: big fluffy winter offerings, skinny fluorescent slip-of-things, mean little black ones, cosy and solid stalwarts; tattered, elegant grey ones. It’s a bit of a mess in there. Sometimes when you are meditating, you get the feeling you have pulled a matching pair out of your brain bag. All those thoughts, tumbling around, become reunited and your brain feels like it’s been put back together again, briefly in perfect harmony.

Matched up with the universe.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

Meditation

In her poem, The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac, Mary Oliver talks about the urgency of living.

She asks: Do you need a prod?/Do you need a little darkness to get you going? And then brutally reminds us that such a vibrant soul as Keats died at just 25.

None of us have much time. We really don’t. I’m sure most of you have been reminded of the lack of time we have on this planet. Often it happens when someone very close to you dies, or when you get a frightening medical diagnosis. For me, it was the latter. It wasn’t cancer, as prompted the urgency in Oliver’s poem, but it was something utterly left-field, something bananas, a one-in-a-million medical condition that finally explained why I had been living with intermittent, excruciating bouts of pain for all of my adult life.

During the weeks of diagnosis, the scans and the being pinged from one grim consultant to the next, there loomed the possibility that whatever it was I had would kill me (It didn’t. It won’t). It was unbelievable and it was totally unbelievable how my mindset instantly changed.

Time became distilled. I couldn’t believe I’d had a complaint about anything before – literally anything. Everything seemed like a special, priceless gift that was about to be snatched away from me. I got down on my knees and prayed every night (and during the day, and every hour) to God to let me stay alive and healthy to look after my sons. To let me live the life that until the week before, when a scan had found a gigantic growth wrapped around the sciatic nerve in my leg, I’d been a bit ‘meh’ about.

Yes, really. I dared to be ‘meh’ about my one wild and precious life, my adorable, bolshy little sons, my practical, kind husband, my sensitive, whip-smart stepdaughter, and about my tumbly tiny terraced house in the centre of the city.

I’m not going to die anytime soon. Or I might. Who knows? Any one of us, at any time, could die or become ill, or something could happen to one of our loved ones.

It is impossible to live at the intensity of ‘I might die’ every day, or even for a moment – but having experienced what it is like, its imprint is inside of me, somewhere. It’s yet another reason why I meditate. It is so incredibly comforting. When you do it regularly, you slowly start to become aware that death cannot exist.

Because there is a part of us that can never die.

Halos and hailstones

Meditation, Mental health, Motherhood

We can be saved in tiny ways every day by people we meet, even just once.

Five years ago, a month after the birth of my first son, I was saved like this by a midwife at the Coombe hospital. I’d had four weeks of steadily worsening mental health. I knew a lot about depression – but this was something very different. My brain was being bombarded by a relentless onslaught of intrusive, nasty thoughts about harming my baby. These thoughts weren’t just occurring, say, every 10 minutes or so. They were happening every moment, every millisecond, with such frequency and force that I could not speak.

I didn’t understand what it was but I knew I was in trouble. I went back to the hospital and sat there. Words were not coming out, but I was crying. A lot.

This midwife took me into a small office, and said: ‘Just trust me. Do something with me, for a moment.’ I had no clue what it was at the time but I did what she said. I thought about my feet, I thought about my legs, I thought about my stomach, my heart, my breath. I followed her words and for a few minutes – moments really – I found absolute respite. Peace. It was Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, the crack: there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. Just enough light seeped in so I knew the dark could not end me. I went home to my baby, called my husband. He came home.

I know now that what the midwife was doing was something called a body scan. She had just completed training in mindfulness. She was able to help me slip out of my broken mind and into the comforting solidity of my body. She saved me, on that day.

I can’t tell you her name because I didn’t ask. She is one of the beautiful, hardworking midwives who save people like me, every single day.

I want to thank her.

to illustrate home

Talking about it

Meditation, Mental health

Just so you know, if you are reading this and in the grips of a frightening mental illness, then you need to go to a doctor. If they don’t take you seriously, then go to another doctor.

Meditation is not going to work when your brain is being throttled by depression, or anxiety, or OCD, or whatever horrible mental disorder that you are suffering from.

I didn’t meditate when I was suffering from post-partum OCD. I was too unwell. I didn’t tell anyone either. I was too ashamed. I thought I was really weird. Honestly, I thought I might even get arrested. After ten months of intense suffering – the precious, unreturnable first ten months of my first son’s life – I found a website that explained what was wrong with my brain.

A tiny stream of relief started to flow through me, eventually becoming a river which carried me to a doctor who, when I told her, said: Why didn’t you tell me before? There is help for this.

What helped me move past my post-partum mental illness was:

1. Pills

2. CBT therapy

3. Reading stories from other mothers who had it too

My OCD has not fully gone away. It bubbles relentlessly in the back of my brain, but the volume is turned down very low and it is manageable.

Meditation helps me now in immeasurable ways. It has given me back joy in my life. It has allowed me to see past the violent noise of my thoughts. It has made me see that our minds are always moving swiftly through storms and that we are not our minds. We are behind all that, totally protected.

Nothing can break that part of us.



Moles

Meditation, Mental health, Motherhood

There is a distinctly non-spiritual reason why I decided to start meditating every day. I read that meditation can give you deeper rest than sleep.

For four years, I had been either pregnant or breastfeeding. I was tired and needed more rest. I’m not a morning person anyway and now brutal, unasked for dawns invaded seven or eight times a night. I woke to feed my youngest child, or to soothe my grouchy middle child or to schooch (grudgingly) over in bed to let the eldest child snuggle up.

I started to do strange things. I’d put the milk in the cupboard instead of the fridge. Once, I glanced at the oven, yelped, grabbed the kids and ran out into the street in my pyjamas. I saw fire. It was just the oven light. Another time, I put the electric kettle on and left the room, to swiftly smell smoke and plastic as it melted on the gas hob. I needed to rest my brain. It wasn’t working. I had three small boys to look after.

The word exhaustion is used so much in tandem with parenting that it has lost its impact. People don’t feel the weight of that word anymore, they don’t see the paper-thin grey around the eyes of the person saying it. It’s not tiredness, it’s not fatigue, it is the king of the states of unrest: Exhaustion. Your brain is slipping out on you. You aren’t taking care of it. It’s trying to make an escape.

Meditation helps. It faces up to the exhaustion and it says: Your number is up. It’s time to rest.