The Headspace Guide To … A Mindful Pregnancy (7 page)

And hey, if you’re still not convinced by the idea of a mindful pregnancy, here are two other scientific titbits which might just tempt you into giving it a go: firstly, mindfulness heightens levels of melatonin, which improves our quality of sleep and mood, meaning that both mother and foetus feel more calm and rested; and secondly, it actually improves the quality of breast milk, which contains fewer harmful hormones and more of those that are beneficial. The result for your baby? Well, the science suggests higher immunity, better sleep, less colic, higher tolerance for discomfort and better self-soothing. Need I say more?

If we accept that mindfulness is instrumental in buffering us against negatively stressful situations and reactionary behaviour, then it naturally follows that this gift must be afforded the foetus that absorbs our stress in utero. That is surely the highest goal of mindfulness within the context of this book: setting the intention to create the most favourable conditions for the baby’s optimal wellbeing.

Imagine you could design the perfect environment for your baby to grow in. Imagine you knew how to shelter it from stress, provide it with comfort, every single day. Imagine that as parents, you are both on the same page, understanding each other’s wants and needs, supported by a loving relationship. It is hard to imagine any parent in the world who would not want this for themselves and for their child.

Mindfulness offers us the opportunity to live a life we could once only imagine. It offers us the opportunity for a calm mind and a calm baby.

Here is a tale about perspective. I’ve changed names to protect people’s identities, but the situation is a true story:

Sally, a young mother, has her hands full, looking after a three-year-old boy and four-month-old girl. This Saturday morning, even before the day has started, Sally is worn out: she’s had a tough night – the toddler was up twice and the baby still needs to be breastfed every two hours. Sleep-deprived, Sally, who feels like her body has been wrecked and her boobs are not her own, is exhausted but, as she told her mother on the phone the previous evening while weeping with frustration, ‘This is what we do. I’ll be fine.’

Sally is a brilliant mother and a trouper, but this is one of those mornings when it feels like she’s trudging through treacle wearing a pair of wellies two sizes too big. As she makes toast for her son, Billy – who repeatedly bangs a toy car on the table and doesn’t listen to requests to stop – Emily, her daughter, starts wriggling and wailing in the baby carrier. Sally’s mind feels and sounds like a warbling radio struggling to find its frequency; she’d do anything for just ten minutes and a cup of coffee, but doesn’t even have time to do that, let alone shower, wash her hair or do her make-up.

Her husband, Oliver, walks in, panting and sweating from the morning run that he just had to do in order to unwind from a hectic, stressful week at the marketing firm he runs. This was how they decided it would be: she’d give up her well-paid job at a PR agency; he’d go to work and bring home the bacon, even though it meant tightening the purse strings. The truth is – even if Oliver won’t express it, because to admit it would mean, in his mind, he’s failing – that he feels like he’s running on a treadmill just trying to keep up with the rising costs that come with parenthood. Sometimes the pressure and chatter in his head feel as noisy as his two children screaming.

Oliver is back for 9am as promised, aware that Sally has her once-a-week coffee meet with two other mothers at 10.3oam. That interlude is, she says, her ‘two hours of sanity in which I start to feel like myself again’. Oliver kisses his wife and kids, grabs a slice of toast and rushes upstairs to change. He spends twenty minutes with a magazine while sitting on the loo, enjoys a ten-minute shower, gets dressed and spends another fifteen minutes reading and sending emails and, Sally suspects, checking Facebook on his mobile phone.

He bounds down the stairs in an upbeat mood – he slept well, the run has done him the world of good and he feels refreshed. He takes Emily in his arms and sits down at the table with Billy, allowing Sally to throw on some clothes and put her hair in a bun. Just as she’s about to head out the door, Oliver shouts after her: ‘Can you be back for noon today?’ Sally pauses, leaves the front door ajar to step back inside the sitting room, looking at her husband in the kitchen.

‘Ollie, really?’ she says, exasperated.

‘What?’ he says, genuinely nonplussed.

‘You know I’m with the girls until twelve-thirty. If I’ve to be back here for noon, it means leaving around twenty to twelve!’

But Ollie has lined up a conference call on an important project; there is nothing he can do and, in the blur of the previous week, he forgot to mention it. Sally has no choice but to accept it, yet his lack of consideration is all she can think about in the car. Her mind keeps churning away, screwdriving her into feeling angry, upset and cheated.

Sally doesn’t get to truly enjoy her catch-up with friends. Yes, she vents to them, knowing they’ll understand, but even when they talk about something else, her grievance simmers in the background, removing her from the moment. When she gets home just before noon, wearing a smile for the children, she looks around the sitting room and it looks as though a Toys R Us warehouse has been ransacked. Billy is among it all – playing on the carpet, lost in his imagination – but Emily is screaming. You can tell she’s been screaming for a while, not just from her red cheeks and teary eyes, but because Oliver looks frazzled and utterly overwhelmed. ‘Thank God you’re back!’ he says, with the relief of a man whose sanity depended on her return.

A few minutes later, as the house recalibrates and restores its calm under Sally’s influence, Oliver goes upstairs to his office to jump on his call. Later that night, with both children sleeping soundly, this couple finds the room to talk. Oliver mentions that he’s had a hellish week, has been feeling the pressure of one project, but was grateful he ‘could look after the kids and provide you some respite’.

Sally looks at him, hears the well-intentioned words spill from his lips, but thinks: he genuinely believes he was a hero for those ninety minutes, coping on his own like that. She laughs; she’s that hysterical with sleep deprivation that she actually laughs.

‘What’s funny?’ he asks.

Sally tries to help him understand. ‘You slept, had a run, had a leisurely toilet break, a refreshing shower, sent emails, probably scrolled through Facebook and the one time – the one time – I get to unwind with friends, you don’t even think about pushing back your conference call, which means I lose time with my friends – time I rarely have these days. Yet you make it sound like you deserve a Pride of Britain award for giving me those ninety minutes. Do you know what I’d do to go for a run, spend ten minutes on the loo or read and reply to just five emails? Do you have any idea what this is like from my point of view?’

Looking at life through the lens of someone else is one of the tenets of mindfulness. More accurately, when we let go of our own firmly held opinions, we simply meet the other person where they are. This is why perspective matters, though no single perspective is either right or wrong. Standing in Oliver’s shoes, we see that he’s overworked and overstressed; he still needs to keep juggling the professional balls, privately worries if they’ll cope financially and feels pushed to the limit in looking after the children by himself. Standing in Sally’s shoes, she’s overworked and overstressed as a full-time mum; she’s juggling the needs of an infant, a baby and herself; privately worries if she can cope and is already beyond her limit, yet powers on regardless.

This sense of appreciating both sides – of seeing the bigger picture – can only come about with the clarity that visits a calm mind; otherwise, we are just immersed in our own thinking and attached to our own opinions, and our perspective is equal to our level of clarity.

When we start training in mindfulness, we usually obtain a fleeting glimpse of clarity which provides a new perspective; it’s more than just a thought, it’s an insight that alters our whole experience – like we’re suddenly looking through a window with a different view. ‘How have I never seen things this way before?’ we ask. But that new experience is quite unstable, so when we finish the meditation and return to ordinary life, we will, more often than not, fall back into the habitual grooves of thought, remembering the experience, but no longer feeling it. The more we practise though, the more our perspective shifts from a fleeting sensation to an ever-evolving insight; from our own viewpoint to an outlook that considers our partner’s position, too, taking ourselves out of our own thoughts and coming back to a more compassionate place.

This is important, because unless we embrace the altruistic nature of meditation, we are not practising as intended, nor are we experiencing the full range of benefits. It’s normal to begin by wanting benefits for ourselves but, in time, we start to notice that our lives are very much interdependent. In fact, the more we focus on the happiness of others, the happier we become. So while you may have initially bought this book to help yourself get through pregnancy and childbirth, the added bonus is that the practice is done every bit as much for your baby and partner as it is for yourself.

What excites me the most is the prospect of giving you the feeling that you’re doing everything possible for the health and happiness of your baby, and feeling good about being a mother. Yet it seems so many expectant mothers experience anxiety, insecurity or guilt on myriad levels. The mind rushes through all kinds of what-ifs and fears, from the fertility stage through to parenthood. What lies ahead is such an extreme process of change, and to navigate that transition is difficult without support or guidance – and I’m not just talking about external support.

I’m talking about assisting yourself internally. Well-meaning friends and relatives can say, ‘You’re going to be just fine’, and you’ll appreciate the sentiment, but it won’t change how you feel on the inside, especially if you have deep-seated fears, or if your hormones are all out of whack.

If this is your first baby, the unknown territory in which you find yourself can be bewildering, as well as scary. You are discovering what it feels like to have your body hijacked by another life force growing inside you, and it is easy to think that you and you alone are going through this experience. But in the same way men often take their partners for granted, women can sometimes do the same. Try not to do that. View him with kind eyes, too.

By that, I mean involve him and hear his opinion, even if it’s not one with which you agree. Because if you are bringing a child into the world as a couple, nurturing your relationship is just as important as nurturing the bond with your unborn child. Our obstetrician, Dr Amersi, says this is a critical time when couples either grow closer together or drift farther apart. Mothers-to-be can rely heavily on a support system that mainly consists of their obstetrician, relatives or friends, perhaps unintentionally making the father feel like he’s excluded. I should say that this was not my own experience, but I know many men for whom it was. If this disconnect isn’t attended to during pregnancy, the danger is that any sense of segregation can deepen when the baby has arrived. Dr Amersi adds: ‘The father can’t be made to feel like a bit-part player for nine months and then expected to step up only after the baby is born.’

Moving forward, the pertinent question is, what can you do for yourself, your child and your partner? Within this compassionate outlook, you learn to relax and go about enjoying the journey of a mindful pregnancy.

If every man could approach pregnancy with Dr Amersi’s know-how, then we’d all be checking into the Nirvana Health Clinic. But the reality is that very few men truly grasp the sacrifice that a woman makes, before, during and after childbirth. Mindfulness certainly encourages the father to be more compassionate, bringing him closer to what can otherwise be a dissociative experience. It is equally important for him to not retreat, physically or emotionally. As Dr Amersi says, ‘The biggest mistake that men make is in taking their partner for granted, as if motherhood is her role and “This is what they do”.’

For fathers, the nine months of pregnancy are a fundamentally different experience and, strange as it may sound, they too can be wracked with insecurity, self-doubt and worry. ‘Can I step up?’ ‘What if I’m not a good dad?’ ‘What if I continue to feel like an outsider and feel no connection with my child?’ ‘Can we cope financially?’ ‘My wife’s morning sickness and cravings are out of control – what the hell do I do?’

These nine months confront us with a powerlessness that feels foreign. As much as we like to feel useful, the journey of pregnancy does not need a ‘fixer’. Nature knows what to do. It may not be how we would like it to be, but we might just as well stand under a tree with red apples, willing them to be green. So this time is about being there for the mother, offering support and, most of all, making her feel heard, cultivating an atmosphere of love, care and attention.

As Dr Amersi says: ‘The father’s role is just as important as the mother’s during pregnancy. The couples who enjoy the best pregnancies are those with fathers who are an integral part of the journey and support system, who feel involved every step of the way.’

Granted, there is something unique about the maternal bond that men will never know, but the opportunity of unconditional love that parents can have for their child goes far beyond biology, building a lifelong connection that can be shared as a family.

On a number of occasions at the monasteries where I lived, I overheard the teachers telling people, ‘If you’re not going to be a monk or a nun, then go and have a family instead’ – in other words, having a child is a shortcut to understanding selflessness.