The Headspace Guide To … A Mindful Pregnancy (8 page)

In becoming parents, we are forced to let go of so many things, including ‘doing what I want, when I want and how I want’. In releasing this type of thinking, we begin to embrace selflessness, even if somewhat reluctantly at first. One of the teachers who worked a lot with lay people in the community said he continually noticed that individuals often struggled with selflessness, even when married. But when couples had children, more often than not, they let go in a positive way as they discovered a natural sense of concern for others.

I doubt there are many periods in life other than the nine months of pregnancy when you are both solely dedicated to the same outcome: the arrival of a happy, healthy baby. In that time, there is a golden opportunity to work together and look through the same lens. View it a bit like running a marathon together – if you put in the proper amount of training and give the support to one another, the joy at the finish line will be immeasurable, and that much more so because it is shared.

Again, mindfulness embraces the idea of ‘us’ which, in this case, can be the family unit, or simply oneself and the baby. It’s an important part of the practice to stop thinking in terms of ‘me’; that narrower perspective is very isolating, whereas, if we start thinking about ‘us’, we are moving through the experience as one, as a team, being kinder to both ourselves and those around us.

One thing is guaranteed from the moment of conception: the baby will know nothing – and won’t care – about the colourful wardrobe you’ve bought for him or her, or the newly decorated nursery. The trappings and luxuries of the home environment are incidental. While mother and partner can communicate with each other, we cannot know what our babies go through at first, but it’s worth trying to imagine what their perspective might be.

He or she has been cocooned within the cosy, cushioned walls of the uterus, and it probably felt as soothing and familiar as the beat of the mother’s heart, detected from the inside, pulsing through the body. Then, suddenly, with a nervous system still raw and developing, and with eyes unused to the light, they are pushed out and thrust into the maelstrom of the external world; their wriggling arms and legs no longer feel the safety of the padded walls that protected them and everything sounds so loud. What a brutal assault on the senses that must be, and how stressful on their little heads and bodies to be squeezed through the birth canal.

Long before childbirth, your baby is tuning into you. Neurologically, at thirty-two weeks of gestation, the foetus behaves almost exactly as a newborn. Babies are born with distinct differences and activity temperaments ‘because their individuality and personality traits originate in the womb’, according to scientists at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, who have conducted numerous studies on foetal psychology. Indeed, the roots of human behaviour are established just weeks after conception when the brain cortex starts to develop.

Of course, the foetus spends much of its daily life sleeping, but scientists speculate that our sons and daughters dream about what they know, informed by the sensations experienced in the womb. As a mother, you may well have spent the nine months of pregnancy getting a sense of who your baby is – women I know say there was something ‘familiar’ about their child when born – but in terms of personality, character and temperament, we still need to get to know them.

Within this getting-to-know-you context, the baby is really an extension of oneself when in utero. In the same way you have to be conscious of what you eat during pregnancy, you equally need to be aware of how your mind behaves. For, if we are not looking after our own body and mind, we are not looking after the baby’s.

Just imagine if your baby didn’t become overly familiar with the stress response.

That’s not to suggest that you won’t feel stress
– there’s no avoiding it when pregnant – but you can become less agitated, less anxious and less overwhelmed, meaning the periods of calm will outweigh the moments of stress. Moreover, with your focus on the internal miracle growing week by week, your child will be largely imbued with calm. What an amazing predisposition with which to enter the world.

Our journey actually begins the moment we start trying for a baby.

For some couples, the ‘trying’ doesn’t last long: the woman conceives at the first or second attempt and all the lights turn green. For others though, not everything falls into place quite so easily, leading to frustration, heartache and despair. A diagnosis of infertility can, for many women, feel like the end of the world, as they are unable to contemplate a life without children.

I don’t think anyone who wants a family starts out thinking it will be remotely difficult. After years of taking precautions, experimenting with different types of contraception and having endured lectures from teachers at school and parents at home about the risks of getting pregnant, it can seem almost nonsensical that the result of engaging in unprotected sex could be anything other than a stork swooping down from the skies.

The phrase ‘trying for a baby’ is so loaded. It suggests effort, expectation, and the idea of a goal or result. It also hints at the concept of success and failure. But what if no amount of trying produces a result? How do we begin to process that, let alone embrace it?

In researching this book, I was astonished to discover how many couples struggle to conceive at first, and just how many pregnancies end in miscarriage. But while it can be an incredibly isolating time, and it may well seem as though everyone else but you is getting pregnant, you are truly not alone.

Experiences such as this one, from a woman in her thirties, are common:

My husband and I decided to make a baby and couldn’t have been more thrilled. I had this dream that it would be a magical, wonderful experience – that it would be as easy as a baby falling from the sky into my lap. I was crestfallen when I still wasn’t pregnant six months later.

It is difficult to imagine another time in life when that voice of how we think life
should
be, can be so at odds and so much in conflict with life
as it is
.

Let’s go back to that very first idea of mindfulness: it cannot necessarily change what happens to us, but it can fundamentally transform how we experience it. Yes, there are steps we can take to promote a more fertile environment and increase the possibility of conception, extending all the way through to multiple rounds of IVF and even surrogacy. Beyond that though, it seems we are at the mercy of nature. But wait, that suggests we are separate from nature – that it has control over us. It does not. We are part of nature, we
are
nature; there is no separation and the journey we’re on is part of something so much bigger.

Early in 2013, I had the opportunity to meet a number of couples going through fertility treatment. I had just been diagnosed with testicular cancer, losing one of my crown jewels in the process. Cancer is another one of those life events that accentuates just how little control we have over this precious human life, and I remember the prognosis just as vividly as the diagnosis. As I sat with Lucinda in a doctor’s office and he outlined the surgery, the weight of the news fell heavily on us both. When he described the operation, I squeezed my wife’s hand a little tighter; when he discussed our future fertility, she squeezed mine that little bit harder. Our best hope, it seemed at the time, was in making a deposit at the local sperm bank because the chemotherapy that would follow the operation could quite possibly leave me infertile. This all happened just one month after Lucinda and I had decided we would like to ‘try for a baby’.

I cannot even pretend to imagine what it must be like for couples who try for years and are unable to conceive. In the end, we were fortunate enough to have a beautiful baby boy, but, in those first few months of cancer, I felt as though I had a small insight, perhaps a faint glimmer, of what life might look like without the prospect of children, or at the very least, needing to explore more unorthodox avenues of conception. It can be a lonely, frightening, disconcerting place to be.

During that time of uncertainty, I continually came back to the four foundations: reflecting on the delicate nature of this rare and precious human life; the speed of impermanence – our desire to hold on to the past or reach out to the future, rather than be present with each passing moment; the law of cause and effect and the realisation we were creating the conditions for our future in each and every moment, that the journey itself was the goal; and, of course, reflecting on suffering – the pain of things being different from how we want them to be. I am not suggesting that laying down that resistance and moving gently towards acceptance was easy, or that as a couple we always did it with grace, but mindfulness gave us strength, a sense of perspective and peace.

Few things in life keep us so far removed from the present moment than the qualities of hope and fear. Like two sides of one coin, they oscillate in the mind, encouraging us to gaze into the future, to turn our attention away from now. I remember one monastery where they had a sign above the entrance: ‘Abandon hope all who enter here.’ At first glance, abandoning hope can sound negative, defeatist, even outrageous. We may feel sad, angry, anxious or indignant at the very suggestion. But if we can look behind the idea we can start to see how this thinking can potentially set us free.

When we talk about hope and fear, we are really talking about expectation. We are anticipating (with bias) how we would like things to turn out. This is a natural human tendency. In hoping things turn out one way, we are at the same time fearing a different outcome, and vice versa. In life, quite understandably, we tend to hope that we can hold on to what health and happiness we have while simultaneously being fearful of losing it. This attachment to the ‘good stuff’ and fear of the ‘bad stuff’ keeps the mind active and restless, as if in a constant tug of war. I’m not suggesting we should have no dreams, ambitions or goals – having a family being one of them – but instead we can learn to differentiate between ‘expectation’ which hurts us, and ‘intention’ which helps us.

Hope focuses on the goal. Happiness is dependent on reaching that goal, rather than the journey itself. Intention, on the other hand, is about setting out on a journey and choosing the direction. We know where we would like to go, but we understand that our happiness is felt in each step, not in some final destination.

When it comes to getting pregnant, more often than not, it can feel as though our entire life, our future happiness, is dependent on having a child. The desire can sometimes feel so intense that it eclipses everything else of value. The only thing that matters – the only thing the mind fixates on – is getting pregnant. In such circumstances, our actions tend to become more reactive the closer we get to that which we fear, or the further away we move from that for which we hope. We tend to panic.

The contrast when we set an intention is stark: we keep up a steady pace, responsive to new circumstances and changing conditions, not unlike an elephant in nature: strong, steady, purposeful, just putting one foot in front of the next, not reacting to every little thing. If we consider how this applies to trying for a baby, we can see how it might influence the journey.

The doctors I’ve spoken to in researching this book say that if nothing happens in the first year, that’s normal – it can frequently take couples twelve months to conceive naturally. If we keep that in mind, we will continue to live life, hopefully as healthily and happily as we always have, knowing that there is no rush, and relaxed in the knowledge that we are free from expectation. It is just one step after the next.

However, if we choose to ignore it, we may well find ourselves getting increasingly tense as we start marking up the calendar, glancing at our watches, scouring the internet for answers or dragging our partners out of work in the middle of the day to catch the optimum time for ovulation. While this is understandable in the circumstances, there is a vast difference between checking and doing things mindfully, with consideration, and doing them obsessively

As the mother in her thirties told me:

It’s a vicious circle. Once six months have passed, the worries start to build, to the point that it was all I could think about. The more time that goes on, the more you try to keep a lid on things, and a smile on your face, but the pressure is hard to escape. Sex became exhausting, not only because it became more of a hop-on, hop-off routine, but because it increasingly started to feel hopeless with each passing month. And then, to make matters worse, you see friends getting pregnant and you are so happy for them, but that joy is tinged with that horrible thought,
Why you and not me?

Mindfulness brings a perspective that allows us to dial things back a bit, meaning we’re not swept up in the ‘We need, we need, we need to get pregnant’. Anxious thoughts will always be there – how can they not be? – but we can get comfortable with them, releasing the tension in the very best interests of creating an environment conducive to getting pregnant.

If you think back to Chapter 2 and that idea of how best to approach meditation, it could just as easily have been written about fertility. We cannot force a state of relaxation, so the harder we try to relax, the more tense we become. Such is the complicated mind.

If we apply this to trying to get pregnant, we quickly see that excessive focus and effort can easily tip over into something more harmful, creating stress which actually further reduces our chances of conception. So, if we are going to do this, we need to know how best to go about it. The short answer is that it is less about ‘doing’ and more about ‘being’. The intention is to create the conditions for a calm and happy mind, and a relaxed and more receptive body. You’ll find a specific exercise that will help you with this on pp. 194–6.