The Yoga of Parenting
For over 25 years I have brought my Christian faith to my yoga practice and yoga practice to my Christian faith. As a new parent, I am now bringing both my Christian faith and my yoga practice to raising the sweetest little girl that was ever born. The question I pose to myself is, how can my Christian Yoga support my parenting? (I say “Christian Yoga” intentionally because, at this point in my life, my yoga practice and my Christian faith have become one.) My Christian Yoga is both a philosophy of living and an ensemble of spiritual practices which support unity in my life: unity within myself, unity between me and God, unity between me and others and unity between me and nature. All four of these dimensions of unity support my parenting.
Unity within myself
My Christian Yoga practices support unity within myself, which in turn, supports my parenting. When my body, mind and spirit are in harmony I feel more myself, clear minded, and present. When I feel like this, I engage my daughter with more empathy, understanding and support. In other words, when I feel good, I act good. This is the same lesson I endeavor to pass on to her. I can already see in her tiny being that when she feels good, she acts good.
Unity between me and God
My Christian Yoga practices support unity between myself and God. When I am close to God, I am close to my daughter who, only two short years ago, arrived on the earth, “trailing clouds of Glory,” freshly formed by the hands of the Creator and His breath still warm on her face.
As I maintain an active relationship with God through my Christian Yoga, I am ruled by heaven and not by my own will. This difference is what separates the line of Cain and line of Seth. Cain was ruled by his own will when he committed the first murder of his brother Abel. Seth retained the right relationship with God and was ruled by heaven. These two lines became what St. Augustine described as the City of God and the City of Men. I am free to choose to live in either. My Christian Yoga practice is both the route to the City of God and the discipline required to remain there.
“I can see my daughter where she is, in the Garden, walking with the Lord in the peacefulness of the morning. I see her from my place, outside the Garden, but I can still connect with her through the gate protecting her place in there for as long as possible. ”
My Christian Yoga mat practice includes a variety of postures and breathing exercises. These hatha yoga exercises help to remove the blockages within my own being that inhibit the flowing of grace into me. When my body, mind and spirit are aligned, grace flows more easily. When my mind, body and spirit are isolated from each other my mind tends to be filled with thoughts associated with the stressful circumstances of my life; my body tends to be filled with aches and pains; my spirit tends to retreat deep inside myself below the static and unrest in my mind and body. How then could the still, small voice of the Creator be heard in my heart? My mat practices quiet my mind and soothe my body. This is a peaceful psychosomatic environment where my spirit feels safe enough to come to the surface where it can, simultaneously, peer out into the world through the senses and listen to the depths of my heart where the voice of the Almighty is heard. When I hear the voice of God within myself, I am content with my life at a fundamental level.
From this place of personal contentment, without anxiety or worry, I am the best parent I can be. I can see my daughter where she is, in the Garden, walking with the Lord in the peacefulness of the morning. I see her from my place, outside the Garden, but I can still connect with her through the gate protecting her place in there for as long as possible.
The second pillar of my Christian Yoga practice is traditional prayer in the form of the Liturgy of the Hours. As a Benedictine Oblate, I am committed to prayer in this form. As a Christian Yogi, I know how to organize my body, mind and spirit and so to harmonize them as my soul opens itself to God in prayer. My body, mind and spirit are the bow, my soul is the arrow, God is my target. The arrow cannot fly without the bow and the bow does not fulfill its destiny if it does not fire the arrow.
My altar includes reminders of Rosie
Traditional Christian Prayer is based on the Psalms. The Psalms have been the prayer of the People of God since the ancient days of the Israelites, many centuries before Jesus. Jesus quoted the Psalms frequently and the disciples prayed them in the Temple at fixed hours of the day. To me the Psalms is the way that God empathizes with the entire spectrum of my human experience, from its lowest point of isolation to its highest point of praise. When I pray the Psalms I feel that God is aware of what I am experiencing, the essence of empathy. I do not feel that God sympathizes with me, feeling what I am feeling, but empathizes with me, sees what I am feeling. If I believed that God was feeling what I was feeling, I would feel less secure because God would himself need support for what he was feeling rather than being able to focus on me and see what I am feeling. I don’t need God to feel what I am feeling. I need God to be aware of what I am feeling. Jesus felt what I felt, not the Father. I go to Jesus for sympathy and to the Father for empathy. I need both and so does my daughter.
Because I receive empathy during my prayer practice I am able to give it to her. I can always count on the Father for empathy. I can’t always count on my fellow human beings for empathy, not even my therapist, who tends from time to time, to lose focus on what I am feeling and drifts into a focus on himself, or on trying to fix the challenging circumstances in my life, rather than simply letting me know that he is aware of my suffering. For me to provide empathy to my daughter I must receive it myself. I can only give what I have. I must have a steady source of empathy for myself if I wish to be a steady source of empathy for her. As I feel my experience reflected back to me in the Psalms she feels her experience reflected back to her from me. I know that I cannot solve the challenges she is already facing in her sweet little life. My role is to provide her with the support she needs to weather the inevitable storms in life that are already, unfortunately, causing her distress. Because I get my needs for empathy met from God and others I am free to pass it on to her. My hope is that she will then empathize with others because she will know how good it feels to receive it and she will want others to feel it too.
Unity Between me and Others
My Christian Yoga practices on the mat and on the prayer bench serve my relationships with others in specific ways. I retreat to my yoga mat and to my prayer bench only in order to re-engage with others and with the world more fully. Having been set at peace myself I am more capable of peaceful interactions with others. Having satisfied some basic needs of my body, mind and spirit I demand less from others. Having harmonized my being within myself and with God I interact with others in a more harmonious way.
Taking care of my own needs means I will not implicitly or explicitly ask my daughter to satisfy them. When an adult has their child satisfy their needs rather than the other way around, they enmesh the child. A child that takes care of their parents basic needs is enmeshed with that parent. An enmeshed child loses themselves because they are focusing on keeping a parent happy rather than focusing on satisfying their own needs for play, adventure, learning, and receiving support from a variety of adults and older children.
Unity between me and my daughter requires that we exist as individuals with integrity, or wholeness. I am me and she is she, two independent human beings, sharing the closest bond nature provides, parent and child. As her father I must protect her integrity/wholeness as an individual person separate from me and teach her how to protect and maintain it herself. As I satisfy many of my own needs through my Christian Yoga, I am able to focus on satisfying, in the ways only her father can, many of her needs.
Unity with Nature
My Christian Yoga is a lifestyle that keeps me connected with nature on a daily basis. At two-years old, my daughter is already following in my footsteps as we take nature walks, pick flowers, smell the juniper and piñon trees, watch the birds fly over head, tend to Rosie’s Garden, cook healthy food, cut flowers for the home altar, touch the bark of different trees, listen to the music of the wind chimes, look closely at bugs, and bring home an interesting rock or two from the trail. She is a child of nature that teaches me more about tuning into nature as I am teaching her. The Father learns from the daughter. She herself is the most precious part of nature I am now in relationship with. As a human being, she is the crown of God’s creation. As an innocent child she is still Eve without a care in the world, enjoying the Garden, simply allowing her soft body to love what it loves.
My Yoga, my Christian Yoga, is all about unity, and the most important person in my life right now for me to be united to is my two-year old daughter. Our birthdays are five days apart, mine June 3rd and hers June 8th. Father’s Day is a June celebration. She and I have a lot to celebrate in June. We will celebrate the gift of our individual lives and our lives together. We will move ahead into a new year of life together, her third year and my forty-seventh. She is embarking on her first half of life and I on the second half of mine. She will acquire new knowledge and I will refine mine. She will orient towards this world and I to the next.
“Your child is not your own. She came through you, not from you.”
As Rilke would say to me, ‘your child is not your own. She came through you, not from you.’ He is right. No, she is not my own, no matter how much I want to hold on to her. It is not only her mother that birthed her into the world. I, too, carry her within myself. I too, must labor in pain as I push her out of the womb of my heart. I know there will be a series of birthings as she moves further and further away from my nest and into the wild world.
Ooh baby baby, it's a wild world
It's hard to get by just upon a smile
Ooh baby baby, it's a wild world
I'll always remember you like a child, girl
You know I've seen a lot of what the world can do
And it's breaking my heart in two
Because I never want to see you sad girl
Don't be a bad girl
—Yusus Islam
A Father’s Prayer
This is my prayer for you, my dearest one. The sweetest and cutest little girl in the world.
Heavenly Father, I ask your blessing on Rosie this day.
May she live and move and have her being in your goodness, your truth and your beauty and most of all in your love.
May she live in fellowship with people of good will and extend her hand in charity.
Amen, Amen
