For my children
Sacha and Anouska Rose,
With love and blessings.
Thank you for choosing us.

Close your eyes and you will see clearly.
Cease to listen and you will hear truth.
Be silent and your heart will sing.
Seek no contacts and you will find union.
Be still and you will move forward on the tide of the spirit.
Be gentle and you will need no strength.
Be patient and you will achieve all things.
Be humble and you will remain entire.
Taoist poem

CONTENTS

Introduction: Awakening Motherhood with Mindfulness

Stepping into Pregnancy

Getting to Know Your Pregnant Self

Connecting to Your Unborn Baby

Getting Ready for Childbirth

Opening Your Spirit to Childbirth

Swimming Down the River of Childbirth

Arriving Out on the Other Side

Growing into Conscious Mothering

Opening Up a Mother’s Mind

Affirmations of Motherhood

Coming Home to Your Baby

Building Mothering Bridges

Maternal Love

Starting with You

Relationships at Home

Ancestral Roots

The Rest of the Family

Letting in the Outside World

A Working or Home Decision

A Mother’s Life Purpose

Life Blessings

The Tree of Motherhood

Epilogue: Cycles of Change

Bibliography

Further Reading

INTRODUCTION

AWAKENING MOTHERHOOD WITH MINDFULNESS

‘Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think.’

Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada

Motherhood is one of the most immense and life-changing events that can occur in a woman’s life. When you give birth, you create a new life, that of your child, and your own as a mother. You start an epic journey of self-discovery and growth that can transform your entire sense of self and identity, not just now, but throughout the rest of your life.

The birth of a child is a profound rite of passage with immense potential to bring infinite joy, delight and enchantment in its wake. Your relationship with your unborn child may be one of the greatest love affairs that you ever have, stretching across decades of your life. It doesn’t matter whether you planned this pregnancy, are taken by surprise, or have walked the path of motherhood before. The magical alchemy of maternal love is one of the most wonderful surprises of becoming a mother – a living, breathing gift nourished and renewed by daily contact and nurture between you and your child.

Yet at the same time as falling in love with your child, you are also cast into the role of full-time guardian, with around-the-clock responsibility for meeting their needs and demands both day and night. As you move through pregnancy into this unknown territory of looking after babies and small children, your entire life can feel as though it has been tossed up into the air, leaving you to catch all the different pieces as they fall down. Except that they no longer seem to fit back into the same place as they did before. And you are left, trying to juggle and keep your new life afloat, while feeling consumed by your new maternal role.

As a new mother, you are making massive physical and emotional adjustments to smoothly integrate your baby into your life, while coping with greater levels of tiredness, stress and exhaustion than you have possibly ever felt before. Simple activities such as having a bath, making a phone call, eating supper, sleeping, or chatting with friends are constantly interrupted, seldom reaching a satisfying conclusion. You don’t have much time to do anything else apart from look after your baby; whose contentedness often seems to remain outside your immediate control.

As mothers, we instinctively want the best for our children, to give them a happy and stimulating childhood. At the same time, we also hope to find individual fulfilment through the experience of raising a child. Yes, there will be moments of domestic bliss and harmony when these two ideals coincide. Moments when our children smoothly fit into our internal expectations of how we want family life to be. Just not all of the time! So while it goes without saying, that we adore these little people who share our life, it’s also true to say that it’s not always easy living alongside them. The abrupt reality of giving up autonomy and independence to provide childcare around the clock comes as an immense shock to many of us, often provoking internal conflict and resistance.

So however much you love your baby, they can also seem to destroy your sanity and peace of mind, without doing very much except to open their mouth to remind you they are there. The push and pull of nurture is the fundamental paradox of motherhood. Yet it’s easy to forget this, when struggling to keep up with the treadmill of meeting your newborn baby’s needs and demands. The relentless nature of looking after a small infant can easily deconstruct your sense of having a normal, functioning adult life. And you may find yourself reacting to anything and everything with frustration, angst, anger and irritability, weepiness and despair. There are times – hours, days, even weeks – when you almost want to turn the clock back to a time before babies were invented!

We so want to make our mothering life calm and upbeat, yet we still manage to collide with countless flash points of stress and tension, often making ourselves, and those around us extremely unhappy in the process. We know that we aren’t doing anyone any favours, let alone ourselves, when we forget how to be relaxed and content. Yet it can feel impossible not to feel disappointed, fed up and out of control in the aftermath of this immense life upheaval. There are times when being a mother tests our emotional endurance to breaking point. And we suddenly find our negative emotions are oozing out all over the nursery. And this happens despite our crystal-clear picture of the positive and joyful maternal life that we wish to have.

And so we may sometimes feel that we are barely surviving, and definitely not enjoying ourselves as much as we might like. We hope and expect to have an uplifting experience of motherhood, yet feel unable to notice or appreciate, let alone celebrate the wonder and magic of what is happening in front of our eyes, as we struggle to make our new maternal role comfortably fit into our adult lives.

Yet your individual transition into motherhood holds the seeds of genuine spiritual transformation and growth in its wake. The daily experience of being a mother can become a conscious practice of mindfulness, as we start to explore our living relationships with our children, partners and others, and most of all with ourselves. Who is this inner voice of self, engaging our attention in constant mental dialogue; and how can we find our way to a place of inner stillness and peace? How can we get our mind to work with us, rather than against us? And what is our heart saying to us when we stop and listen?

When we become receptive to exploring our innermost nature, we start to uncover a heart spring of love, wisdom and truth flowing inside us. This is always there, yet can remain buried beneath internal conflict, suffering and tension. When we step onto the path of conscious mothering, our life energy starts to move more easily, and we can see and appreciate who and what we are. With all our imperfections, sorrows and joys. Motherhood and family life becomes a spiritual backdrop against which we can get to know and understand ourselves, and grow, through the simple act of being with our children.

At the same time, our children learn so much about themselves, in the reflection of our life within their own. They witness the world in our relationships with them, and with our partner, friends and family. So it follows that when we feel harmonious, whole and in touch with our higher wisdom and truth, we are more ready and able to guide our children. It is therefore up to you to sow the seeds of your physical, emotional and spiritual awakening into your daily mothering experience.

Mothering can be a daily act of inspiration and grace. We can use daily family life as an emotional catalyst, empowering us to find and cultivate new depths of love and compassion, self-awareness, forgiveness, courage, altruism, self-acceptance, affirmation and resilience.

To become a mother with mindfulness is to celebrate your life. To transform it into a living affirmation, as you accept and embrace whom you truly are, by learning to survive and blossom through the incredible, yet chaotic and often tedious, daily rhythm of life with babies and small children. Having a child now becomes a beautiful and profound rite of passage of awakening consciousness, through the everyday experience of mothering life.

This is about you: your inner journey of spiritual growth and development, as you understand and become the mother you truly want to be to your child.

STEPPING INTO PREGNANCY

‘The journey of one thousand miles begins with one step.’

Lao Tzu

Pregnancy is a miracle of life and new beginnings. When you discover that you are pregnant, you open an unknown door inside you. Stepping across its threshold, you begin to move into a new chapter of life, as your mind and body starts to grow and change to make space for the unborn baby developing inside your womb. Each day draws you closer to the moment when you will give birth to this child, letting go of your old sense of self and identity to be reborn as a mother.

Yet this passage of nine months is so much more than time spent waiting for your baby to be born. It is the start of your own unique journey into motherhood; a natural breathing space in which to consciously prepare yourself for the profound changes that the birth of a child will bring into your life. Your pregnancy is a wonderful opportunity to slow down, reconnect to yourself and reappraise, appreciate and celebrate your life as you live it.

So where are you at right now?

The first thing to get your head around is that you actually are pregnant! This may sound obvious, but when you are still staring at the blue line on your home pregnancy testing kit, you may struggle to accept that this really is happening to you. Until your body shows visible signs of another life existing inside your womb, you may wonder whether you read the test instructions back to front, or imagined the whole thing, because surely you can’t be pregnant. Except that you are of course!

To become pregnant is immense, groundbreaking news that may feel wonderful and terrifying in equal measures. Since that moment of conception when a certain sperm met the fertile egg inside your uterus, your body is now switched onto pregnancy autopilot that will continue until you give birth. Your body is operating on a massive program of physiological adjustment to support the healthy growth and birth of the foetus developing inside your womb. And your mind and body may react to this new state of affairs in ways you just don’t recognize. Your life reduced to trying to cope with alternate waves of intense nausea and cravings on a rollercoaster of changing emotions.

So while you officially know that you are pregnant in theory, you can only guess at the huge impact and upheaval that this fact will have in defining and influencing the rest of your life. You may insist that your offspring will seamlessly morph into your current lifestyle, like a natural offshoot of your existing limbs. Yet you can sense how your unborn child’s presence, (even if they are still only of microscopic proportions) is already shifting your entire perspective of what really matters and is important to you.

Your body knows exactly what needs to be done to grow a baby, and is busy getting on with doing this. Yet while your heart may willingly expand into this new realm of babies, your mind may flatly refuse to follow or accept your new status quo as a mother-to-be. So you are pregnant. But how can you help yourself to enjoy and connect to your first steps of the unique rite of passage into motherhood.

Allowing your mind to catch up

Your pregnancy is a monumental landmark in your life. You will experience moments of sheer joy, peace and bliss during the next nine months as you develop deep bonds of love and empathy for your unborn child. However, you may be surprised, confused and upset to find out you are also feeling a certain amount of internal conflict and resistance about becoming a mother. You expect and want to feel delight, excitement and elation about having a baby. Yet alongside these uplifting emotions are more complex feelings of shock, stress, anger, doubt, fear and anxiety at the imminent prospect of disruption to your life, as you now know it.

You might think you should ignore any misgivings you feel about having a child, now that you are pregnant. So you resolve to only think ‘happy’ thoughts and hope that your baby won’t notice any wayward bubbles of maternal reluctance floating around your placenta. Yet you will never be able to totally convince yourself that your troublesome thoughts and emotions don’t exist, however hard you try to be resolutely positive. If they do, they do! And you won’t be able to shoo them away with the sheer force of your willpower and effort alone.

You may truly feel ‘help!’ this really isn’t a great time to bring a child into your life due to financial pressures, career development, lifestyle choices, or concern at a rising world population. You may doubt your innate maternal aptitude and would rather not put this to the living test, at least not for another few years or so. You could easily fill a book of doomsday proportions with all the perfectly valid reasons about why you, of all people, really shouldn’t become a parent right now.

Of course, we would all like to have flawless maternal instincts, yet we won’t conjure these up by simply ignoring our inner conflict about this new combination-to-be of babies, parenthood and ourselves. You are not going to be a dreadful mother just because you are brave enough to acknowledge your mental reluctance. The opposite! You are developing genuine strength, honesty and courage when you learn to face, accept and resolve where your maternal resistance lies.

So although you may be genuinely delighted to be having a baby on some levels, you also want other aspects of your life to continue as they are. This is perfectly normal! Most people would have some misgivings, if they got a letter from a stork, informing them that a newborn baby was due to be delivered to their doorstep in nine months. Just because this baby happens to be gestating inside your belly doesn’t make it any easier to get your head around the concept.

It will take time to assimilate the reality that you are pregnant, especially if you didn’t plan to contact the stork’s order line in the near future. And it makes sense to confront and resolve any central dilemmas that you have about new motherhood right now, rather than waiting until you are in the midst of labour!

Self-acceptance

This is an opportune time for you to be pregnant and become a mother. If only for one simple reason: that it is happening to you right now. Sure you might have tried to stack the odds to make the arrival of babies more or less likely to occur. Yet new life still arises or doesn’t for undecipherable reasons. You cannot decide exactly when the sun shines and plants grow. So too, you can’t control the flow of universal consciousness. All you can do is trust in life unfolding as it is.

Our individual wishes will never wholly determine what occurs to us, and when this happens – especially when it comes to the birth of babies. As seen in the heartbreaking experiences of many women who struggle to conceive naturally, the cycle of birth and death is something that lies outside our immediate control. So once you decide to continue with your pregnancy and see things through to your due date, accept your unborn child’s precious life for what it is: A gift of the universe.

The starting point of your new maternal role is to accept responsibility for a human life, other than your own. Your unborn baby is utterly dependent upon you, and will continue to be so for many years to come. And at some point, you will have to come to terms with this simple truth. This may take time and practice. So don’t worry if you haven’t become a saintly mothering icon of selflessness overnight. This will not be the last time that you fight aspects of yourself as a mother. Or wonder if you even want a child over the next 18 years and beyond – however much you also love them!

Adapting to your body’s changes

As the firsthand witness of your pregnancy, you will already be intimately aware of the internal changes taking place inside your body. You are the only person in the entire world who can truly appreciate and savour the signs of new life fluttering in your growing belly. You also have to cope firsthand with the not-so-enticing physical side-effects of pregnancy; morning sickness, varicose veins and heartburn hardly being life experiences to get too excited about!

At the start of the first trimester, your mind and body takes giant internal leaps forward to become your baby’s home for the next nine months. Your moods may seem to rise and fall on a tidal wave of emotions, as your mind tries to keep up with the additional physical demands being made upon your body. Your hormone levels are also rocketing up, which doesn’t help the cause of emotional equilibrium. So don’t be surprised if your mind keeps dragging you off on a deranged loop-the-loop spiral through the entire spectrum of your emotions.

However, sooner or later, major headlines settle down to become a new normality. You will acclimatize and hopefully radiate out a golden glow of pregnant health and wellbeing. You start to recognize yourself again inside the new outward curve of your profile. And you regain the energy, balance and humour that you may have temporarily misplaced during the first months of pregnancy mayhem. This is great news, especially if you have been searching for your emotional sanity along with the discarded results of your pregnancy home-testing kit in the wastepaper basket for the last few weeks.

Soon you will be well on the way toward your second trimester and the date of your first scan appointment at the hospital. You no longer collapse in shock or hysteria each time somebody mentions your pregnancy. Even though you may secretly wonder if you will ever be truly ready to become a proper grown-up mother. This more settled middle phase tends to continue until you are well into your final trimester, counting down the weeks, instead of months until your due date. Your baby will then start to grow more rapidly in preparation for birth, and your body literally has to rise to the occasion, expanding outward to take the extra weight.

As you reach the home stretch of your last three months, you may experience new sources of discomfort such as acute fatigue, anaemia, heartburn, disturbed sleep patterns, high blood pressure and leg cramps, to mention but a few. Your moods may swing between polar opposites: happiness and anticipation at meeting your child, along with growing unease at the unavoidable process of labour and childbirth looming ahead of you.

Many women worry about how they are going to cope with giving birth to a baby, and start to imagine worst-case scenarios. You may be a lucky carefree woman, and sail peacefully through the final months of your pregnancy like a beautiful curvaceous boat steaming toward harbor. However, if your mind is wobbling, remember that your body knows how to do this, without needing an instruction manual. So all you can do is support, reassure and strengthen both your mind and body to enjoy and engage with your experience of it, as best as you can.

Moving forward in your pregnancy

As your pregnancy progresses, you will travel far beyond the old edges of your previous comfort zone. You are moving into an unfamiliar landscape, which can feel a long way from the place where you once were. And this gives you a choice. You can sit and wait complacently for things to return to your old definition of normal, which is never going to happen. Alternatively, you can take your first steps on a parallel inner journey of conscious growth, as you get to know the woman you are now, and the mother you will become.

It is so important to enjoy being pregnant as you live through this reality. And nobody else can do this apart from you! When you wake up to the daily miracle of your life, you flourish and blossom in the truth of ‘what is’, as your unborn child grows inside you. It is your birthright, along with that of your unborn child’s. Your individual experience of growing, birthing and nurturing a baby may well turn out to be wildly different from how you imagined it would be, yet you can always seek out and create inner beauty, vitality and joy from whatever passes through it.

Finding your Breath

Your breath is the vehicle of universal life force or Prana, making the bare flesh and bones of your body dance with conscious life. With each breath, your life energy flows, your stream of consciousness shifts, and your thoughts and emotions change, moving from one impulse to another. As long as you breathe, you are alive. So the quality of your breath is the living barometer of your life force, and has the direct capacity to express and influence your health and wellbeing. This is the healing power of breath.

Now that you are pregnant, your baby is held within the soothing and energetic rhythm of your breath tone. When you breathe deeply, you are bathing yourself and your baby in a sea of fresh oxygen and nourishment. Your breath enables your internal organs to metabolize more effectively, removing the waste products of respiration and metabolic activity from your body. When you inhale, your ribcage rises, creating more space inside your abdomen. When you exhale, you release tension, drawing your awareness back down to earth.

As your pregnancy progresses, listen carefully to your breath tone. You may notice that you sometimes struggle with shallowness and shortness of breath. There is literally less surface area available in your lungs, due to your enlarging uterus pressing up against your diaphragm. Your body will tell you when you need to slow down and relax by how much huffing and puffing you are having to do to breathe easily and freely.

Crossing the bridge of breath

Our breath can draw the mind and body into a state of equilibrium and balance. When we are aware of our breath, our conscious mind connects to the physical flow of life inside us. Our mind and body quiets down into tranquility, and our breath lengthens and slows down into a relaxed and peaceful rhythm. On the other hand, when we are stressed or agitated, our breath quickens and becomes shallow as the body tenses. Wherever our breath goes, the mind and body will follow. So when we control the quality of our breath tone, we literally influence the state of our mind and body.

If you churn up a pond of clear water, it quickly becomes cloudy and obscure, so you can’t easily see down to the bottom. So too, when we agitate the surface layers of the mind with unpleasant thoughts and emotions, we become unable to perceive things as they actually are. We no longer notice anything except the ripples of disturbance spreading out across our life. In becoming more conscious of our breath, our mind naturally becomes still – like a pool of water that reflects what lies deep beneath the surface. We observe the sensation of breath moving in and out of the body, and the mind has little choice but to settle down into a state of clarity, focus and absorption.

We can piece the scattered pieces of our mental energy together like a jigsaw puzzle to reveal infinite lucidity and stillness inside us. Sure, it might take us a few weeks, or even months, to focus clearly on what lies beneath the surface, but sooner or later we will find a more complete picture of what this is. We are coming home to rest in the true nature of mind.

GETTING TO KNOW YOUR PREGNANT SELF

‘Your joy is your sorrow unmasked . . . When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.’

Kahlil Gibran

When you are a child, you instinctively know how to find spontaneous joy and delight through discovering the world around you. Yet as we grow up, our lives become more complex and convoluted. Our natural curiosity slowly suffocates under the weight of adult anxieties, judgment and insecurities. And before we know it, we are limiting ourselves within a straitjacket of attitudes, opinions, beliefs and dogma that dictate and influence our life’s purpose.

Except that now, you are pregnant! Your body is working overtime to grow and birth a baby, and your intuitive wisdom knows this is different from your normal expectations of your adult life. Your rhythm of life is changing before your eyes, and confirmed by your softly expanding belly. And this miracle of pregnancy and birth creates a glorious possibility to start afresh and reconnect with all that life can offer you. Your mind and heart are starting to wake up from a deep sleep of complacency to rediscover the world again through the fresh perspective of motherhood.

Understanding the person we are

We wake up each day, often repeating the same old patterns and cycles of thought and behaviour over and over again. We build up a fragile sense of identity, like a tower of playing cards that could easily topple down with the slightest push. We cling onto the illusion that our personality is something solid that we fix onto us. That this is the way we are, take it or leave it. It helps us to feel more safe and secure, as we navigate our way through an increasingly unpredictable and uncertain world.

Yet we frequently lose our grasp over the control panel in our lives. We try to protect ourselves from the true nature of our human vulnerability by keeping it buried deep inside our hearts. We would prefer to act on autopilot, like a puppet attached to the strings of our habits, rather than admit that we often don’t know. In fact we may not have a clue, and aren’t always right.

The dense tapestry of our subconscious mind influences what happens to us, often before this even comes to pass. This natural law of cause and effect is what the ancient yogic texts call Samskara. We scatter the seeds of intention within our thoughts and emotions, and we harvest the chain of reaction that follows.

In the meantime, we keep on trying to change aspects about ourselves that we dislike; we honestly and truly do. Yet we still keep behaving like an idiot, acting in ways we really don’t mean or want to do. We may notice that we are negative or critical, yet struggle to improve certain facets of our relationships with friends or family. There often seems to be precious little that we can do to stop our emotions from taking us off guard, and slamming back into us. Our mental conditioning creates spirals of suffering that we are seemingly unable to fix or change. So while we resolve to make our lives more positive, we keep coming up against ourselves, in spite of our best efforts and intentions. We live as a virtual prisoner trapped inside the hardened shell of our ego; a mechanical human robot set on a repeat program of behaviour in action.

How the mind weaves thoughts

It may surprise you to notice just how random the mind is. Especially when left to its own devices. Thoughts and emotions flow from one sensory impulse to another in a stream of flowing consciousness, known as the Vrittis in yogic texts. We receive a mass of data from the world around us, every second that we are alive and exist through our senses. Our mind attempts to organize this jumble of sensory stimuli into some sort of order, largely by filing everything to fit into a self-constructed concept of ‘I’ and ‘me.’ That is to say, we relate everything back to ourselves.

Our mind chases after our shifting thoughts and emotions, as if they were something solid and definite, that makes us into us. That would give us a clearly defined outline of personality. If only this was as real and tangible, as we would like it to be. We identify strongly with our individual notion of ‘I-am-ness’ (known as Asmita) to reassure ourselves that we are valid, distinct and do have a reason to exist. So we live inside our ego’s limited perspective, fuelled by this hard drive of buried mental patterns and habits. This generates what yogic texts call Karma – the wheel of cause and effect. The natural law of Karma is neither good nor bad; it all depends on what we choose to manifest in our present, which sets the scene for what will follow us into the future. We become what we think as we take our thoughts out into the world around us.

Understanding the fight-or-flight response

Most pregnant women agree that their main priority during these nine months is to relax, nourish and nurture themselves, so that they and their baby are cohabiting in a state of optimum health and wellbeing. Yet our stress levels often seem to rise to the contrary during this time, as we turn our lives inside out in preparation for motherhood.

As hunter-gatherers, we successfully overcame the primordial threat of extinction in the natural world around us. We have survived as a species, largely due to our ability to survive dangerous and life-threatening situations through the course of evolution. So when we are placed under stress, our bodies still try to maximize our chances of physical survival, even if this is not strictly necessary.

In modern life, we seldom have reason to hunt for supper. We don’t regard ourselves as something to be eaten, and reach for the refrigerator door when we’re hungry, and we only tend to see dangerous animals when we visit the zoo. So we rarely have to face genuine life-or-death situations, and have little real need to live on the edge of adrenalin.

Yet the modern brain remains as ready as it ever was, to react to even mildly unpleasant circumstances with a fight-or-flight response. It doesn’t matter whether we are facing a genuine threat or not. Our mind shouts ‘stress,’ and our pituitary gland automatically sends chemical messages to our adrenal glands, releasing stress hormones so we are ready to fight or flee from the potential aggressor. Even if this is only a friendly spider waving its legs at us in the bathtub!

Living in tension

We can easily start to believe that we are under constant threat of attack from a hostile world out to get us. And soon, we exist in a habitual state of unresolved tension. We tread an uneasy line between our attack or defense mode, and our adrenal reflex silently feeds off our life force like a parasite. We suppress our body’s natural state of homeostasis and weaken our vitality, which can manifest in chronic health problems, such as high blood pressure, low immunity, nervous exhaustion and physical burnout. We can become so preoccupied with the negative symptoms of stress – anxiety, fear, uneasiness, anger, fatigue and restlessness – that we fail to look up or notice that there is often no enemy, except the one we create inside ourselves.

Our mind easily forgets that it doesn’t have to operate in stress mode. And there is absolutely no justification for reacting as if the world were about to collapse on our shoulders, when it clearly isn’t going to do so. We don’t have to cast ourselves as Rumpelstiltskin in our personal life drama, hopping up and down with expert frustration, just because things don’t always turn out exactly as we might like. Neither become adept at acting the victim, beating ourselves up for our imperfections.

Redefining stress

We have a choice: We either get stressed, or not. While we may never remove all of life’s difficulties, we can decide how we cope with what is thrown at us. We alone are responsible for ourselves, and for maintaining a positive equilibrium in our lives, regardless of what anyone else says or does to us.

Sure, you may need to make all sorts of important decisions as you contemplate parenthood concerning your career, work, financial security, living arrangements, childcare, friends and extended family’s involvement in your life. You may struggle to rearrange the complexities of life around your pregnancy and the prospect of having children, especially when you’ve previously taken it all for granted as being just so. What matters is that you are open and honest about the difficulties that seem to arise when you explore the sticking points of motherhood. These are genuine concerns, regardless of how trivial, irrational, or just plain mad they seem to be. And now is a time to do something about them. They will then have less power to bother you later on, after giving birth, when you all want to do is nurture your baby in peace, without distractions.

You are being given an amazing opportunity to turn your life inside out, upside down, and mould it into a shape that you want it to be. Your life is truly precious, and will feel the more so, when you open it up and share it with a child. So use the time you have now, to understand what you are choosing to fill it up with. As you voice your worries, fears and anxieties, you dissolve their latent power to hold you in the past, which might otherwise suffocate your power, resolve and motivation to act now. You start to open your heart to face yourself honestly, to see the root causes of stress as they are: something that you don’t want or need to include in your mothering plan. Life is already complicated enough, without adding more unnecessary difficulties to carry in it.

Create a mental picture in which you are coping and thriving in a stressful situation. Now take another step forward to believe in and manifest these positive qualities in your life. Only you can give yourself permission to enjoy your pregnancy as it is happens. Alas, you may never remove all of the root causes of tension in your life; in-laws and work may never go away! But you can create an internal toolbox of antidotes to give you enough resilience and coping strategies. This might include a new career path that fits in with your vision of family life, or simply disappearing into the bathroom to shake out waves of irritation at family gatherings.

Smiling and laughing in the face of stress encourages your brain to relax and releases endorphins (the feel-good hormones) throughout your body, and so activates your parasympathetic nervous system. Your mind stops racing, you breathe more easily, boosting your immune system. All of which removes emotional and physical toxicity more effectively from your body. Your baby can now find true refuge living inside your womb.

When we get to know and make friends with the bogeymen who disturb our inner peace, we loosen the tight knot of emotional discord that we hold inside us. We don’t get quite so worked up about our personal tales of woe and misfortune unfolding in the soap opera of our lives. We feel more confident and sure-footed about how to leapfrog over obstacles, noticing new possibilities that we didn’t even see before. We don’t take ourselves quite so seriously, even when we are seriously struggling, and let’s face it, stressed! The difference is, we are now choosing our individual response to our life script on our own terms.

Catching hold of nesting madness

As a mother-to-be, you may be panicking at the prospect of life change. Your immediate response may be to try and reinforce order and control over those aspects of your living circumstances that you can directly influence. Many of us throw ourselves into domestic baby preparations with enthusiastic gusto, like a train gathering steam. We start manically clearing out the clutter in our homes in order to create more newborn baby space. There is, of course, a point to this. No one wants to drown in a sea of baby paraphernalia; especially if you are worrying that you’ll need a new extension to store it all.

In shaking the cobwebs out of your surroundings, you make your baby’s arrival more tangible and real. Into something that is actually happening to you, rather than an abstract concept. Yet a healthy nesting instinct can rapidly mutate into a hormone-fuelled obsession involving epic proportions of online research and shopping. You start using up vast amounts of time, energy and resources, collecting items from an endless list of ‘essential’ newborn equipment. Even though you know that your baby won’t know or care whether you’ve got the latest model of infant technology, as long as you are near them. So decide at what point you’re going to step off the consumer bandwagon, satisfied with your secondhand buggy and hand-me-down baby clothes, and then stop searching for the missing receipt to a perfect mothering life, thrown away in the packaging around you.

As you sigh with relief at finding a new regime of simplicity, don’t get sucked into the second wave of pregnant madness: the great home improvement program to transform your humble abode into a castle. You don’t want to loose your newfound time, energy and credit rating in a whirl of domestic ambitions to refit the kitchen, build an extension and redecorate the whole house. All of which is driven by the same hormonal thirst to create a perfect nest around you.

You can put yourself under a lot of pressure to get your surroundings ready for your baby while pregnant. And quickly lose the plot of what really needs to get done. Your pregnancy hormones may try to assert themselves far more forcefully than the quiet wisdom of your common sense asking you to sit down and rest. You don’t need to be a slave to unrealistic consumer ideals; namely that a good parent should provide a perfect domestic environment for their offspring. Your home improvement manifesto will never give your newborn infant a more auspicious head start in life, or safeguard their future triumphs and successes.

This child of yours has no choice but to grow up within the emotional ambience you create around you. So, if you suspect you are caught up in a constant flurry of physical activity, give yourself time and space in which to do nothing else, except to be pregnant. Your body is already using up vast amounts of energy, simply by growing a baby. So stop and listen when you are slipping into tiredness, and fill yourself with sufficient rest and nurture.

Finding resolution

We all struggle with relative schizophrenia at times, dividing ourselves into different personalities with distinct and conflicting priorities. The rational mind often wants to dominate and assume a role of chief foreman, controlling our actions. Then we find that we are continuously busy doing something or other. We tell ourselves that we will stop and relax in just a moment’s time, which of course never arrives. In the meantime, we slowly wear ourselves out waiting for life to quiet down a little.

The simple truth is that if you don’t slow down, you will start to feel miserable, ill and run down. You will then have to postpone whatever you are doing anyway in order to catch up, recover and redress the balance. However, when you trust and listen to your intuitive health, you develop self-respect and esteem to look after yourself, and be a mother, without crumbling away under the pressure.

Transforming the ordinary

Your pregnancy is a unique time; a deeply profound and individual rite of passage in which to prepare to become a mother. To stop, reflect and appreciate what your life already is. When you give sincere attention to simple acts of ‘being,’ the heart wakes up, engages and becomes aware. When you repeat the same daily action again with genuine mindfulness, you invest symbolic importance into what you are doing, and give it positive intention. You can continue to enrich mundane routines of life with a deeper resonance, each time that you find emotional satisfaction in doing them. In being present.