“Don’t wait for someone to bring you flowers. Plant your own garden and decorate your own soul.”
– Luther Burbank
When I think of spring, I think of waiting; that anticipation with planting a seed and wondering when it will sprout and the excitement of warmer days interspersed with cooler days when winter tries to come back.
Meditation often feels like waiting. Some days I wait for that moment of peace and some days I just wait for the timer to go off so I can check it off the list. On those days, meditation seems like a destination and yoga feels like the trip. But, it’s not so black and white. When you are on your yoga mat moving and breathing, you can have the same mindset as you do in meditation, and when you are sitting still in meditation, you might notice that there are still the subtle movements as you breathe.
When we strike a balance in our practice, we are never just doing yoga or just meditating. The two do a little dance and it’s just that sometimes one is leading while the other follows. The grace is in the transitions: the switch from exhale to inhale, from engaging muscles to relaxing them, from movement to stillness.
In motherhood, there is a lot of waiting: for the baby to finish nursing, for the kids to fall asleep so I can get a few precious moments of peace, and for every little milestone as the kids grow and learn new things (when we she/he sit up? crawl? walk? talk? stop throwing tantrums? Just kidding, I haven’t even fully learned to stop doing that yet:)
Momming is full of transitions, too: making breakfast, getting ready to leave the house, winding the kids down for naptime, bedtime, dinnertime. Babyhood to toddlerhood to kidhood to adolescence. It’s constant change punctuated by waiting.
Spring is so much about transition, too: moving from cold to hot, quiet to active, dormant to vibrant. It’s a little bit like that part of a yoga practice when you come out of savasana, slowly. Entering into spring is a little like that: energy moving upward. Postpartum life is a little bit like that, too. As my son turned 9 months I started to think of how I could get up off the rug, where I play with him and his big sister, with more yogic grace. If I was to find any time for yoga on a daily basis, I thought this could be my best flowing sequence: how to get up from the ground into a standing position. Here are some ideas for starters:
Any seated pose - table top - downward dog - walk hands to feet (or feet to hands) to bent-knee uttanasana - hands on thighs and push slowly up to standing with a lengthened spine.
Any seated pose - table top - step forward to a gentle anjaneyasana (lunge) - hands on the front (bent) leg - push down into hands and feet into standing (unless you have sciatic or pubic bone pain, then #1 might feel better).
Play around with fun ways to get up off the ground into a standing position. Here are some ideas I wrote a few years ago for a kids’ class with a spring theme.
Do you have any fun, mindful ways to get up off the ground or out of your seat? How do you remember to do that spontaneously throughout the day? Let’s plant some seeds to remember these sort of mini yoga sessions, maybe with calendar reminders on your phone, a post-it on the wall near your chair or desk, or just a firm intention to notice how you transition during an action you do a few times a day (it could be every time you go to the bathroom, get up from nursing the baby, get in your car to go somewhere, or something else you do regularly).
By the way, the sequences above are from my WIP, A Yoga Mama Manual about how mamas can incorporate yoga into their busy lives. So I love any comments and feedback here to know what really does or doesn’t work for other yoga mamas!