I took a nap with Jake yesterday.
It was an overcast day, and a cool breeze with the smell of rain puffed through the open window. Jake and I were wrapped up together in my duvet. I'd had a lovely, strong home yoga practice that morning while Jake had pedaled about the park with his dad on his Radio Flyer tricycle, his knees knocking against the handlebars and impeding his progress. We were horizontal and warm, and I had squishy baby cheeks to kiss. Many people would find a nap a perfectly natural occurrence under these circumstances.
I would not be one of those people.
Why I Can't Nap
The last time I recall taking a nap with Jake was when he was three weeks old and I spent quite literally every minute of every day either feeding him, pumping in a futile attempt to increase my milk supply, or washing sundry pump and supplemental nursing paraphernalia. Beyond exhausted, I finally took the advice of a lactation consultant, stripped Jake to his diaper and myself to my underwear, cuddled him to my chest, and slept for a blessed forty-five minutes. The next day at breastfeeding clinic I regaled a woman who claimed not to have the time to take a nap with the importance of making yourself get a little extra sleep when you have a newborn. My mind goes fuzzy when I try to recall taking my own advice.
There are, I believe, two sets of people when it comes to napping. There are the ones who think naps are what Sunday afternoons were created for. And there are people like me who seize up at the very suggestion that we ignore all the other pressing matters in our lives -- the laundry we could be doing, the Sunday paper that must be read cover-to-cover, the car seat that should be disassembled and cleaned -- and sleep in the middle of the day.
I wasn't always like this. In college I developed the admirable skill of telling myself what time to awaken, dropping my head to the pillow in a complete blackout, and awakening alert and ready to go out drinking at exactly the hour I had designated. I don't know where I lost this impressive ability, but somewhere between my graduation processional and Jake's momentous first trip to the post office it disappeared completely.
I tell myself the time I spend playing with Jake is down time. It isn't. I scrupulously protect my evenings with Mike. But they are spent near catatonically swallowing dinner in front of a scant half hour of mindless television. I tell myself I will steal twenty minutes one afternoon while Jake is at school to curl up on the couch with my book. It hasn't happened yet.
What is it that renders me capable of rousing myself from an oh-so-comfortable drowsiness as I cuddle Jake to sleep every night? The call of things that still need doing. The desire to spend just a little bit of time with my husband, lest our marriage deteriorate like a cheap Target tee-shirt carelessly tossed in the dryer too many times. The thrilling importance of getting Jake's lunch ready for the next day. In other words, complete and utter neurosis.
Why I Was Able to Nap Yesterday -- A Piece of Peace
It was so easy napping yesterday. After a few minutes of confirming Jake's designation of my facial features -- "Mou!" "No!" "Aye!" -- he turned his attention to his thumb, and I grabbed the book on my bedside stand. (Shout out to "God's Middle Finger," by Richard Grant.) My eyelids started feeling kind of heavy, and I started to lose track of what the words on the page meant.
"You're just going to spend the time reading," I yawned to myself. "There's no reason you can't sleep too." So I did.
It wasn't that I was particularly tired yesterday. Or even that cloudy days make me feel like I have warm milk running through my veins. I've been plenty tireder and still rallied enough to take advantage of Jake's afternoon nap time. I can always, after all, write a blog entry. ("I thought you were blogging," Mike exclaimed in surprise when he came upstairs two hours later and found me in bed. I didn't even feel guilty that while I napped he had been planting basil in our garden.)
I think I was able to nap because I've been laying the groundwork for a few months now. For some time, I've been telling myself it's okay to take a break. You know, when I've been telling you the same thing. And somewhere along the way, it seems, I started to take my own advice.
So, in a moment of sanity on my busy and productive Friday I resolved to start taking days off from blogging. I decided the legal project I received that day did not have to take up any of my attention over the weekend. I wrote out the list of things that need doing and then put it aside. And two days later, as I lay next to my boy with the beautiful ragged eyelashes brushing against his cheeks, I was pleased to find myself able to do nothing.
Practicing How to Stop
Like anything in yoga, doing nothing takes practice.
We practice it at the end of every asana practice in savasana -- corpse pose, limp body, quiet mind, soaring heart. Except as soon as my heart starts to open I hear Jake's laugh and lose whatever minor ability I have to quiet my mind.
We practice doing nothing when we sit in meditation. Which I have given up on except when I am practicing my asanas. "Meditation in motion," I tell myself, making one of those excuses you give yourself even though you know it's just an excuse and no one else really cares, so why bother?
Hard as it is for most of us, hostile as the world we live in is to it, a few moments of nothing is exactly what we need to center ourselves. If you're constantly in motion, how are you supposed to remember where you are? And how can you get back to where you need to be?
How beautiful it is to just stop and sit for a few moments. To listen to silence or the sound of the wind in the trees or the high-pitched peep of a bird roosting somewhere beyond my sight line. To breathe deeply through my nose, tasting the fullness of the air, feeling my lungs open to it like my sister's Venus Flytrap used to open wide for the bugs we offered it. All the things I have stirred up in my whirl of dervishing settle down gently, give a little wobble, and then are still, waiting patiently until I have time to get to them. Because, I can finally see when I stand still, there actually is time.
It's no wonder so many of us have forgotten there is time to be still. From soon after birth to right around puberty, our children are constantly moving, and we are forced to move with them. When we are not moving with them, we're moving for them -- doing their laundry, picking them up from school, working so fast we start to sweat so we can get home in time to have dinner with our family. Everything, it seems, depends on our moving as fast as we can.
But, hard as it is to muster the courage to be selfish just a little bit when you have children, at some point you just have to be. When I first had Jake, I let all my natural, non-yogic inclinations take over. Who can take care of herself when she has a newborn to take care of? Who can breathe slowly and consciously when she's so tired she can barely breathe at all? Why slow down when you're using all your energy just to keep going? I could see my yoga practice slipping away into the distance, but I felt powerless to grab hold and pull myself back to it.
And then I found myself -- nine months, a year, sixteen months -- later feeling unsettled, uncentered, distant from myself. And I knew it was time to be selfish again. Much as I love Jake, if I love myself, I have to do it.
We all have to stop and rest some time. And I don't mean the six and a half hours we allot between checking one last time on our sleeping angel and the buzz of the alarm in the morning. I mean true rest, a break from the list of "must do's" flipping before us like an endless bridge of shuffled cards falling into place one after the other after the other. Either we tell our minds to be still occasionally, or our bodies will make us stop through illness and nervous exhaustion.
So why not practice right now? Just a few moments, a few breaths. Just so you're ready for that Sunday afternoon when you decide you'd like to take a nap.
A Buddhist Meditation
I love this meditation yet I rarely practice it because -- you guessed it -- it takes too much time. To be honest, you can probably do it in five minutes, although I'd try to give myself ten, just to fully enjoy it. I find it beautiful because of all it does: gives your mind something to focus on; gently guides you toward complete quiet; and moves your body through different types of energy so you feel refreshed at the end.
One you've tried it a few times, you can also do this meditation only part way. For example, if you're at work and just need to calm down, you can go part way toward total quiet but come back before you get there. If you're stuck in traffic, you can recall just the first step and immediately feel calm without spacing out in the car, which I emphatically do not recommend.
If it doesn't work for you, remember, meditation takes practice every bit as much as, say, headstand. So try it again when you feel like it. And maybe you'll start to feel like it more frequently.
Meditation Instructions
If, anywhere during this meditation exercise, you start to feel uncomfortable or nervous, stop where you are and make your way back through the steps you have taken to the beginning. When you're ready, you'll go further. After all, you don't need me to tell you it's about the journey, not the destination.
1) Either sit in a comfortable cross-legged position or lie comfortably on your back. If you are sitting up, sit on the folded edge of a blanket -- just your sitting bones, not your thighs -- to release your lower back and tilt your pelvis slightly forward.
2) From either position, let your palms face the sky in a gesture of reception. If you are sitting, the backs of your hands will rest on your thighs or knees. If you are lying down, the backs of your hands will rest on the floor about six inches from your body.
3) Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths in through your nose. Feel your body relax more and more deeply with each exhale.
4) As you continue slowly and steadily breathing through your nose, start to think about the earth. Feel, smell, be it -- rich and loamy and full of life. Feel yourself grounding. Let your body become the earth. Take your time.
5) Once you have fully experienced and melted into the earth, start to become the mist that rises from the ground in the early morning. Let that mist become water -- moving without effort, shapeless and yet not shapeless, cool and fresh. Be the water, feel it fill your mind so everything is the water. Take your time.
6) When you have fully become the water, start to feel the water heating and rising as steam. Let the steam become fire. Become the fire -- heat and ethereal form, dancing, ephemeral. Enjoy it for as long as you'd like.
7) When you have become the fire, start to become the pale hint of light at the very edges of the flame. Let it fill your mind, lose your edges as it is edgeless. Take as long as you need to find this space.
8) When you have fully experienced the light at the edge of the flame, let it go out and become complete blackness. Search in your mind for any hints of light and let them extinguish. Feel the silkiness, the inkiness of the blackness. Let it fill your mind; let whatever form is left to your body meld with it. Remain here for as long as you need.
9) When you have fully experienced the blackness, see if you can experience complete nothingness. No color, no form, no movement. Just emptiness.
10) When you are ready, from the nothingness, return to the blackness. Notice the familiarity of it as you return. From the blackness, move toward the light at the edge of the flame. Then, taking your time, to the fire itself. As you move through the fire, become the mist that travels down to the water. Flow with the water as it runs into the earth. Take a moment to be the earth before you start to return to your form.
Take your time returning to the present moment before you open your eyes. Let your body be still as you come back to yourself. When you move, move consciously, aware of the space, quiet, time, energy you have created in your day.
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