The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  I know that a traditional meditation retreat offers opportunities that the daily life of a mother can’t—for example, the chance to cultivate in silence, undistracted, the skills of mindfulness, insight, and one-pointed concentration.

  But for me, mothering has been the deepest practice I’ve ever taken on. It’s a constant assault on my ingrained selfishness—a wake-up call to the snoozing bodhisattva within. I’ve let go of props I thought were indispensable—a decent night’s sleep, my morning ritual of yoga and meditation. I’ve been offered the opportunity to study my mind as it changes as quickly as my baby goes from giggles to squalls. When I wake up to the sound of a cry at midnight, I can resent Forest for breaking into my dreams. Or I can rock him in the dark, milk pouring out of me, and let myself soak in the intimacy of a moment so precious and fleeting it breaks my heart wide open.

  Could there be any better way to get my nose rubbed in the truth of impermanence than to love a child in a jagged, careless world? Napping with Forest—his head on my breast, my nose pressed against the dark silk of his hair—I watch the heartbeat fluttering in the soft spot on his skull. Forget about freeways, and plutonium, and stealth bombers—I’ve been warned that even a teddy bear could suffocate him in his crib. At night, when he’s been silent a couple of hours, I creep into the bedroom and stand beside him until I hear him sigh.

  And even if everything goes absolutely perfectly, I know that this particular Forest—the one who warbles and passionately sucks on the bill of his rubber duck as he splashes with me in the tub—is going to dissolve like bubble bath. Yesterday he was a kicking bulge in my belly as I swam laps in the July sun; tomorrow he’ll be a middle-aged man, scattering my ashes in a mountain lake. Watching Forest drool and gnaw on a frozen teething ring, my husband says, “It’s so beautiful that it hurts.”

  I know these insights aren’t the pristine diamond of samadhi. They are a sloppier, stickier kind of realization, covered in drool and Cheerios crumbs. But maybe this is the gift of mothering as practice—a kind of inclusiveness that embraces chaos and grit and imperfection. The journey of motherhood is a cascade of the extraordinary disguised as the unremarkable, of the universal mysteries manifesting as mundane details. Motherhood practice is not based on control or keeping things tidy. It makes room in its heart for an electric train—or a preteen slumber party—in the middle of the living room floor. It doesn’t slip away in the middle of the night to search for enlightenment. It stays home with Rahula, the fetter, and finds it there.

  As mothers, what can we make of that story of the Buddha leaving his family? I asked Fu.

  “Oh, but he wasn’t the Buddha when he left his child. He was a young prince, in terrible pain,” she answered. “If you’re awake, you don’t leave your child. Where would you go?”

  SUTRA 5

  Butterfly Kiss for the Buddha

  • • • • •

  I’M SPEEDING DOWN Sir Francis Drake Boulevard on a glorious fall day, running through yellow lights, completely stressed out, trying to get to the meditation hall on time.

  I’m teaching the daily yoga classes at a women’s meditation retreat at Spirit Rock, a Buddhist retreat center in a rural valley north of San Francisco. But my beloved babysitter, Megan—a twenty-something Zen student with beads and tiny electronic parts woven into her turquoise-and-blonde dreadlocks—had gotten caught in a traffic jam and arrived at my house an hour late. Then I got stuck in the same freeway snarl myself. As I barrel down the winding country road, I imagine a cop pulling me over: “But, officer, it’s a dharma emergency! A hundred women in deep meditation are waiting for me!” I burn rubber into the Spirit Rock parking lot, walk up the hill to the meditation hall as fast as possible while still appearing mindful and serene, and get to the yoga room with seconds to spare, just as the bell is ringing to end the last sitting period.

  It’s two days into the seven-day retreat and I’m already exhausted. I would have loved to have participated in the entire schedule of this silent meditation intensive, “Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine,” a title that hinted that it might explore some territory that wasn’t exactly mainstream Buddhist orthodoxy. But as the mother of a two-year-old, sitting a full retreat isn’t possible. So I’m flip-flopping identities each day: a mom all night and morning, a yogini all afternoon and evening.

  Unfortunately, Forest has been cutting two molars this week. Last night, he woke me up six times between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., at which point I finally brought him into bed with me—where he thrashed around for another two hours, whimpering and talking in his sleep. At one point he cried out in delight, “What’s that down there? It’s…it’s the gas pedal!” Then he half woke up and began rooting at my chest, mumbling, “More gas pedal! More gas pedal!” in what appeared to be an archetypal male conflation of car and breast.

  By day, he has been in classic two-year-old mode, exploring the limits of autonomy and personal power. All is harmonious as long as I let him indulge his current olfactory obsession: opening and sniffing every jar in my spice drawer, identifying each by scent. That morning, we’d sat and smelled them together for over an hour—“Nutmeg! Cardamom! Rosemary! Turmeric!”—until my nose hummed and tingled in what felt like a practice dreamed up by a Zen master on LSD.

  But when I tried to take him to meet some friends at a nearby park, all hell broke loose. Forest didn’t want to leave the car; he just wanted to sit in his car seat listening to Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” nineteen times in a row, while taking periodic hits off his bottle of cinnamon, which he had insisted on bringing with him. Exhausted and starved for adult conversation—even if it was just comparing teething notes with another mom—I did not handle the situation quite as tactfully as I might have. The outing ended in a fiasco, with the absurd spectacle of me grimly hauling a screaming, flailing child toward a playground, in a shower of tears and cinnamon, while he shrieked as if I were carrying him off to the electric chair: “No slide! No swing! More ‘Yuv and Happiness!’ ” I finally surrendered and took him back to the car. As I started the engine to drive home, the tears turned off like a faucet and were replaced with beams. “I just want you to cooperate,” he told me cheerfully—then chugged a juice box and passed out.

  So as I drive off to the retreat that afternoon, let’s just say I don’t exactly feel like the Divine Mother. But arriving at Spirit Rock feels like diving into a pool of peace. The center is tucked in a valley of burnt-gold hills; the autumn air is a musky, minty blend of sage and pennyroyal. After teaching two gentle yoga classes, I sit the rest of the afternoon in the domed meditation hall, dipping thirstily into a vast well of silence.

  In two years of motherhood, my body has forgotten what a meditation retreat is like. It’s astonishing to find myself, even for a few hours, in the midst of a hundred silent women, all of them moving slowly, as if underwater—sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping as they stop and sit down in the middle of their hundred individual lives, each as intense and vivid and complicated as my own. I sink into the luxury of having nothing to do but feel my body and heart, breath by breath. For a few hours I stop skimming along the surface of my life and swim into the depths.

  As I walk from my silent dinner toward the meditation hall that night—pausing to savor the crimson sunset and the wild turkeys rustling through the long grass—I find myself asking my perennial question: How can I make my life feel more like a meditation retreat? How do I bridge the apparent gap between yogini and mom?

  In a dharma talk that evening, the vipassana teacher and psychotherapist Debra Chamberlin-Taylor—a mentor of mine for over a decade—offers a few hints. The sacred feminine, she explains, is a psychological term for an archetypal spiritual dimension that exists in both men and women. It is nonlinear and receptive. It’s about being, rather than doing; integrating, rather than analyzing. It moves in spirals and circles, rather than lines and angles. It intuitively perceives all of life as an interconnected w
hole (which, of course, is also one of Buddhism’s central teachings). It values the world, the body, the emotions, relationships, the connections of the heart. But in our daily lives—and even in our spiritual practice—it is often paved over by the more masculine attributes of action, analysis, and achievement.

  In Buddhist practice, this powerful energy is symbolically represented by images such as Kuan Yin, a female manifestation of an awakened being who “hears the cries of the world” and responds to them. In Tibetan practice, there’s the compassionate goddess Tara in her myriad forms and colors. In other spiritual traditions, it takes the form of a Divine Mother, such as Mother Mary, or a consort, such as Parvati. Invoking such images, says Debra, can help us relax and expand our meditation practice to embrace with compassion the chaos of our daily lives, rather than trying to escape it or push it away.

  Debra emphasizes that both men and women can benefit from connecting with the image of a Kuan Yin or Tara. It’s not about trying to project “feminine” and “masculine” qualities onto actual women and men. However, she says that for her, there’s been something especially powerful about leading all-women retreats.

  Whether shaped by biology or by culture, women’s deep involvement with relationships, family, children, and home has traditionally been viewed in most religions as an impediment to spiritual practice. “On a women’s retreat with women teachers, they will come into dharma interviews talking about their divorces, their hot flashes, the pain of leaving their children for the first time to go on retreat—things they say they have never dared to talk about on a meditation retreat before,” Debra says. She is sitting on the dais flanked by two statues: a traditional male Buddha, and a slender, busty female deity called Prajnaparamita, the mother of all Buddhas. “And when these experiences are seen as sacred, as part of the spiritual journey—rather than as something to be discounted and passed over en route to something more ‘spiritual’—the whole field of awareness opens up, and women can go deeper into their meditative practice than they have ever gone before.”

  That night, Forest is restless again, waking up and calling me over and over. He doesn’t want to come to my bed, but he also doesn’t want to be alone in his crib in his bedroom next door. Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, I lie down on the floor of his bedroom, wrapped in a quilt, to keep him company as he falls asleep.

  The floor is hard; I can’t sleep. So I lie there and meditate, feeling my breath go in and out. I am trying to rest with exactly what is: exhaustion, the aching bones, a vast loneliness wrapped around my heart.

  Yet I find myself also opening my heart to the joy of that moment: My child lying in his crib, clutching his blue blankie and his stuffed lion. The room filling up with his earthy, yeasty smell, like a cross between lawn clippings and baking bread. The intimate textures of my daily life, filled with “Love and Happiness” and the smells of cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, and ginger.

  And in that moment, I am on retreat, present in the moment—as much as if I’d been in a cloister at Spirit Rock.

  Kuan Yin, I remind myself, does not hide from the world. She sees it all and embraces it, like a mother holding a child. She finds the sacred right here, amid the smells of the spices, the tantrums, and laughter. She finds it in the relationship struggles, the teething, the pain and joy and mundane tasks of everyday life. She reminds us that rebirth is possible in every moment and, indeed, is only possible in this moment.

  The next morning, running around the house in his pajamas, Forest stops and points to the beautiful sandalwood Buddha statue on my mantelpiece. “There’s the Buddha!”

  I get the statue down and hand it to him. “Eskimo kiss for the Buddha!” he says, and he rubs his nose against the Buddha’s. “And now a butterfly kiss for the Buddha!” And he flutters his eyelashes, intimately, against the Buddha’s cheek.

  SUTRA 6

  The Terrible Twos (Or, More Yuv and Happiness)

  • • • • •

  THIS IS A story I couldn’t bring myself to tell until years after it was over.

  It is a tale of tantrums. Of tears in the middle in the night and howls of rage. Of someone standing on the back patio, smashing plates on the ground and wailing, because they didn’t get what they wanted.

  Oh, wait. Did you think I was talking about Forest?

  AUGUST

  “DO YOU WANT TO BUY SOMETHING???”

  I open my eyes blearily. In the pale glow of the streetlight through the closed curtains I can see Forest, who turned two last month, sitting bolt upright in bed next to me, clutching his stuffed lion. I’d carried him into bed with me at 3:30 a.m. from his crib in the next room, when he wouldn’t go back to sleep after I nursed him. He has tossed and turned next to me for a couple of hours, muttering in his sleep. Now he has jolted wide awake, seized by an idea that is just too good to keep to himself.

  “Do you want to go to the store and buy something???” he shouts again.

  I know it isn’t really a question. At two, he reverses his pronouns, mirroring the way other people speak to him. For example, “Do you want some juice?” means that he’s thirsty. When he tells me, “I won’t do that,” he means that he doesn’t want me to do something, and he’s hoping that’s what I’ll say.

  “It’s too early, sweetie.” I roll toward him, away from the empty pillow on the other half of my king-size bed. I always leave that side of the bed open, even though no one but me has slept there for months. “The stores aren’t open yet.”

  “Do you want to go in the car! Do you want to drive? Do you want music! Music, music!”

  I snuggle my arms around him. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…” I sing sleepily. “You make me happy, when skies are gray…”

  He pushes me away with a contemptuous shriek. “Do you want music on a CD!”

  “We could put a CD on the stereo,” I suggest.

  “A CD in the car!”

  “Forest, it’s still dark. The stores are closed. This is really, really not an option.” I look at the other side of the bed—the pillows stacked, the comforter pulled neatly up, waiting for a mate who’s not there.

  * * *

  —

  A few months earlier, when Forest was nineteen months old, my husband moved out.

  I’m not going to give you the details of how our marriage unraveled. I’m not going to tell you what things could not be undone, what words could not be unsaid.

  I’ll just share with you this one terrible image: I am screaming at my husband as he puts on his coat. I am crying and grabbing his arm. When he twists it away, I hit him on his shoulder. And when he walks out the door and closes it behind him, I turn and see Forest kneeling on the floor of the living room, crying. He is banging his forehead against the floor, over and over.

  With a few deep breaths, I try to switch from melting-down woman to Mommy. I scoop up my son and hold him close.

  * * *

  —

  From the outside, my life as a poster-mama for “mindful mothering” appears to be going great. I have begun publishing regular essays about mothering as meditation practice. I just directed a conference on “spiritual parenting” for the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. I’ve become the West Coast editor for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review—a job I can do part-time from my home office. And I teach a regular Friday morning yoga and meditation class at Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

  But here’s what my readers and students don’t see: I am living alone with Forest, who still doesn’t sleep through the night despite several failed attempts at “sleep training.” Following the advice of my “attachment parenting” books, I’m still breastfeeding him on demand whenever he asks for “nummy,” although he has been eating solid food for more than a year. And since “demand” doesn’t end with nightfall, I haven’t slept more than three straight hours since he was born. Exhaustion is wearing me into a bundle of shredded
nerves. After he falls asleep, around seven o’clock each evening, I don’t light a candle and meditate, as I always tell myself I will. Instead, I turn on the TV my husband had left behind and watch Dr. Phil and a rerun of Friends while I eat my solo dinner. Then I pass out on the couch, my dirty dishes parked on the carpet beside me, until Forest wakes me up to nurse again a couple of hours later.

  Compounding my pain is a sense of spiritual failure. I am a yoga and meditation teacher. I teach and write about serenity, calm, peace, clarity, connection. How can my life be such a mess? I am so ashamed of the problems in my marriage that I haven’t even told my friends and family that my husband and I are separated. This, of course, makes it hard to reach out for support. In my fitful sleep, I regularly dream that the characters from Friends have dropped by my house to keep me company. When I wake up, I feel bereft.

  Now, outside the bedroom window, the sky is streaked with rose and orange. Forest nurses until he calms down and forgets about CDs and cars. I am half-asleep when I hear him begin to murmur a word under his breath over and over, so softly I can’t make it out. This is something that he does when a thing is so wonderful and out of reach—and he wants it so badly—that he can’t let himself say it out loud until I say it for him. Looking down, I see he is smiling.

  Awake now, finally, I guess the word: “Teabag?”