📿 Is Parenthood Compatible With Teaching Meditation?

Also: this story from Pema Chödrön is a favorite.

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Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —

When I was five months pregnant with Ruby, my belly popped past the point of mistaking my shape as just weight gain. It felt like the right time to begin sharing the news with my one-on-one meditation students before announcing it more widely. This was the furthest along I had come in any of my pregnancies, and her arrival was beginning to seem like (fingers crossed) a sure thing. 

I chose which of our sessions I would tell each of them in, and then held the news until the end. Our session time is earmarked to talk about their life and their meditation practice, and I knew that once the cat was out of the bag, our time together could quickly become about ME and MY big life event. I also didn’t want to assume that everyone was going to meet the news of a baby with excitement. As someone who’s experienced multiple pregnancy losses, I know what a challenge it can be to dig under the crust of one’s own grief in order to tap into joy for another.

Thankfully, most of my one-on-one students were elated and wanted to know all of the details. What is the birth gender? Have we picked out a name? Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! A few of my students searched my face carefully in an attempt to understand what this would mean for them. Would I continue to teach meditation with a baby? Would we continue to have these sessions? One student expressed enthusiasm verbally, but her body language was crestfallen. She’s also a parent, and I suspect that she suspected that having a baby would fundamentally split my attention.

One of my students had a reaction that I think about often. She was excited — for me and for her — because now I would have personal insight into her practice quandaries of how meditation meets parenthood. “There aren’t many career meditation teachers with young kids,” she reflected. She racked her brain for names of teachers and her list stopped at precisely one. I also rattled through a mental list — of the meditation teachers with broader name recognition and contemporaries who had chosen this path— and my list topped out at four. She asked why I thought that this was the case. I told her it’s a very good question. 

My first thought was that kids are expensive. Let’s be honest: no one gets into teaching meditation for the competitive salary and health benefits. My second thought was that maybe there is something incompatible about the mix of raising young children and what is required (as a practitioner) in order to feel prepared to teach. 

Small children don’t blend effortlessly into the element of space and the action of stillness. There’s a certain amount of chaos energy that comes with kids. Long, silent meditation retreats are off the table for me (for the foreseeable future), as are the spacious morning sits where I would feel the slow shift of the morning sun through my window as a timer instead of using an actual clock. As soon as Ruby sits up in her crib, a starting pistol fires and our day is running around the track. 

I’ve carried this question around with me like a koan this year. Is child rearing incompatible with teaching meditation? Just like many koans, or question puzzles, the point may not even be to find “an answer,” so much as to continue asking myself the question. The scraps of experience that one collects in response to the question can lead to both valuable insight, and even more refined questions. 

A few mornings ago I was outside with Ruby watching her crawl in the grass. She’s at an age where she’s testing her surroundings and requires exquisite attention— lest she eat a bug, or land on a rock, or want to show you the handful of grass she triumphantly picked, or the crispy leaf that she found (and might eat) or maybe she just needs a wave back at that moment to feel safe enough to keep exploring. 

I watched her pick up a stick half the size of her body and beat it against the ground. In that moment I was reminded of a story that Pema Chodron tells in her book “Comfortable With Uncertainty.” It goes: