#285 | The Mother's Mind: Harnessing Peace and Calm with a Simple Meditation Practice with Kelly Smith

In meditation is we practice kind of non judgmental observation. And asking yourself, why don't I meditate then without judgment and just sit and observe without judgment? Is such a powerful practice.

It is effort. It's effort. And the funny thing about it is, when you do it, it's effort coming out. It's hard to come out of it, because it just feels so good when you're in it, and you kind of have to pull yourself out because, you know, there's a part of your brain going, Oh, just a little longer, just a little longer. And I can definitely attest to the anti aging effects of not for myself personally, but my meditation teacher, I swear, was like, 40 years old, and he turned out to be in his 60s. And I was like, it's unbelievable. And he's like, it's because I meditate. It's because I meditate every minute I'm in meditation. I'm not aging and I'm reverse aging. And I was like, wow, okay, and now our listeners are interested in the rest of us.

I'm Cynthia Overgard, owner of HypnoBirthing of Connecticut, childbirth advocate and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down To Birth Podcast. Childbirth is something we're made to do. But how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth.

Hello, everyone. So I am Kelly Smith. I'm the founder of yoga for you, which is a location independent yoga and meditation school. I have been teaching meditation for over 10 years. I'm a mom of two, and I'm the host of the podcast mindful minutes and meditation mama. So I love to help support people and just putting tools in their toolbox so that they can live a little bit more mindfully, a little bit more intentionally, and also just make things a little bit easier, because it is really tough sometimes existing and just living life. And so I love to help support people with that through meditation.

Well, we are so happy to be speaking with you because we speak on the podcast all the time about tools and tricks for you know, helping moms adapt and adjust. And one of them we always come back to is things like meditation or journaling or walking. And meditation is such a hard one because it so easy to just throw it out there and say, just meditate for five minutes a day, meditate. It'll change your life, and it actually truly does. But nobody knows how to get started. Nobody really believes it until they do it, until they get good at it. So this is going to be really exciting for us and our community, to get some really practical tips from you on how mothers of all people who need it the most but have the least amount of time to do it, can start to incorporate it into their daily life.

Yes, I'm so excited to talk about all of those things. My favorite, my favorite people are the ones that say and I used to be this is either the I meditated once and and then they're going to tell me why they didn't like it, or it or it didn't work, or the Oh, I could never meditate because and then XYZ. Those are like when I go to a dinner party. Those are my two favorite types of people. So I'm excited to chat about all of this.

I've heard a lot meditation doesn't work for me, or yoga doesn't work for me.

How often do you interact with somebody who says, oh, yeah, I started meditating. You know, day one, it was easy for me. I took right to it, and it's changed my life like that probably doesn't happen very often. No, I don't think I've ever had that experience in a decade. I don't think I've ever had anyone say that, because it's a new skill meditation. I think of it as like if our mind is a light bulb. When we're walking around all day, the light bulb is on, it's shining. But when we meditate, it's like taking that light bulb and turning it into a laser pointer and focusing it on one thing. So just like if you were learning how to play the piano, or you were learning, you know, how to be a distance runner, you had a goal of running a marathon. No one just wakes up and says, You know what I'm going to do today. I'm just going to go run 26 miles without ever having done any kind of running before. Or I'm going to start with Mozart without even learning, you know, the keys on a keyboard, and meditation is like that too. It's a new skill that we're learning, that power of single pointed concentration. And so it takes time. And we also, as human beings, we aren't really naturally predisposed to having this laser like focus on one thing without being distracted or thinking of other things or being pulled in one way or another. And so we just as. Really our natural state, and we have to build up to get there.

I like to think of meditation as a muscle. It's like, it's if you don't work it, it's weak, and as soon as you start working it, it gets stronger and stronger, and it works for you once you work it.

Yes, I also think of it as like when you start a new healthy habit, like eating. Well, at first there might be a little bit of resistance, and your body's like, what are, what are all of these vegetables? Maybe you get, like, some headaches, things like that. But once you start doing it regularly, and you start feeling better, you really can't go back, because you see those improvements, like in your everyday life, and you feel it. That's what I wanted to talk about, I think that when we pursue running a marathon or learning a new skill, part of the drive is how proud we're going to feel of ourselves, and we're going to get to share it with other people. But when we say we're meditating, if anything, it feels pretentious to say that it's just such an incredibly intimate experience. And I think the first thing that we could begin with today is convincing the non believer in a sense of why they should go through the struggle and the effort of beginning this practice. So can you talk a little bit about what we know from the 1000s of studies that have been done on meditation and also not just the results, but how minimal a regular meditation practice can be as long as it is, in fact, regular. Wanna talk about some of those benefits,

so many benefits. And the thing I always like to start off with is studies tell us actually, eight to 10 minutes a day of meditation is enough to get the physical, mental and emotional benefits. So I really think of it as, like, this little micro habit. So if you're listening to this already and you're like this Kelly lady is going to tell me, I have to sit for 30 minutes, 60 minutes a day, you do not. I don't do that. And I'm a meditation teacher. I have two kids under four, like I'm busy. There's a lot going on, and we know that even 10 minutes a day is enough. So I just like to put that out there as when we talk about these benefits, it really is, in just a few minutes, you don't have to sit for a really long time. And I love what you said about you know, if you're gonna run a marathon, you can see like an end point, and you're gonna feel proud of completing that thing. And I like to reframe meditation in terms of, there is a lot that will happen in your life that you can be proud of. A big thing is like, I'm yelling at my kids last which we all do it. We try not to right, but we all have those moments where you just get pushed right to the edge. And those, especially if your kids are like mine, they know how to do that. One little nudge, just a little too far right, you become less reactive, having more compassion for others, but mostly for yourself. It can be really hard, as a mom, I think, to have the same kind of love and compassion with ourselves that we share with our children and our family, even our friends. There's also benefits of like being able to sleep better, because, let's be real, we're not really sleeping a lot. And so improving your sleep, being able to focus on something for a longer amount of time, improving some emotion regulation, which is a really big piece, even if you're experiencing maybe you're trying to get pregnant, you are pregnant, or you're in the postpartum phase, right? Those hormones aren't always working with you to have the most even keel feelings and emotion regulation all the time. And I think the piece of not this exactly the question, but that idea of having something to be proud of, meditation does give you these results that you should be really proud of, whether it's being less reactive, being kinder to yourself, being more compassionate, being able to complete tasks from point A to point B. I have ADHD, and I'm a mom, so being able to complete a task from point A to point B sometimes can be really challenging, and as you practice meditation, you'll see kind of these small but powerful shifts in your life that starts making things just better and happier and softer in the way that I know many of us want to live, and that is something to be proud of, but in terms of some of the specific benefits, some of my favorites are like in the physical category, meditation is great for your immune immune system, we know that our immune system is replenished when we're in that rest and digest, and it's on the front lines when we're in fight or flight. It's really great for your heart health, your blood pressure. It also helps to reduce the aging of our cells, which is really interesting. So it's reducing aging on a cellular level. And then in terms of like emotional benefits. As I said, meditation is so great for building your compassion towards yourself and others. Kind of being open minded people who meditate report just being happier than when they weren't meditating, which even that, I'll take more happiness like any day. On a neurological level, there's a really interesting thing that. Happens when we meditate, and that is when we start to focus and we look at the brain during meditation. Is the amygdala, which is the pain, fear, worry center of the brain. It's kind of like the drama queen of our brain. That part starts to shut down and become less active, where the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that has to do with emotion regulation, some of the higher cognitive function work that we do focus that actually becomes more active. So over time, usually after about eight weeks or so, the amygdala begins to shrink, meaning we're having smaller physiological responses to stress, anxiety and fear triggers and the prefrontal cortex increases in gray matter, meaning we have a better ability to focus, have emotion regulation, and we can see these things changing in the brain in just two months. I don't even know if I see like maybe if I was lifting weights really consistently, certainly not for just eight minutes a day in two months, that I would see such a stark contrast. But meditation is really interesting things on a neurological level, which I love.

That's the Zen effect. You can really see it in people who meditate. I mean, you can kind of spot a meditator because they just have this calm presence about them, and they're not usually very reactionary. And that is probably exactly the reason, because they're constantly training their their neurologic system, and I can definitely attest to the anti aging effects of not for myself personally, but my meditation teacher, I swear, was like, 40 years old, and he turned out to be in his 60s. And I was like, it's unbelievable. And he's like, it's because I meditate. It's because I meditate every minute I'm in meditation, I'm not aging and I'm reverse aging. And I was like, wow, okay, and now our listeners are interested in the rest of us, so I'm in you just said it. I was thinking that if you make a list of all the reasons to meditate, you will be writing dozens of things on that list. If you look through some of the biggest research studies on meditation, and then when you look at the reasons why not to meditate, you're really just going to sit there and be like, because I don't want to. It's like, there isn't a reason not to do this. But I think this is of particular importance postpartum. And yes, the irony being that women have so little time and they're so tired already. But I think the importance is that they are suffering with so many difficult emotions. We just did an event on postpartum rage. So many women relate to postpartum rage, postpartum anxiety. Virtually all women suffer with postpartum anxiety. These emotions will be so much easier to endure, there'll be such lesser experiences for these women with just a little bit of meditation practice before you begin teaching us a little bit about how to get started with meditation. Can you talk about the importance of active relaxation, because so often new meditators end up dozing off. So I think that might be a good place to begin. If you agree, yeah, and I love that you highlight that where you said, you know, early meditators doze off. It's something that I hear a lot, both of meditation, and we're not talking about it today. But I also do something called Yoga Nidra, which is yogic sleep. It's good, like yoga nidra, so it's amazing, nourishing and great. But people fall asleep all the time when I lead these events, I have to say at the beginning, if you start to snore, this is what I'll do, and I want to flag that a lot of times, if we're dozing off when we're meditating, especially if it's a shorter meditation that is a signal that we need more rest and more sleep. And I don't say that to kind of minimize what you're experiencing, but our bodies will always prioritize our basic needs over, for example, opening our hearts to a more compassionate way of living. It's going to be like, no, no. The first thing I'm going to do is take care of my basic needs, which is like sleeping, taking care of myself. So much happens when we sleep that we need to function, and so I just want to flag that, because I get this question a lot from my students or after events, if I'm always falling asleep, what does that mean? It means we're tired, and there's nothing wrong with that. And I think that is always a great place to even start in terms of your own care. When you feel like I'm doing everything for everyone all the time, what is like one thing I can do for me, and trying to prioritize sleep, even in small ways, can make a huge impact. So I wanted to highlight that, because it happens all the time. I hear about this all the time. My own mother, who loves to come to my classes, she's usually the first one to snore, and I have to go wake her up. And it's like, you need more sleep, mom.

Well, in Yoga Nidra, we do lie on our backs, yes. So it's very back, you get kind of like, cozy. It's like, I've never not fallen asleep during yoga nidra in a live yoga nidra class. But with meditation, aren't we to keep the spine quite active, with the rest of the body very relaxed? Yeah, it's a yes. And because you do want to keep the spine long so that you're able to breathe. So if you think about if you're slumping over to one way or another, kind of crunched over, it's really hard for the diaphragm to be able to work correctly, which is going to get in the way of us taking even full breaths, not even doing breath work of any kind, but just being able to breathe. However, it is a myth that you need to sit to meditate. All you need to do to have a proper meditative position is a long spine. We want to be relaxed enough that we're not trying to physically hold tension in the body to stay in our position. But not so relaxed we're going to fall asleep. And that's really it being in a position that we're not going to inhibit our breathing in any way. So that could be seated. It could be seated in a chair. I once spent a few weeks with some monks and took a vow of silence, and I was meditating with them. And they would do chairs. They would meditate in chairs, and then they would get up and break up long sittings with walking meditation. Laying down on your back is absolutely fine. You can lay on your back, knees, bent, feet on the ground. You could stand, if you'd like, as long as you're, you know, able to kind of find that in between position. So it is a myth that you have to kind of sit crisscross applesauce to be meditating in the right way.

In my experience, the more you meditate, the easier it is to just drop into a meditative state in any place, anywhere, anytime, whether you're a passenger in a car, sitting on an airplane, waiting in a waiting room, walking walking meditation is really great. Obviously you have to keep your eyes open for that one, but I totally agree with you, like you do not have to have a meditation station and have all those barriers of any 30 minutes of time and need a special spot, and all the atmosphere has to be exactly right, like when you get good at meditating, you can just drop into that space pretty quickly. And that's the major benefit of it. The other thing that we didn't mention when we were talking about benefits is the clarity that comes from meditation, the clarity of thought, the clarity of decision making, the clarity of knowing. I feel like that's the most beneficial thing outside the physical stuff. That's great for your health and wellness, but for mothers who are so confused all the time about where to put their energy, how to spend their time, the decisions they have to make around their children, whether or not they want to have another child or things like that, like meditation can be so incredibly powerful and helpful in getting you to hone in on the right thing for you, like right thinking, right decision making, so much less back and forth.

When I brought up active meditation, I wasn't indicating that we're supposed to sit, though I know that's normally how it's depicted. There are walking meditations. When I teach it to my clients, I say, Look, you can sit between busy sub busy subway stops in New York City with on a crowded subway, and you can meditate in the 60 seconds between stops. And I'm looking forward to you explaining all of this, but the key is the focusing on the one single thing. The reason I brought up active meditation, and what I was alluding to wasn't necessarily sitting, it was that I think one of the most powerful things about meditation is when we learn to be focused and calm while active in our spine, without just curling up and falling asleep while we're meditating, while a little bit active. It's my experience, and it's my understanding that we can take that into our daily lives. If I can be calm but a little bit active when I'm meditating, active enough to sit tall, active enough to be walking and focused, I can now carry that into my driving, my relationships with other people. That's to me, the magic of meditation. It's the active relaxation component of it. That's what I was that's what I was trying to underscore earlier, when I was bringing up active relaxation. Do you have anything to add or say about that? Oh, I do, and I appreciate you clarifying that, and I love what both of you just said. I think such beautiful points of not only allowing meditation to kind of, as you turn inward, to connect with your true self, which I think of as kind of being like your internal compass. And it is really hard, especially when you're a mother, thinking about, you know, what's the right decision to make? What direction am I supposed to go here? And I also love what you're highlighting about meditation really being this practice, and that's exactly why we call it a meditation practice. There's a joke. It's a meditation practice, not a meditation perfect. But if you think about it, when you are meditating, you're trying to do single, pointed concentration. You're trying to maybe calm yourself down, whatever your intention is with your meditation practice, it's going to be the easiest to do that when you're practicing your meditation, when you have carved out time for this, when you're practicing those skills, but you're practicing to them, apply them to everyday life. So if you're working on, you know, turning in. Word, connecting with your true self, finding that internal compass. Then when you have to apply it, and you hit some kind of a crossroads, or you're trying to decide, you know, Trisha, I think you did a great job of highlighting a really common example. Do I want another child? Am I done these types of things? That's where you're taking the tools or the skills that you're building in your practice and then applying them to everyday life. That's when, like, the rubber hits the road in a way, or when you are sitting in the morning, you have your beautiful morning routine. You add your meditation practice to that that is amazing and a great way to practice. And then when you're on the subway and you need to pull in those same skills you're trying to meditate there. That's when you're taking the skills from your practice and you're applying it to like the real life, things that we're experiencing as human beings every single day. How does a mother get to that place? How do we get to the place where we can incorporate this in our daily life and without that much thinking with that when? When does it become a habit? So the first thing that you have to do, the hardest thing, is, just getting started, is getting past the I can't meditate because I have ADHD, or I don't have enough time, or I don't know how to do it, all of these things where we think, you know, meditation has a high barrier to entry. It actually does. It has a very low barrier to entry, but we do a good job of kind of with any healthy habit of coming up with reasons why we shouldn't start implementing these into our everyday life. So the toughest thing is going to be just getting started and then remembering that you only need a few minutes a day. So again, we're practicing, we're training, saying five minutes a day. That's all I'm going to do for my meditation. And then when it's over, I'm not going to think about it again. I also think a guided meditation is a beautiful place to start. It can feel a little bit scary or confusing, of like, what do I do? I don't know how to just shut my brain off. I don't know how to meditate. And so doing a guided meditation where you have a teacher, and you might have to, you know, play around a little bit until you find the teacher that you like, their style, their voice, all of that when you have someone that will just guide you through a practice. And this is not by any means, cheating, I get that question a lot. Is a guided meditation cheating? But also in yoga, people will say, if I use a block or props, am I like cheating? Somehow, not at all like that is what a guided meditation is there for. It's to guide you through a practice. And I think that's one of the easiest ways to just start a practice. Is start listening to some guided meditations. Let someone walk you through it, from point A to point B. Find a five minute practice, a six, seven minute practice and you commit yourself to two weeks of doing that. In my experience, people are most likely to quit their meditation practice or lapse on their habit building within the first two weeks, because after that two week mark, you really start to feel better. You get the you almost always feel better, more calm, a little quieter, like immediately after meditation. But I find if you do it consistently for those two weeks, that's where you start to see things like, oh my gosh, my you know, my toddler did this thing that they do that drives me nuts, and I was able to stay calm, and I wasn't reactive the way I used to. Or, oh my gosh, I was driving someone cut me off. I hear this one all the time, and I didn't get any road rage, like, I was just like, oh, they must be in a hurry. And like, those things that feel like a really big deal to us, they start to become a smaller and smaller deal. Even, you know, oh, my in laws are coming over. I'm really stressed about it. I'm really anxious about it. It just starts to get a little bit smaller and smaller, really, after that two week point. So that's where I find is like the sweet spot when you're really starting is guided meditations a few minutes, but you are both experienced meditators, so I'd love to hear your input on this.

What I like to tell those who are beginning meditation is, it's fine to start with guided meditation, because your whole intention and meditation is simply to come down to the present. And how do we come down to the present? We focus on what is right here and now. So that's why you hear about the breath so often. And if you want to get really subtle, maybe you'll just focus on like, the fact that the air feels cool coming into your nostrils and warm coming out, the feeling of this seat underneath you. If your hands are a little bit crossed, you feel you suddenly are aware that where your skin touches the air, it's much cooler than the skin that's in contact with your other hand. But there's nothing wrong with guided meditation, because what you're practicing is something that's perhaps a little easier to focus on. You're focusing on someone's words that is still in your present. It's still legit to focus on a guided meditation, and as the mind wanders, of course, the whole art is, how quickly can you come back to what you're focusing on? So I'm glad that you're giving permission for this, because it is full on legitimate meditation. And. If you want to challenge yourself over time, you can then pursue what's increasingly subtle, like, I'm just going to focus on my breath now. I'm just going to focus on the sensation of the air in the room the whole time.

I love that, yeah, and I think over time too. Something that I encourage my students to do is when they feel like and some people just stick with guided meditations for forever, which is also totally fine and great. But I'll start to encourage my students to start asking themselves, what do I need today, or what would feel good to me today? And that might be focusing on my breath, or, you know what, I'm having some big feelings. So I just want to sit with those feelings and let them exist and work on releasing them. And as you start to become more experienced with meditation, you can start to do some more self driven practices, or more intuitive practices, where you can sort of just figure out what you need, and then start to support yourself in that through meditation.

So when I was learning meditation, I kept it really simple, and I still actually do my meditation this way, and it's very, very basic. I picked three words and created my own mantra, and I'm happy to share some of those words. Usually it'll be something like clarity, peace, joy, happiness, something like that, some simple things, and I literally just sit down. I like to set a timer because I don't like to think about time. And I kind of want to, I don't know, maybe that is anti meditative, but I set a timer in the background. I like to just sit down, not worry about time. Just know that, you know, I'm committing to 10 minutes today, or 13 minutes, or 17 minutes, or try to build up to 20 minutes, but I started with 10, and I literally just repeat those three words. And it's so simple, because it gives my mind a little something to do, but so it doesn't distract very much, but it's not complicated. Like, Oh, I'm trying to think about relaxing every part of my body, or I'm trying to say some complicated mantra that my yoga teacher taught me. It's just like hones in really quickly and really easily. And eventually, when I do that for a while, the words start to go away. I don't need to say them anymore, and I'm just sort of in that trance like state. It just gets me there. And then after you do it for a few weeks, then your body craves it. I physically will crave it. Now, I have been out of meditation for a little while now, so I'm going to be very inspired to get back into it after this conversation. But once you start doing it, you literally can't not do it, because your body will just like, gravitate toward it and be like, I need that relaxation, I need that release, I need that comb, and then it becomes so easy. But why do you think it's so hard to start? Because when I'm out of it, I can walk by. I have a great little meditation center in my room. It's beautiful. It's like, very inspiring. You want to go sit down there, and I walk by it over and over and over and be like, No, I can't do it right now. No, I can't do it right now. Why is that? Because it's not like we're physically doing something hard. It's, it's literally just sitting Why is that so uncomfortable and hard for people? I think there's maybe two things going on, in my opinion. One, I do think the mind doesn't like to be controlled. It doesn't like, I mean, our minds like to go wild even think about, you know, earlier you're speaking to even postpartum anxiety, which is something I really struggled with with my first born, and then I was really proactive to have a different experience with my second. But like, Man, can that mind go crazy, crazy places, and just it does not like to be contained. And I think that there's that component that the mind doesn't necessarily want to be controlled or in control, that it likes to kind of just go wherever it wants to go. And I also think there's a secondary component where we sometimes really struggle to do the things that we know are good for us, sleep being another one. We know we should go to bed a little bit earlier. We know we should maybe put our phones away even 30 minutes instead of laying there Doom scrolling until we eventually close our eyes and go to sleep. And I was reading some interesting work on self sabotage and this idea of self sabotage being an underlying belief that we don't deserve something. So we will kind of engage in self sabotage in these little ways because we think we're either not worthy, we're not deserving, or, Oh, I could never and so if we think that we're already going to fail before we've started, we will sabotage that behavior, and I found that to be so interesting when thinking about meditation, because it is simple. It is not to necessarily say it's easy, because it can be extremely challenging, even for a few minutes, but it is simple, the concept of it, the practice of it simple, not always easy. It's short. You don't need any special equipment. Moment. You know, I could, you know, we could all leave our time together and go even just close our computer screens and start meditating right now, it's simple, not always easy, but I think if we already have this internal belief of, I'm not going to be able to do it, so then we don't want to try, or, oh my gosh, I don't think I could ever be that like calm mom that just, you know, kind of floats through, isn't reactive, is always very present with her children. Or maybe I don't deserve to start feeling happier or speaking to myself with kindness and compassion. Or maybe I don't deserve those five minutes of what feels like, quote, selfish time, just for me. So I think it's a kind of a two fold thing where the mind, it doesn't want to be controlled. It will resist. It will try to distract you. It will say, Oh no, no, don't focus. Think about your to do list. Think about what you're going to pick up at Target later today. Think about, you know, that awful thing happening on a different side of the world, it doesn't want to be controlled. And also, is there something in there where you feel like you don't deserve it, and then maybe unpack that? That's also something that I think is really great to sit with in meditation, is we practice kind of non judgmental observation, so sitting and just observing and asking yourself, why don't I meditate? Or why do I have such a hard time doing that and then without judgment, just observing what comes to mind, and you can do this for anything, and just sit and observe without judgment, is such a powerful practice.

It's a tenant of yoga as well. No surprise that they're so closely related. But in yoga, when you I've been practicing yoga for more than 20 years, you learn early on. First of all, never look at another person's mat. Refuse the temptation to glance. If someone gets up mid practice and leaves the room, you are focusing only on yourself. But when you get to those really challenging poses, you can sometimes fall right down. And if you have a good teacher, as I did, you truly train your brain not to judge yourself. You're holding a balancing pose. You're holding something really difficult. You fall down. Your brain doesn't judge it, you don't feel embarrassment, you don't feel bad about yourself. You just continue. And that is a life altering place to be. I think meditation. I'm always thinking about it myself. What, like, what? Why not meditate so frequently. It is effort. It's effort. And the funny thing about it is, when you do it, it's effort coming out. It's hard to come out of it, because it just feels so good when you're in it, and you kind of have to pull yourself out because, you know, there's a part of your brain going, Oh, just a little longer. Just a little longer. I want to come back to something you said, though that was completely new for me, and it was exciting to hear you talk about it. In yoga, we always talk about having intention. You're never supposed to get on that mat without intention. You take a moment to say, Why am I getting on the mat today? Is it to be become strong and powerful? Is it to let go? Oh, I just need to let go. You know what? Why are we showing up? And when you are connected to that intention, you truly infuse your intention into every movement of your body. You hold your poses differently because of that intention. I've never heard it said before that we can have intention with meditation. Is that something that you came up with in your experience, or is that like a known part of the practice? I mean, it's so interesting to I can't believe I never put that together. But can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, you know, that is so interesting. I think I certainly am not taking credit for coming up with that. That's not a me thing. I think it's something that maybe, as I started to shift from practicing meditation to teaching meditation and seeing so many different people coming to meditation for different reasons, it really did start to kind of illuminate this idea that everyone does have a different intention with meditation, whether it be kind of a broad intention of, I want to soften the blow of anxiety in my life, or it's something really specific. Of, I want to work on my breath retainment. It can be something where I've worked with athletes, high performing athletes, of wanting to improve their mental performance and their mental resilience, the one through line is no one comes to meditation when everything's going well, it just doesn't happen. Because if everything's going well, we're happy, we're balanced, we're so present, we're feeling great. No one's like, this would be the time to then start building even more great habits, because we really only start looking for fixes when we feel like we have problems. And so I think after years of working with people on whatever they perceive to be their quote problem, which is sort of like loaded language, because we all have stuff in the human experience, but that it really showed me that we do have to. Intentions. When it comes to meditation, there's different you can call it goals, if you want, or things that we want to focus on. And I think that when you do anything with intention, it makes it more powerful. Even if it's playing with my children, I can just sit there and, you know, kind of play with them and go through the motions, but then I also know what it's like to be intentional with playing with my children being there, you can, you know, drive, and it's like you're half on autopilot. But you also can drive with intention. I think you can do anything with intention. We're used to hearing about the word intention in yoga and other particular like mind body practices, but the same applies to meditation, that you can do it not only with intention, but with an intention in mind when you start practicing, or as your practice develops.

One thing I wish everyone would understand about meditation is that you don't ever arrive you are an expert in teaching it, and you're very experienced in practicing it on a regular basis, and it's, I wish people would understand that even for you, it's an it's a practice. For everyone, it's a practice. The whole art is, can I keep my focus and can I reign in that mind that wants to follow the thoughts and not to think that they need to get somewhere? It's just, it's always a practice, and it just kind of clears the slate. If you have a nice meditation session, you clear the slate a bit, you clear the cobwebs, or however you think about it, but there's no place you arrive. No one just sits down and suddenly it's easy, and they just relish in meditation. It's always that initial initiation effort when you sit down, do you agree with that 100%

I always say over on my podcast, there's no boss level, meaning it's not a video game that you're going to hit this level and then that level, and then at some point there's going to be like the boss level. And then I've beaten the game. It is not like that at all. There are no like levels. There's no and I think sometimes we have a tendency to really want to kind of quantify our progress, in a way, and say, Oh, I, you know. And you can do that in some ways with meditation, where I used to struggle to sit for five minutes, now I'm sitting 10 minutes with ease. But there is no, like you said, final destination. There's no time you've ever like beaten meditation. You've mastered it. It's when you're working with the mind, your body, your emotions, all of this, it just grows with you, and it continues to support you and evolve. But there's never really an ending point. It's just this continual journey that hopefully we will take for the progress of our lives and let it support us throughout that journey. Can we get into tips for maths? Okay, yeah.

So tips for starting a practice, maintaining a practice, all the above, yes, particularly with young children, I think, and particularly probably starting for most absolutely so when you're starting a meditation practice, especially if you have younger kids, these are my tips. The first is going to be, you are going to practice that non judgmental space within your own heart and apply it to your meditation practice. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to say, I'm committing to two weeks of daily meditation. I'm not going to be hard on myself as to what that looks like. I'm going to do a few minutes. And when it's done, it's done. I'm not gonna, you know, psychoanalyze it. I'm not gonna, you know, let it turn into this big bad thing. Also, I find that people have the most success if they either do the first 10 minutes of the day or the last 10 minutes of the day. So when you kind of do a little bit of like habit stacking, if you will, but hopefully every single night you go to bed at night, you wake up again in the morning, if we're lucky, that might be the only consistent thing in your entire day. Stuff pops up even before, you know, we recorded this. I said, Oh, I got this call from my son's school that I had to take things pop up in life. So when you sync up your meditation to either right when you wake up or right before you go to bed, I find people have the most success of sticking with it, because that might be your only consistent thing in the day. If you are not a morning person, this is another tip. Don't try to become a morning meditation person. If that sounds like torture to you, don't do it. Set yourself up for success if you're like you know what? I would rather use meditation at night to kind of quiet my mind and calm down before bed. Amazing. Do that if you already have a morning routine that you'd like to weave meditation into. Great do that set yourself up for success by implementing meditation in a way that feels authentic to who you are, instead of doing it the way you, quote, think it should be done, or that we see on social media. Another tip would be, start with guided meditations. So we already talked about that. You know, obviously I would love to have everyone come over to mindful minutes or meditation, Mama, the invitation is open. But there's other great things. There's Insight Timer, calm app, YouTube, you can find it anywhere. Another tip would be, I. To incorporate your kids into it. I know that a lot of the time we want to say no meditation is for me, but maybe from time to time, this is something that I wrote a book called meditation for the modern family that's all about, how do you weave meditation into the family system? If we really can't find the time to be alone, is there a way we can incorporate our children into it so it can feel like this nice connection that we're having, and also we're modeling this form of self care and intentional introspection for our children as well. So if we really feel like we can't make the time, can we kind of open arms and invite our little ones into the practice with us? This could be doing a meditation maybe while you're nursing, if you have a little one, this could be sitting with your toddler for even 30 seconds. My son and I, he's three, we love to do what's called dandelion breath. So it's like you pick an imaginary dandelion Big breath in. As you breathe out, you're blowing all the seeds out. Can you do that for even 30 seconds? And kind of model this behavior and get the really beautiful benefits of that mindfulness in the moment for the two of you. So those are kind of my big go to tips. But I'm curious if the two of you have anything to add.

I would say for those with kids who are a little bit older, what was really helpful for me was to pick the half an hour before my kids got home from school and just block that time off for myself. So I didn't take work calls during that time. I That time is just like usually three o'clock, which is also the perfect time of day for a nap. So if you're already in the habit of naps from being a postpartum mom, as you may not need naps anymore, or if you want a nap some days, or meditate some days. But meditation, for me is like a nap. It replaces a nap. It makes me feel as rested as a nap. So that time of day is great, and then the kids would come home and I would be a lot more calm.

I remember when you did that, Trisha, I remember how good that timing was for you, 3pm a day, three o'clock. And the reason Trisha said that's a perfect time for a nap is that we get a little mini spike of melatonin around 3pm every day. So that's and a dip in cortisol. And what? And a dip in cortisol, a dip in cortisol. So that's why you feel it, don't they? Yeah, why you feel that low? But Kelly mentioning meditating in the morning, it's such good advice. I never did that. I was always more of a mid afternoon and sometimes evening meditator, but the morning is such good advice for those who are willing to try it, because our mind is basically at our calmest. In the morning, things haven't started happening yet. Mid afternoon, it's like, oh, God, I need to meditate. My mind is swimming with things, and that's the drive. But it is so much easier when you just wake up and you're willing to not jump up and brush your teeth right away. You're willing to just sit tall on the edge of your bed and just take a few moments. I think that's a really good thing to try, if people can. Now, when I had little children, I was woken up by my children. I don't, you know, I wouldn't use without waking myself up, so that wasn't really possible. It's you have to be creative.

And I think the other important tip is you kind of touched on it. Like, if you sit down to do it and it doesn't work, you only get five minutes in, like, good just congratulate yourself. Like, feel good about that, and try five minutes later in the day, I give moms who are trying to pump and increase their breast milk. The same advice, like, just start get through whatever amount of minutes you can. And if you get interrupted, it's fine, no big deal. Like you did it just and then you can always just pick it up later today, like, make the barrier to entry really low.

Yes, I love that so much. And I think that not letting your meditation practice be something that either a feels like another thing you quote, have to do, or it feels like this thing that becomes a stressor in your life, like, let it be low stakes, let it be casual. Let it just be whatever it is, and then, and then, we're fine with that. Don't let your meditation practice add to your mental load, your you know, to do list or your stress, it should be something that helps to support you. Just let it be easy.

Thank you for joining us at the Down To Birth Show. You can reach us @downtobirthshow on Instagram or email us at Contact@DownToBirthShow.com. All of Cynthia’s classes and Trisha’s breastfeeding services are offered live online, serving women and couples everywhere. Please remember this information is made available to you for educational and informational purposes only. It is in no way a substitute for medical advice. For our full disclaimer visit downtobirthshow.com/disclaimer. Thanks for tuning in, and as always, hear everyone and listen to yourself.

Have either of you had any profound meditation experiences?

I I have Trisha? Have you?

I would say yes. I would say yes. I am. For me, mostly it's about the intuitive hits that I would get in meditation, like things would just drop into my mind, and then that thing would happen. It would just like come to be I love that

my mine was when I was practicing very regularly, and on Sunday nights I was going to a meditation gathering, I started having an experience, and I haven't had it now in years, but it was how and it was happening so often. It was incredible. I the way I would describe it, who knows what it was, but I was going into my consciousness, was deep into the universe, and I was just like this, watching explosions all around me in the universe, colors and explosions. I mean, I was in the universe, and it was incredible. And happened again. And it happened again and again. And it was just like, the most exciting I've never done drugs. I was just like, This must be what it's like to do, like LSD or something, because I was there and it was something I was regularly experiencing. I asked each of my meditation teachers about it. The first one, she was so smart, I brought it up, and I was just almost afraid to talk about it. I should have listened to my instinct, but I asked about it, and she was this fabulous, brilliant, charming, funny old woman and a Buddhist. And she said, You know what I say to that Cynthia, n, b, d, no big deal. And she didn't want me to make it a thing. And that was exactly when I started thinking about it and craving it and wanting it, that became the blockage to it. And then I asked my other yoga instructor a few years later about it. I said, Can you shed light on this experience I had years ago? It was just, it was just magical, and I haven't had it since, but I was having it all the time. And he's, I don't know if he's right or not, but he said that's actually like a very low level meditation. He's like, he's like, sorry. He said, like, that's a low level. He said, like, that's one of the first, like in the strata. That's like a lower level after that. You have this after that. You have that after that. He said something about like, something like radiating from the crown, and ultimately, like a Nirvana experience. So he was like, Yes, of course, I know what that is. And so that, that's all I have to say about it. That's that was my experience. But I loved it. It was just, it was the most exciting, beautiful thing. I mean, I have conviction that I was in the universe.