The Headspace Guide To … A Mindful Pregnancy (10 page)

When the news is confirmed that, yes, we are bringing a tiny human being into the world, we are effectively being landed with a baby on our doorstep. Planned or unplanned, an adjustment is required. On the basis that the pregnancy goes ahead, and short of running for the hills, this life-changing event is going to happen in 9–8–7–6–5–4–3–2–1 months. The countdown has already begun, even if the news hasn’t quite sunk in yet.

The spectrum of emotions experienced will be incredibly wide-ranging and will vary from person to person, but I think it’s fair to say that, on the most basic of scales, the reaction usually bounces between shock/surprise, fear/excitement, optimism/pessimism. We all have an underlying predisposition to a certain emotional tendency, even if we practise mindfulness. For most people, I think the reaction oscillates between joy and nervousness – joy at first, followed by a less vocal nervousness when the news settles in; or perhaps vice versa when the pregnancy is unintended. Some people seem to move from the intellect into the experience almost immediately, sensing the life-changing nature of what is about to take place. For others, it’s a bit like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re pregnant … how interesting’, but the magnitude of the event doesn’t necessarily hit home until the first scan or baby’s first kick.

As a man who had one day wanted a family (and yes, the irony that I had chosen to be a monk is not lost on me), I couldn’t have been happier at the news when we discovered Lucinda was pregnant. I remember the euphoria. But I imagine it’s a different experience if you hadn’t planned on becoming pregnant, or if you’ve only been dating for a few months. Obviously, the emotions will be very different if the news comes as a surprise.

Whatever the circumstances, the romanticised, conceptual, intellectual understanding of pregnancy is a world away from the reality of ‘This is happening!’ The thought is not experienced in the same way you thought before – it is now
felt
in every part of your being. It’s a bit like the difference between entertaining the thrilling
idea
of snowboarding down Everest and thinking how cool it would be, and if someone were to actually take you to the top and say, ‘We’re doing this!’ The mind would naturally behave a little differently.

Of all of life’s events, getting pregnant is one of the big ones. It’s a step into the unknown, and we all enter into it with zero experience and nothing but our instincts (and perhaps a few pregnancy books) to hand. And because our instincts and idea of things are all we have to go on, it’s understandable that it can feel completely overwhelming.

But the truth, in the precise moment, is that nothing has changed.

I know, I know, that’s not how the mind wants to interpret it, but in this moment, right now, nothing circumstantially has changed. Yes, you may be experiencing some initial physiological reactions but, outwardly, all remains the same. I say this because so much of our stress is caused by our thinking as we anticipate what
might
be, rather than what
is
. Ask yourself this: how much of your time is spent being present with the new sensations you feel, and how much is spent caught up in an inner dialogue that insists on leaping ahead and projecting into the future?

It is worth returning here to what we explored in Chapter 4, looking to see how each one of the four foundations applies to this situation: an appreciation of
precious human life
– the ability to bring another human being into the world is an incredible gift, something to be deeply grateful for;
impermanence
– life changes all the time and, for the next three quarters of a year, your body will alter month by month, week by week, day by day;
cause and effect
– you are here, planned or unplanned, due to your own actions or duff equipment; and
suffering
– in the days ahead, there will be some discomfort, but there will also be joy. The challenge now is to take the journey step by step, moment by moment, with a sense of gentle purpose and a calm mind that is at ease with itself.

Like most parents, I remember vividly where I was the day my entire world changed. It was 6am on a cold, dark London morning. Lucinda and I were back from LA, visiting our respective families for Christmas. We were staying in Notting Hill at the flat of a friend who had kindly let us have the run of the place while she was out of town.

On this particular December morning, my taxi had been booked and was due within fifteen minutes to take me to Heathrow. Lucinda was heading off to visit her parents and, in the back of my mind, I remembered our conversation the previous day before dinner. She had been out running – my wife would pound the pavements and run for miles whenever she got the chance – and had noticed that her breasts were more tender and that she ‘felt different’. Her intuition told her that she might be pregnant.

‘Are you sure?’ I had said. Just five months earlier, we had been sitting inside a sperm bank, ahead of me having the operation for testicular cancer, wondering if we’d ever be able to have kids at all.

At the time it was hard to imagine there ever being space for a baby: we had recently moved to California, I’d just had cancer, Headspace was growing by the day, we had team members relocating from the UK and a travel schedule which made me wince. So, as much as I felt a huge amount of responsibility to my wife, I also felt responsibility for the team. In short, the plate was pretty full.

But it turns out that there was room for a little bit of gravy.

I was sitting on the end of the bed, tying my shoelaces, when I noticed Lucinda standing there – the bright bathroom lights turning her into a silhouette in the doorway.

‘It’s blue,’ she said, holding out the pregnancy-testing stick in her hand.

I don’t remember her saying anything after that. I just remember her coming over and hugging me in what was an incredibly emotional moment for us both.

Once she and I had dried our eyes, we realised that we only had about ten minutes left before my taxi arrived. Ten minutes together to share, process and quickly discuss this monumental news before I was out of the door and gone for a week. Then she’d be alone with the news, keeping it to herself because we had agreed that if there was any news, we would hold off telling our families until Christmas Day. I flew off to I can’t remember where, with my mind in some kind of paralysis. It was quiet rather than spinning – almost in a state of suspended disbelief. If any thought lodged in my mind, it was the one that contemplated Lucinda being on her own in the UK without me there to offer support.

Meanwhile, her mind, as she would tell me later, was off the charts, visiting every possible destination in the future.
Oh, God, how are we going to do this?
and
How am I going to go through this in LA, without my family?
and
Where am I going to find a doctor?
and
Are we really going to be able to afford this?
and so on and so forth. And this is one of the tougher mental challenges at such times: how to stay present when the mind wants nothing more than to jump ahead.

The mind can be erratic at the best of times, but the news of a pregnancy will affect its propensity to career around like nothing else. Whether that means looking to the past (family health issues, old magazine articles, birthing horror stories or the bottle of wine you drank last week) or jumping to the future (organising, planning and anticipating everything up until your – as yet unborn – child’s eighteenth birthday party). Left unattended and approached unskilfully, the questions, checklists and concerns will arrive like incoming planes at the world’s busiest airport, leaving the mind stacked with thoughts.

I’m not suggesting we repress or dismiss what arises in the mind – this is not the approach of mindfulness. What I am suggesting is that we are fully conscious of what arises, avoiding the temptation to get sucked into an endless spiral of thinking, or swept away by the overwhelming emotions. Where the partner is concerned, and especially in those cases where the pregnancy is unplanned, Dr Amersi encourages the men to be with their mixed feelings away from the mother at first. ‘Instead, remain supportive because, out of all the times, this is where the partner’s emotional strength is needed.’

I have included an exercise at the back of the book (see
here
–
here
) that addresses the moment when the news is received, and which will help you to stay grounded at this head-spinning time. Instead of being so reactive, we see a thought arise, we acknowledge it and learn to let it go. Rather than fuelling emotions with yet more thinking, we instead learn to feel them as they wash over us, neither trying to encourage or resist their journey, simply letting nature take its course as we watch them pass by.

While I would never say that mindfulness makes this process easy, I know from my own experience, and that of many others, that at the time of hearing the news, the practice of meditation and the application of mindfulness can make the world of difference. I can only imagine what my mind would have been like without this support; for that reason alone I cannot recommend it enough. Even then, I still found thoughts popping up every now and then.
Will Lucinda be OK in childbirth? Will the baby survive? Will I faint in the hospital?
But rather than making me feel more stressed, that increased sense of perspective made me smile at my thoughts instead.

To begin with, as you embark on a mindful pregnancy, the untrained mind will want to dart all over the place. The reason it reacts in this way is because the news suddenly transports you from a place of security to insecurity, from certainty to uncertainty and from knowing to not knowing. Disconnected from reality, the mind conjures up concepts to help reason with the unknown. If you are one of those people who needs to know what is going to happen, you will already be able to associate with this feeling. It’s almost as if the mind would rather focus on the fear and worry in a hypothetical future than face the void and uncertainty in the here and now; it would rather be caught up in the restlessness and chatter of inner dialogue than kick back and relax with nothing to do. But when you train the mind a little bit, you see the trickery, you see the illusions, you see the games that you have been playing, albeit unintentionally, with yourself your entire life.

This brings me to an important question that gets asked a lot on the Headspace community pages: ‘How do we plan for the future while staying in the present?’

To be clear then: thinking is not a bad thing.

There is productive thinking and unproductive thinking. There is thinking that allows us to feel more at ease and confident as to where we are going; conversely, there is thinking we are mostly ignorant of, that leads us to get caught up in everything. So the key is to
think ahead with awareness,
while staying in the present.

For example, we can sit here and think,
OK, so this is happening, what do we need to do?
In that pragmatic sense, we are conscious of our intention, motivation and practical needs. That’s very different from sitting on the loo and allowing the mind to drift into the future; and then, while making a cup of tea twenty minutes later, still being locked in that same thought stream; and, another half an hour later, being slouched on the sofa, looking at the TV, but not watching it, because the imagined future is still churning away, leaving us in a trance. In no way can this be considered productive or helpful.

This unproductive thinking comes from a place of chaos, even in the most relaxing situations. Because of this chaos, there is no clarity, and therefore our ability to make decisions is impaired. In contrast, productive thinking comes from a place of calm, even in the most difficult of situations. Because of that calm, there is clarity of thought and, therefore, a sense of perspective and better decision-making ability. This clarity also provides us with a feeling of contentedness; and it is that sense of contentment that gives us the mental space to be just as concerned for the happiness of others, as we are for our own, otherwise known as compassion. Remember the four Cs: calm, clarity, contentment and compassion.

The beauty of pregnancy is the fact that there is a relatively long period of time to train the mind; a chance to treat our head right, reassess and readjust. This is the purpose of the Meditation Exercises at the back of the book and the programmes we offer at Headspace. Of course, how we adjust, and how easily we let go, is largely down to how much we try and hold on to our old life, our ideas about how we believe things should be and quite possibly our entire sense of identity and self.

Who we think we are, and how we want others to see us, are a pretty big deal when it comes to pregnancy, because this joyous news, this natural biological function, can play mayhem with our sense of identity. It yanks at the roots of our self-image, a whole lifetime in creation. It also redefines how others might see us from hereon in, forever to be a mum, a dad, a parent – all those things that once seemed to belong to those older folk like … well, our mums, our dads.

There will be many people for whom parenthood has been a lifelong ambition, and they may well embrace this new-found identity with nothing but glee: this is what they wanted; this is where they wanted to be. But just as likely, there will be women – with equal motivation to become a mother – who find this new label and role to be inexplicably challenging to the ego, to the point that the sense of shock can be quite profound. Again, there are nine months to get used to the idea but, for some, even that is not long enough.

And this should really come as no surprise. From the earliest age, we begin to establish a sense of self – an individuality as someone separate from our parents and the world around us. As we get older, this developing persona is projected to the outside world; if the world reflects back its approval (or disapproval if that’s what we’re seeking), this identity is reinforced and we tend to cherish it somewhat, further projecting that image into the world. Needless to say, if our projection does not work quite as planned (think back to that purple hair in your teens or the nose ring at uni), then we might tweak that image until we get to something that both we and those around us find a little more comfortable.