Motherhood as Enlightenment
Hi all! Today is a fun episode - a few years ago, toward the end of my master’s degree program, one of my assignments was to prepare a presentation, like a Ted Talk on what we were studying. I thought it was great, which is probably a good sign for someone who eventually went on to start a podcast. I researched how to give a great ted talk and all that stuff. Unfortunately I didn’t record it at the time but I obviously kept all my notes and so here, today, I’m going to recreate that presentation on Motherhood as Enlightenemnt . I hope you enjoy it!
You want to know the last time I had a spiritual experience? It was not at a meditation retreat, although I’ve done those. It was not on my yoga mat, even though I’ve been a practitioner for over twenty years.
No, my most recent spiritual experience was watching my 6 year old daughter attempt to tie her own shoes. The amount of patience and focus it took for me to simply sit and be present was greater than anything I’ve ever felt at any meditation retreat.
Sure, I could have done it myself or hurried her up. But we were running late, and anyone who has ever been in that situation knows that rushing makes it take longer. So I simply sat, allowed myself to feel into my impatience and just watched her concentrate and be completely present in the moment. Eventually, I felt a sense of oneness. I felt a blurring of reality as time folded in on itself and I remembered learning how to tie my own shoes. This allowed me to feel even more connected with my daughter and share in her pure delight when she finally tied that last knot and looked up at me proudly.
Today I want to talk about redefining motherhood as a spiritual path to enlightenment. Forget about renouncing all your possessions and going to sit on the side of a mountain in solitude. That path is way too easy! Instead, we’re going to learn how to dive right into the challenges of motherhood as an express ticket to spiritual evolution.
But first, why is this important?
If you type into google “Why is motherhood…” here are some autofill options:
why is motherhood so hard
why is motherhood important
why is motherhood so lonely
why is motherhood so exhausting
why is motherhood so stressful
why is motherhood glorified
why is motherhood so overwhelming
why is motherhood rewarding
why is motherhood harder than fatherhood
Out of 9 autofill options, only 1 or 2 of them were positive. Mothers are unhappy. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the painful truth that our capitalist society does not value motherwork. When millions of people left the paid workforce for the unpaid work of motherhood, many were forced to evaluate what truly gives their life meaning and purpose. As we are now settling into a post-pandemic world, we have the opportunity to redefine motherhood, not as a heternormative, patriarchal institution, but as a potentially enlightening experience that offers spiritual awakening.
Of course, reframing motherhood as a spiritual path to enlightenment doesn’t solve all our problems, as I’ll address later. And I firmly believe that motherhood is a catalyst for spiritual growth, but not if someone is forced to be a mother before they are ready, and the overturn of the federal protection of Roe vs Wade has already resulted in unnecessary pain, anguish and even death for families in the US. But hopefully, this new way of looking at motherhood as enlightenment can help mothers feel more empowered, more secure in their inherent worth and maybe, a little bit happier.
Before I jump in, let me clarify this: who gets to count as a mother?
As Andrea O’Reilly has stated, the identity of mother is distinct from the category of woman. With the inclusion of “birthing person” in the US budget last year, we can finally publicly acknowledge that just as not all women are mothers, not all mothers identify as women.
This presentation honors that anyone who takes on the work of nurturing, loving and raising a child, what Patricia Hill Collins terms motherwork, counts as a mother, regardless of gender or biological relationship to the child.
Separating gender from motherhood allows us to expand even further WHO gets to identify as doing motherwork, and I’m really excited about the future conversations this will spark, especially as we work to get fathers and other male-identified people more involved in raising children. Do I think fatherhood offers spiritual opportunities? Sure, absolutely, and I hope someone comes up with that presentation soon!
I also want to clarify that when I talk about motherhood as a spiritual path, I am NOT saying that motherhood is some kind of sacred purpose or spiritual calling for women. Because it can fall into that category and that’s not what this is. Those are essentialist narratives that continue to trap mothers in this patriarchal institution that says “motherhood is your sole purpose and highest calling in life, and your worth is dependent on becoming a mother because this is they way God has designed you and it is your divine responsibility to do so.”
Instead, my suggestion is that we reframe motherhood into a spiritual path, that position is a consciously chosen act of resistance to the patriarchal institution that devalues motherhood. It takes the act of motherwork and turns it from a child-centered activity into an opportunity for a spiritual evolution of the MOTHER.
You don’t have to give birth to be a mother, or to raise a child. That being said, the biological experiences of conception, pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding can all be transcendent experiences akin to a spiritual journey. Interestingly, a 2016 study from duke university suggests that oxytocin, the hormone released during both childbirth and breastfeeding, supports heightened spirituality. Personally, the births of my three children were profoundly transformative. Pregnancy, birth, and the early days of motherhood should be celebrated as a rite of passage as important as any other transition in our life, if not more so.
So there may be a biological impetus to motherhood as a spiritual journey, and that definitely warrants further conversation.
But these biological experiences in no way discount the fact that even if someone didn’t birth or breastfeed a child, they will spend decades raising them, and there is vast opportunity for spiritual growth in the work of raising children. That’s what I’m most interested in today: What does it mean to consider motherhood as a spiritual path?
Well, what if instead of thinking of ourselves as humans striving for spirituality, we consider that we are already divine, and we are actually spiritual beings in a human existence? When I talk about motherhood as a spiritual path, I’m not saying that raising children will turn you into some sort of ethereal being wrapped in an aura of light. That would be really distracting at the next PTA meeting.
No, when I talk about motherhood as a spiritual path, I’m really talking about the parallels we find between motherhood and many spiritual traditions. Some of the examples include directives like performing acts of selfless service, being present, releasing your Ego, and seeing the sacred joy in everyday acts.
Some might ask, doesn’t religion take care of all this? Why does motherhood need to be seen as a path to enlightenment anyway?
Well, many religions include systems of hierarchy, with leaders, who are mostly men. This creates an intermediary between a person and, what could be called God, the Universe, Source, the Divine, whatever you’d like to call it. Religion, especially Western religions, often enforces a separation from our own divinity. There is human, and then there is divine. These religions have left many people, especially women, feeling disconnected from a true spiritual practice that represents them.
But if we can reframe motherhood into a path of spirituality, we can start to believe in our own divinity. We recognize that we can be our own spiritual leaders, and spiritual leaders for our children. We don’t have to wait until an afterlife to feel the sense of something divinely greater than ourselves, we recognize it in the beautiful, sacred, and messy everyday acts of motherhood.
So let’s talk about some examples, shall we? Exactly how IS motherhood a spiritual path?
First let’s talk about performing acts of selfless service. Several years ago, during my advanced yoga teacher training, I learned about a path of Yoga called Karma Yoga. Karma Yoga, mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita, is a spiritual path in which one achieves enlightenment through the actions of selfless service. It is these acts of selfless service that demonstrate devotion to God, or a higher power. Of course, when the Gita was written, over 2,000 years ago, the access to this path of devotion was limited to men.
Even as recently as 1896, when Swami Vivekananda published the book Karma Yoga: The Yoga of Action, he assumed the readership to be male. He wrote that it takes years of struggle before men can even hope to perform work completely unselfishly, and that as soon as they do, they will have reached enlightenment.
This is where motherhood gives us an express ticket. It did not take me years of motherhood to begin performing acts of selfless service, it took me mere hours after birthing my firstborn. Breastfeeding was the first of countless acts I have completed in the service of another human being. Even now, as a mother of three kids aged 12, 9 and 6, my life is filled with moments where I am doing unselfish work, in fact, I often spend MOST of my time doing work that I’d really rather not be doing, setting aside any “selfish” acts until the work of mothering is complete.
How about being present?
Living in the present moment is one of the cornerstones of a spiritual practice. If you’re always thinking about the past or worrying about the future, life just passes you by.
To live with young children is to be required to live in the present. Babies need to be fed, cuddled, sung to, cleaned, and comforted, and when they express these needs, they mean NOW. And nothing brings you to the present quite like your child fearfully calling to you because of a nightmare, or delightedly showing you the fuzzy caterpillar they’ve captured, or tearfully explaining how their friend was mean to them at lunch time.
All of these interactions with our children bring us to the present. I’m gonna be honest, sometimes it’s really frustrating to be pulled away from something in order to give my attention to my kids and I’m often not completely present with them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “Mom, mom, mom, mom! Watch me! Mom, mom! Watch this!”
But, as Jon Kabat-Zinn writes in his classic mindfulness book, Wherever You Go, There You Are, “these trials are not impediments to either parenting or mindfulness practice. They are the practice, if you can remember to see it this way.” (251) Motherhood is not a separate path from a spiritual practice, they are the same journey. They both take practice, a lifetime of it.
The thing is, you’re probably never going to actually GET IT. I tell my yoga students all the time, this is why it’s called a yoga PRACTICE. You’re never done, completed, checked the box - hey, I’m enlightened! I’m a perfect mother! You just spend your whole life working toward it.
We don’t think of motherhood as being something we have to practice though, and this is another reason why these parallels between motherhood as a spiritual path are important. When we reframe motherhood into something you practice daily, it takes the pressure off mothers to feel like they need to get it right, or their child will turn out wrong. My husband had to bribe my kids with pizza and root beer to take them out so I could give this presentation tonight, and that may or may not have been a great decision. We’ll see!
Now, when I start talking like this to friends and clients about motherhood as a spiritual path, it all makes sense, right? Any mothers who are listen to this episode probably recognize some of what I’m saying already as personal experience.
Except no one ever talks about motherhood like this. I’ve been a yoga practitioner for over twenty years, and none of my teachers spoke about motherhood as a spiritual practice. In fact, it was just assumed that becoming a mother meant my own yoga practice and spiritual journey would necessarily be put on hold, that I’d have to wait a few years until my babies were a little older to really dedicate myself again. It took me years of being a prenatal yoga teacher and helping countless women in their transition to motherhood, that I even began to make the connections between my spiritual practice of yoga and my motherhood experiences, and when I finally made that connection, it seemed totally revolutionary to me.
Another spiritual practice, especially in Eastern traditions, is the idea of releasing the ego. Shedding the zealous attachment to that sense of “I am.” This is where conscious parenting comes in. Dr. Shefali Tsabary, who wrote the book The Conscious Parent in 2010, has been talking for over a decade about conscious mothering and using the interactions with your child to release your ego. She explains that, as parents, we carry a belief that because we have children, we feel they belong to us, and that gives us a sense of control and power over things that we actually cannot control. Things like their emotions, their desires, their likes and dislikes.
If you’ve ever tried to give a toddler the red cup when they’d rather have the yellow cup, you know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Trust me, there is nothing more shattering to your sense of ego than having a four year old stare you down and realizing “Wow, this is not going the way I thought it should.”
Besides forcing the release of ego, children also act as a mirror to their parents’ forgotten self and inner wounds. Motherhood is such a valuable experience in self-growth because it is possibly the most triggering activity a human can engage in, and when you’re getting triggered by your child, it’s revealing to you areas where you need healing.
Whenever your child is acting out and you can feel yourself getting angry or frustrated; when you are talking with your partner about how to raise your children and you inexplicably start feeling threatened or scared; when your friend’s perfectly behaved toddler makes you feel ashamed by your own child’s behavior: these are all examples of triggers.
So, we’ve covered some of the ways in which motherhood acts as a spiritual path. What now? What do we do with this new awareness?
Reframing motherhood into a spiritual path is a big step in empowering mothers. But it has even bigger implications. It positions motherhood as a site of cultural revolution.
We have isolated mothers by placing them on false pedestals. I have been told so many times “you’re doing the most important job in the world,” but the words ring hollow when there are few, if any, social systems designed to support me as a mother. I can talk about motherhood as a spiritual path all day long, but the harsh reality is that for many mothers, they’re just trying to make it through the day. A mother needs to have basic physiological and safety needs met before this path is applicable. And in a capitalist economy, even these basic needs like food, water, shelter, and healthcare, all cost money.
In the United states, our policies around motherhood are abysmal, and many were made worse by the pandemic. In addition to these issues facing mothers, we are still living in the systems of what bell hooks calls imperialist, white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism. There are deep and systemic issues across all our institutions, policies, relationships and education.
But here is where motherhood is akin to a spiritual path of enlightenment, and where it intersects with social justice. Remember earlier, when I talked about how motherhood and spirituality are both lifelong practices? It’s the same with social justice. It's ALL lifelong work. You’ll likely screw up over and over again and you always have the opportunity to learn more and do better. And the more we recognize that, the more opportunities we have to build resilience, develop tools, and find community support so that when we DO screw up, we can get right back to it.
The beauty AND the work lies in understanding that you are going to fail sometimes, AND you still put in the effort as though you will get there. Motherhood as a spiritual path is less about ambition and striving to get it correct, and more about right action, right relationship, discernment, and compassion. That is how embracing motherhood as a path to enlightenment is actually a radical act that will bring about positive global change.
Even if all you are doing is sitting with your daughter while she is learning to tie her shoes!
