Pregnancy Meditations

We have been doing the Headspace "Pregnancy" course (along with other meditations on Headspace) as we approach the birth of Pemi. We started in January of this year and have been keeping up meditating - 15 minutes a day each morning after breakfast - on most days where we wake up at home. It's not always easy, but has been a nice way to ground and calm ourselves every day, even if only for a moment before heading off into the whirlwind of work and exercise.

Beyond taking care of our minds, the pregnancy course has been a beautiful way to prepare ourselves for becoming parents. It's a 30-day pack built on 3 parts.

Part 1 - Inward visualization

The first part uses a light visualization where you first imagine yourself sitting somewhere that makes you happy (Jasmine and I both often thought of sunrise hikes, I thought of sitting on Federal Hill in Baltimore or the BU bridge in Boston). Then, you picture a tiny ball of light filling up your body until you are overflowing with a spacious, radiant, and calming glow. After a few minutes, you then do the same thing but instead of imagining yourself somewhere else, you do the visualization where you are sitting right there.

This was a really nice way to prepare ourselves for what's to come. The visualization felt kind of funny at first, but over time it became easier to "do" and with that ease it becam

Part 2 - Visualizing with the baby

The second part used the light visualization again, but it started with the second phase of part 1 and then transitioned to imagining the ball of light filling up your baby. At this point, Pemi was about as small as a pea, so it was kind of hard to imagine him, but that was the point! It took effort to really picture him there as a real physical presence, but doing this made it feel all the more real that we were having a baby and he was going to be a part of our lives in a few months.

Part 1 transitioned beautifully into part 2 -- it's like first we take the calmness and ease that came from being somewhere we love, and transferring it to where we are right now. Useful. Then, we take that visualization and transfer it from ourselves to our baby. So we're gathering our inner peace from a memory, filling ourselves up with it, and sharing it with our son.

Part 3 - An exchange of love

The last part still used a visualization but it changed. This one was different, like nothing I'd ever done before, and so beautiful. The idea is to breathe in and out, and while breathing in, to imagine relieving Pemi of any stress or discomfort, and while breathing out, to imagine giving peace and happiness to Pemi. It was assisted with a small visualization by imagining a gentle white smoke being pulled away from Pemi on every in-breath and imagining Pemi being filled up with that same light from Parts 1 and 2 on every out-breath.

Andy (the creator of Headspace) explained that this is unusual because usually we want to push negative feelings away and pull positive feelings inward. But this exercise flips it on its head: we inhale any discomfort and exhale love and peacefulness.

He said it's tricky and hard to do, but it felt so easy. It felt like parenting. We haven't started being real parents yet, but I imagine that I'll come back to this feeling many times throughout the rest of my life. Pemi is going to be uncomfortable and sad and angry and frustrated throughout his life, and as his Dad I'll always do my best to help relieve him of those negative emotions with calmness and compassion.

Returning to the practice

I'm writing this blog entry now because we returned to the meditation after a few months of doing other ones, and I wanted to share how different it feels now that Pemi is almost here and we can see the shape of his body even without the ultrasound. (He loves kicking his foot out and you can literally see the little bump of his foot in Jasmine's belly!).

Whereas before imagining Pemi took a bit of, well, imagination, now it's so easy to picture him there. He feels like a real presence now. It's only day 1 of Part 3 again, so I think it'll take a bit more time to get used to the visualization exercise, but picturing Pemi? Easy. It shows how much more real he is. His body has been growing in Jasmine's belly, no doubt about that, but at the same time the idea of him has been growing in our minds too.

We're very excited :).