Hello from deep summer. I am grateful for all the ways this season has felt balanced. Upon reflection, “balance” means I have orchestrated a good mix of learning, activities, play, and relaxation for my kids. And, my husband has worked less intense hours and has taken some real vacations instead of working vacations. However, I’m not sure where I am in all of this, and I look forward to discovering that as we head into August and I get some time to think. I want to go into the fall and the election season feeling steady, grounded, and clear so I’m checking in with myself to see if I’m doing what’s required to feel that way.
Pillars of Support
Time to think has always been important to me. As a former pre and postnatal yoga teacher and as a spiritual director, I offer my clients many tools. One tool is making a plan for pillars of support. When I taught yoga, I noticed the moms in my classes were encouraged to buy their way out of many issues that occurred during pregnancy or after birth. A plan for pillars of support digs a little deeper. It asks, what do you need to feel like yourself, and how do you get what you need on a near-daily basis? Centering the question around what the individual needs at baseline is really important, because it makes those potentially unconscious needs conscious.
For example, buying expensive baby sleep contraptions isn’t empowering, and instead makes the purchaser hope against hope that the product works, or the baby is a “good” baby who sleeps. The purchaser is left hoping that something outside of herself takes away the problem. It’s very different for a mom to articulate that one of her pillars of support is adequate rest. There is no externally-focused magical solution to hope for here. In fact, the mom getting adequate rest and the baby’s sleep can be separate issues.
Articulating pillars of support is an empowering step towards feeling steady, grounded, and clear
Typically, the first step is naming the pillars to oneself, because everything begins with honesty to self. The next step is communicating the pillars to at least one person. Communicating the pillars is often essential, because people want to know how to help us, and frequently people are less intuitive about our needs than we might like them to be.
My pillars of support are time to think, healthy food, and movement. I need many more things for a rich and full life; I need connection with my husband and a small handful of people like I need air, but that is outside of myself. Time to think, healthy food, and movement are baseline needs for me to be able to engage meaningfully with the larger world. I named my pillars back when I had my first baby in 2010, and they have sustained me into having kids that are 10, 12, and 14. I hope to refocus on them now after a summer spent caring for others. The excuses immediately pop into my head, like “I only have so much time left with my kids living at home and I need to leave it all on the field.” My wiser self knows that I need these pillars to survive and thrive – to be able to leave it all on the field – in the next 100 or so days in the American election cycle and onward.
Wise people have often used pregnancy, labor, and postpartum analogies for political life. Valarie Kaur is a mystic activist (my words, read her bio here) who evoked ancient wisdom when she asked us in 2016 to consider whether we were in the darkness of the womb rather than the darkness of the tomb. And she invites all who care about our country and what happens here to be engaged in the active labor process that is American democracy: to breathe and push, breathe and push.
Everything and everyone around us benefits when we are able to approach our interactions from a steady, grounded, and clear place. In the next 100 days, whether we are involved in the birthing of democracy or our own more private and personal creative projects (or likely both), the beauty of these pillars is that they help us have a steady baseline whether times feel simpler or more difficult. I have been on a high the last few weeks, feeling political optimism, potential, and excitement that I’ve never felt, and I’ve been a Democrat since 1987 when I was in the second grade. I love to feel that way. But I will not show up best for myself, my family, and the greater world if I ride the roller coaster of collective emotion for the next three months. I will allow myself to experience joy because it feeds me, but I will not become untethered to the things that help me show up as a steady, grounded, and clear presence.
