Yes, you can meditate
Yes, you can meditate — and parent, and work, and sleep, and breathe, and pay the bills....and it’s not called “doing it all”. Self-reflection is simple and free self-care.
I see this a lot in my social feeds: “meditating every day does not solve a working parent’s problems,” and I have to push back. I understand the sentiment of course: our culture doesn’t take care of parents, and that starts first and foremost in the workplace.
But dissing sitting quietly to notice how you feel makes me uncomfortable. Also, I believe referencing “meditation” here doesn’t make any sense - in reality, what we are talking about is taking a moment for self-reflection. That could look like sitting for 5 minutes and focusing on your breath - that could look like walking around the block without a podcast or your phone. Self-reflection CAN help with parents’ problems because it takes the focus off the hectic world we reside in and brings us back to our core, our self, and where we are emotionally.
And so I think this is an apples-to-oranges situation. What they should be saying is that a 5-minute break does not make the stress of modern parenting any better because you still need to endure the demands of a 40-60 hour workweek and no social support from our government.
No amount of Self-reflection will fix our work-obsessed, “pretend you don’t have a family” culture — but it’s not gonna make it any worse either.
How do I know? Well, it starts with the insight of a nine-year-old. One of my sons is a big afterschool talker (either you have an oversharer or a non-sharer, you’ll see). One day last year, he came home and shared that he had a bad stomachache at school, “Mom I was feeling really, really bad, like really bad. So I stopped and took a breath. And it didn’t make me feel better, but it stopped me from feeling worse!”
An adult version of a “stomachache” could be anything: anger, resentment, overwhelm, burnout, or just plain sadness. And we walk around with these aches, not noticing. And when we DO notice, it’s because things get SO bad we have to, and it’s WAY too late. We are burned out and have been stressed for days. We need the skills to notice our stomachaches earlier so we can take the necessary next steps. Instead, what does it take for us to notice? Typically it’s something we can’t ignore: we lose it on our child or our partner, or our body gives out in some way, we push good friends away, we get into a fender bender…
When I had 2 kids under 10 years old, I worked 50-60 hour weeks, traveled, and dealt with start-up hours and investors’ insane demands. One day, I lost all feeling in my left arm - my body had finally had too much. It slammed on the brakes and made me notice how out of alignment my life had become.
In addition to not noticing, we use distraction and indulgence to ignore or withdraw from bad feelings as they try to reveal themselves. Some of us spend too much money online or watch too much TikTok at work — or maybe we drink too much.
Whatever it is — these coping mechanisms keep us from discovering that we have hit our mental health wall and boom! we are in a full-blown Mom Tantrum, and we don’t know how we got there.
I know the people who crap on meditation have hit a mental health wall before — that seems evident from their determination to care for the blights of the working parent. Unfortunately, well-meaning or not, they have got it all wrong. Meditation is not a chance to zone out and “be calm” — and it’s certainly not an escape.
Meditation, or just a simple practice of self-reflection, is the opportunity to train your brain to notice your state - good, bad, or ugly. Your state is just your mood or fleeting emotion you may be experiencing. And once we can notice our state, we can attend to our needs before #$*& hits the fan. We can use this self-reflection technique as simple and accessible self-care. And when we do it leads to more self-care: like a walk outside or chatting with a friend.
I have lived the “Start-Up” life, my husband worked 12-hour days, too, add in that we also were living in one of the most expensive cities in the world, of course, we were exhausted. Until I started to take care of myself, it only felt like it was going to get worse — but as soon as I started taking care of myself, I didn’t get better right away but it stopped getting worse. And I realized that I had choices.
That’s what our “money-as-success” culture takes away from us — choices that come from a broad perspective — and it takes away our curiosity too. We’re just so exhausted and are lulled into the false notion that we have to go to work and be perfect there and go home and be perfect there, too. We forget to question any of it. Perfection does not need to be your truth because it can’t be, you’re a parent, and #&$% happens: your kid gets lice the night before a three-day business trip, or your boss tells you that you need to add another responsibility to your list with no additional pay, or one of your arms becomes unusable and in severe pain (these are all real things that have happened to me!!).
When you are in a state of exhaustion, looking within can feel like a trap, like an unwinnable bargain you will make with the devil - after all what will you find, and does it matter? But it does. Because you matter, and hustle culture keeps you in motion precisely so you WON’T stop and look within. But that’s where all your answers will lie.
So, of course, five or 10 minutes of self-reflection daily will not solve the demands of modern work culture. These two things have nothing to do with one another — yet if you fix one, the other becomes a little more manageable. And you begin to notice what parts of work you like and don’t.
So I would say YES, learn to notice your emotions and moods, and more and more, you will discover all the choices available. How can you do this? Well, you have got to dig yourself out with your own two hands. The government isn’t gonna come save you, and your boss isn’t gonna come save you, and the culture isn’t going to change overnight. The only person that can change overnight is you - and if it were me, I would start with the self-care of a daily moment of reflection. ✌️ - Stef
