Keeping Our Children Whole - Preventive Parenting in a Noisy World Wet Set Gazette Jan/Feb 2006 column
When I was pregnant with our daughter, I took prenatal yoga with Gurmukh. (Gurmukh is so famous in these parts she only needs one name, like Oprah or Cher.) Her class was an oasis of calm in the midst of a bustling life, ninety minutes of strengthening, centering and discovery led by this elegant force of nature dressed in white. Something profound took place within me week by week so gradually, so imperceptibly, that I would have been hard-pressed to describe it, and still am. I do know how strong and ready I felt moving into my labor and what an empowering, transformative experience Eve’s birth was. But along with all the invaluable, inarticulable things I gained from Gurmukh’s class, I took away two important concrete pieces. The first was the verse we sang at the end of each class:
May the longtime sun shine upon you,
all love surround you,
and the pure light within you
guide your way on.
It so moved me that we included it beneath the photo on Eve’s birth announcement. Isn’t this perhaps the highest aspiration we can hold as parents, to nourish, protect and support that pure light within our children, as it guides them on their singular life paths? Call that light what you will: spirit, soul, singular personality and temperament, unique intelligences. It is indeed all of these things plus infinite others that weave the human mystery.
The second tangible thing I learned from Gurmukh was the concept of “The Forty Days.” For many reasons, including the immature development of her brain and the fact that the energy field of her body is not yet fully formed and intact, a newborn is extremely sensitive to incoming energies and sensations (especially sound and touch.) I love how poet John O’Donohue describes babies as “fresh from the eternal.” Partly to protect the integrity of their newly-arrived babies, cultures around the world have postpartum rituals with a common theme: a new baby remains sheltered at home, with just family around her, for forty days. This is equivalent to the six weeks that pediatricians once routinely prescribed as the length of time to wait before exposing the new baby to the wider world.
I see the practice of The Forty Days as intimately related to a child’s “pure light within”: It is one of the first ways in which parents can concretely demonstrate active love of their baby, safeguarding for him a “gentle landing” into his body and into this world, so the light within him—all that makes him uniquely him—can remain unadulterated and strong, in other words, pure. In case it sounds a little airy-fairy, this concept fully lines up with the latest science of brain development: A steady diet of too many incoming sensations (like one would encounter, say, at the mall) can overwhelm immature brain systems and may contribute to later disorders. The rates of sensory processing disorders—in which children’s brains can’t quite integrate (make coherent, meaningful sense of) certain stimuli such as touch, sound, or movement—appear to be skyrocketing, joining the epidemic of ADD and AD/HD.
I cannot help but believe that this is related to the general sensory bombardment we all face in our turbo-paced, techno-powered, instant-access, fax-phone-email-web, information-overloaded world. (One reason I try to keep these columns short!) We adults have perhaps become inured to the barrage, but when we have a baby we need to put ourselves in her booties and imagine this bombardment coming in through fresh new ears, eyes and skin! And it’s important to do so even before the baby is born, since the brainstem—the part of the brain responsible for registering sensations of all kinds—develops fully before birth. In fact one of the many ways that a pregnant mother’s own thoughts, perceptions, and feelings play a fundamental role in her baby’s development involves this very important sensation-processing area of the brain: The fetal brainstem organizes around the maternal heartbeat, and if she is experiencing chronic, unremitting anxiety or distress, her heartbeat is highly variable (compared to the more consistent heartbeat of someone relatively calmer.) Her baby is more likely to be irritable and difficult to soothe, an early indication of a nervous system hyper-sensitive to sensory input and a possible red flag for sensory processing or other disorders as her child grows up.
Dr. Bruce Perry, one of the world’s leading experts on early brain development and the disorder spectrum, concurs. And once born, he says, one of the primary needs of the infant and young child is for consistency and predictability in his daily life, so that his developing neural systems organize in a patterned, synchronous way. Meaning, We get up at this time each morning… we eat meals at these times each day… bedtime is at this time each evening… we visit Nana on Wednesday afternoons… and go to the farmer’s market Saturday mornings.
During pregnancy find a rhythm of doing what nourishes your own “pure light within,” then weave that centering rhythm into family life to nurture the pure light of your child.
Gurmukh teaches prenatal yoga at Golden Bridge in Hollywood (323.936.4172).