Motherhood has taught me that so many things lead back to the breath.
- How present I am.
- How clearly, I can see what is actually happening in front of me.
- How much space exists between what happens and how I respond.
- And, perhaps most importantly, how quickly I can find my way back when I don't get it right.
Because parenting in the modern world is a lot. There’s the morning shift, the day shift, the afternoon shift and the evening shift. School and daycare drop-offs. Pick-ups. Work. Dinner. Baths. Bedtimes. The mental load of remembering what everyone needs, where everyone needs to be and what needs to happen next.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, we're trying to raise little humans. And a lot of the time I find it hard to stay patient.
One of the things I try to remind myself of when everything feels loud is actually incredibly simple:
They are little humans navigating a world that is new to them. A world they don't always understand. A world that can sometimes feel enormous and unsafe.
When I can stop for long enough to take a breath and really see what is in front of me, my perspective changes. This is why breath intelligence is so important to me. It helps me realise that everything happening is actually, rarely, ever about me.
Instead of immediately seeing the behaviour, and how embarrassed it makes me feel, or how inconvenient it is that they don’t want me to leave day care drop off when I’m already late for a meeting, or how tiered I am when they won’t fall asleep. If I take a moment to breathe in and breathe out, I can sometimes see the person underneath it all. The emotion behind it. The big feeling that feels lost inside them with nowhere to go.
Instead of Why are you doing this? there is space for What is happening for you right now? Instead of immediately reacting, there might be just enough space to choose what happens next. The external situation hasn't necessarily changed. I’ve just taken a moment and my reaction has shifted. Most of the time one controlled breath is enough to begin that shift.
And sometimes I lose it
Of course, this isn't how it always goes. Sometimes the big world gets to me too. There are too many things happening at once. I'm trying to get somewhere, someone can't find their shoes, someone is crying, and I'm thinking about something happening at work while simultaneously trying to be present at home. My patience disappears and suddenly my reaction is bigger than the moment ever needed it to be.
I don't always respond from the place I would like to, and I've become increasingly okay with acknowledging that. Because I don't think my children need to grow up believing that being regulated means being perfect, or that being an adult means you always get it right. I actually want them to see the opposite. I want them to know that adults are humans too, that we're still learning how to navigate this big world ourselves, and sometimes we're not perfect at responding in a regulated way.
Sometimes we lose our patience. Sometimes we say something we wish we hadn't. Sometimes we don't act in line with the values we hold for ourselves or our family. But I think there is something really important in what happens next. In showing them that getting it wrong isn't the end of the story. That we can stop, reflect, say sorry and repair. And that maybe being regulated isn't about never losing it, but about learning how to find your way back when you do.
Maybe emotional regulation is being able to feel the full spectrum of human emotions and when those emotional reactions lead to behaviour that doesn’t align with how we want to show up in the world, we take a breath, be kind to ourselves and find our way back.
Breath gives us somewhere to come back to
There is always the possibility of repair. A moment to stop and take in a breath. A chance to come back into the present moment and see what actually happened, rather than continuing to react from the emotion of it. Rather than letting the emotion of it take over and rule the show.
And then sometimes there needs to be a conversation.
I'm sorry. I got frustrated. I didn't respond in the way I wanted to. Can we try that again?
There is something I really love about our children seeing that process. Because we're not teaching them that emotionally healthy people never lose their patience, become overwhelmed or experience big emotions. We're trying to teach them what to do when they do.
- How to notice.
- How to pause.
- How to reconnect with ourselves and with others.
- How to experience big emotions and what to do with them
- How to repair.
- And how to come back to each other.
Breathing isn't just something we practise alone
As a family, we've started integrating different breathing practices into moments of big emotion. Not perfectly, not ceremoniously, and certainly not every time. Sometimes it's simply slowing everything down and taking a few breaths together. Sometimes it's helping one of the kids focus on a long, slow exhale. Sometimes its releasing anger and frustration with the throw down; inhaling up and throwing down an exhale with a HA HA HA. And then sometimes it's me realising that actually, I'm the person who needs to regulate first.
That last one has probably been one of the biggest lessons for me as a mother. We often think about teaching our children emotional regulation as something they need to learn, but so much of parenting has made me realise that it starts with us. Before I ask one of my children to calm their body, can I notice what is happening in mine? Before I ask them to slow down, am I rushing? Before I react to their emotion, can I recognise what their emotion is bringing up in me?
Because it's really hard to help a little person navigate a big emotion when you're already caught up in your own. And sometimes the answer is that I can't. Sometimes I don't catch it in time and I react before I have the chance to breathe, slow down or find some ground underneath myself. But even noticing that afterwards has changed something for me. It's another opportunity to come back, to reconnect and to try again next time.
The space between reaction and response
For me, this is what breathing has increasingly become. It isn't about walking around in some permanent state of calm, because that isn't real life and it definitely isn't family life and it certainly isnt true to who I am. But It's about having something to come back to when life inevitably pulls us away from ourselves, and creating just a little bit of space between what happens and how we respond to it.
Sometimes a breath is enough to create that tiny interruption in momentum. A moment between the thing that has happened and the story I'm already creating about it in my head. A chance to come back to what is actually in front of me, rather than everything else I'm carrying into that moment.
And often, what's actually in front of me is pretty simple. Two little humans trying to figure out their place in a really big world, and a mother who is still figuring out how to be a human in that same world too. We're all learning together, and we're all going to get it wrong sometimes.
I think that's what I want breathing to represent in our family. Not calm. Not perfection. But a way back. A way to create enough space to see each other properly again, to see ourselves properly and meet ourselves where we are at in that moment, to repair when we need to, to reconnect when we need to and to make a concious choice about how to react.
We won't always get it right. But we can always find our way back to each other and keep returning to what matters.