Meditation

Stillness and reflection in the Okavango Delta

The first time I heard about meditation I was ten years old.  My Mother had just given me a book for my birthday called 'Meditation for Children'.

Although an avid reader, I was unimpressed and uninterested in this particular book.  I didn't like my Mother telling me what to do, especially if it was in any way related to her hippy ways, and it lay on a shelf disregarded, for years. I don't actually remember what happened to it.

I guess my Mother could see what was going on with me and was trying to do me a favour.  

While I'm pretty happy with my brain, it has seen me through some complex and difficult situations, I do have one of those minds that churns incessantly.  So in my head, I think meditation is something I should do, and would benefit from.  

If nothing else, I could do with conditioning myself to trigger the relaxation response.

I've tried to learn to meditate a number of different times in my life, with a number of different methods.

• In my early 20s I bought a transcendental meditation cassette tape which had you repeat a mantra for 20 minutes.  
• Inspired by a recent visit by Sri Chimnoy during my first stint working in London, I set up a small shrine with a candle to meditate on in the morning before I left for work.
• When I was living in San Francisco I attended several terms of meditation classes at a 'church' that I eventually felt was a bit too cult-ish for my comfort. 
• I've taken meditation workshops at Tibetan Buddhist temples.
• I tried various guided meditations on YouTube in the interests of reducing stress while I was trying to get pregnant.
• When I first lost Poppy, a friend recommended the meditation podcast 'Emotional Ease' to help with the merry-go-round of incessant self recriminatory thoughts I was suffering.
• When I was pregnant with Pipkin, I listened to a meditation iPhone app while travelling to work on the tube in rush hour.  I find crowded tube trains extremely stressful.  Don't you?

I'm sure there are other times I've tried to start a meditation practice that I don't even recall.  I can honestly say I've learned something from each attempt, but I haven't ever stuck with it.

The problem is, when I try to meditate silently, my internal voice kicks up a big ruckus and I usually terminate the session after a couple of extremely uncomfortable minutes of conflicting internal dialogue.  I mean, I know the point is to keep doing it until my internal voice calms itself (learned helplessness maybe?) but I just don't.

I have more success with guided meditations but get bored with them very quickly and drift off into my own thoughts. 

The other problem is that I like my bed too much to get up any earlier in the morning than I have to, and evenings are about dinner and spending some quality time with Mr Duncan. 

I know.  Excuses, excuses.

I think the closest I've actually come to finding any peace in meditation is during yoga classes, when I am focussed on my breathing and my body is automatically responding to the teacher's instructions.  

It took me years of regular yoga practice before I could even quiet, though not halt, the chatter in my brain during Savasana.

I was recently recommended a website called Buddhist Geeks by an ex-colleague.

Not that I'm particularly buddhist, but I am a little bit Silicon Valley and he wanted to draw a parallel with how I coach my software teams to deliver and the practice of mindfulness.  

I had a click around and found an interesting podcast about behavioural design and how to build positive habits.  One study showed that even finding time for a two minute meditation each day, was more beneficial in establishing a regular meditation practice than setting aside more time less regularly.

I know that I will benefit from meditation if I manage to make time and space in my life to practice it.  So I decided its time to dust off the headspace meditation app I downloaded when I first got my iPhone and never really used past the first week.  

I 'took ten' in the park when I was early to a lunch meeting yesterday and I felt SO much better.  Given I wake naturally at stupid o'clock in the morning and take my temperature before going back to sleep, I'm going to try to spend ten minutes with the app in the morning.  Then I'll go back to sleep.

Mr Duncan won't even notice.

If that doesn't work, I'll have to take the brute force approach and enrol in a 10 day silent Vipassana retreat per the little hints I've been finding in my reading lately.

Taking it day by day...

After I lost Poppy, I think I also lost my self a little bit.  

I took only two days off work, during which I mainly slept, then threw myself back into activity.  

I said I was worried about getting bored, but maybe I was just doing anything I could to avoid acknowledging the enormity of what had happened and the feelings which threatened to overwhelm me.  I drank too much red wine which helped me avoid my feelings but made me hate myself because I wanted to be healthy for a future pregnancy.

When I wasn't working, I did a lot of reading, to distract myself and to try to understand.  

I read many amazing blogs about infertility and loss and those gave me some perspective.  

I didn't know why I lost my baby, or if there was anything I could have done to prevent it, or if I did something to actually cause it.  I had lots of questions.  

What is the meaning of life anyway?

This questioning led me to some interesting books among the self-help shelves of my local library that have opened up the way I think about it all.  I'll write about some of those sometime.

I'm definitely doing it differently this time.

Naming and honouring angels...

A lone flower among the lilypads

One of the few friends I can (and do) speak quite openly to about Poppy and Pipkin commented recently that she thinks it is so cute that I call my lost babies by those names.

Poppy is so named because the day I downloaded all the pregnancy apps for my iPhone, at all of 4 weeks pregnant, the What To Expect App told me 'The baby is as big as a... Poppyseed".   

And it stuck.  

It is useful to have a nickname to speak about the new life growing inside you.

Pipkin was named after the smallest rabbit in the book Watership Down, which Mr Duncan was reading aloud to me at bedtime around the time that Pipkin was conceived.

I have read a fair amount of information on loss and grieving since my first miscarriage and many suggest you name your lost babies to formally include them in your family and have a rite of passage, such as a funeral or memorial ceremony to acknowledge their loss.    

While I had certainly been looking at baby names prior to my losses, we had nothing like a short list.  

In fact it is unmanageably long.  

Maybe if they were older when we lost them, we would have had more of an idea, but part of me feels it is too early to decide before the baby is born and I actually get to meet him or her in person.

When I was in my 20s a close friend had his first baby and excitedly sent out the birth announcement to his friends that his firstborn was named Alexander.  Several days later we received another email, from his wife, saying that after a few days of living with him, it was clear that their son was not an Alexander after all, in fact he was a William.

So they remain Poppy and Pipkin, but I am so glad they both already had their names before I lost them.

Mr Duncan and I want to have some sort of ceremony for them before we leave to live in Australia (still crossing my fingers for the visa) - because they will of course be staying here.  

It would be nice to plant a tree or rosebush or something in our garden, but we're in rented accommodation so thats not really a possibility.  

I'll have to think about what would work for us...

L.
x

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Talking about miscarriage and loss

Something that surprised me when I had my miscarriage was the information that one pregnancy in three ends in miscarriage. 

I think that means statistically, for every three women I know that has a child, one of them will have had a miscarriage.

I realise that many losses are very early, often before a woman knows she was pregnant, and I wonder if the slightly late period I had the month before we conceived Pipkin was one of these early losses or 'chemical' pregnancies.  

This is why I don't test early.  

But why don't people talk about it?  

Given how open people are about every other aspect of their lives on facebook and twitter, it seems strange that miscarriage is such a hidden subject.  I recently read an article from Stylist which discusses why miscarriage may be the last taboo.

The material I had read on miscarriage said it would be like a heavy period.  So I was in no way prepared for the actual experience and I had no one to talk to about it!  

I read through lots of online forums, but there were very few accounts of what to expect.  

I guess its true that every woman and every pregnancy is different.  

I finally found the brilliant pregnancyloss.info site which offers 'information, healing and hope'.  It gave me practical information while I was miscarrying and assured me that I was not as alone as I felt.  

And I felt SO alone.  

In many ways I still do.

Very few people knew I was pregnant when I lost Poppy at 10 weeks, but at 15 weeks, we had just started telling people about Pipkin.  

People's reactions to my sad news was fairly consistent.  

They said sorry and then changed the subject.  

But both my pregnancies and both my losses are part of my life - I don't want my babies to be guilty secrets or hidden!  I want to be able to talk about the pregnancy or miscarriage when it comes up and have people listen, not awkwardly turn away.

After my first loss I spent a lot of time reading about other people's losses.  I found it oddly comforting and it helped put my loss in perspective.  

Many women have gone through the experience of miscarriage or loss and many of their stories are so much more difficult than mine.  One very powerful site I spent a lot of time on was facesofloss.com.

I also started reading a number of infertility blogs from the amazing Stirrup Queen's Completely Anal List of Blogs That Proves That She Really Missed Her Calling as a Personal Organizer which reminded me that while I have experienced loss, I still have hope, and my journey so far has been comparatively straightforward.   

My favourite is Maybe If You Just Relax - it makes me laugh and I am impressed that the author has been able to write about her difficult journey with such honesty and humour!

I have written about the losses of both Poppy and Pipkin with the hope that these stories may in some way help other women going through this difficult experience.

And because I believe it is important that we as women talk about miscarriage and loss.  

We need to acknowledge and honour the short lives of our lost babies for the information and understanding of others, and for our own healing.

L.
x

Honestly, its not easy.

Tranquility in the Okavango Delta

While its been relatively easy (and sort of fun) to photograph and document the meals I make to keep myself and Mr Duncan in optimum health in the hope of conceiving again in the future...   

I have more than a dozen unpublished posts in which I have written about my pregnancies/loss/reactions to the world at large. 

Especially the pregnant and mother-of-newborn world which seems to be so prevalent in the media at the moment.   

Grrr.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to help me work through the feelings - what is it to grow (eg gardening) or create (cooking, sewing) something and have it not work out in the same way that my babies were created and real, but didnt work out.

Maybe draw some parallels.

Maybe have an outlet for expressing the rollercoaster of awe and fear and love and bitterness and hope and despair and jealousy and pragmatism and acceptance and anger I feel.

But my unpublished posts seem so inadequate to express what I am experiencing I've been storing them up to re-work until they do.

Maybe I'm just not ready yet.

I mean, writing it all down has its own value.  But sharing?  Even to no readership -  it still seems a step too far.  

Like its actually real. 

Which is seriously is. 

But still....

I had a total meltdown last Thursday which (once I regained some semblance of perspective) just reinforced the fact that I need to deal with it.

But really... it is not easy.

Hypnotherapy for fertility 'blocks'?

Last week I made an appointment to see a Counsellor/Hypnotherapist.  

I have been worrying, given how difficult it was to get pregnant in the first place, and the two consecutive miscarriages, that somehow my mind/body connection was working against me.  

That maybe I was blocking myself somehow and preventing myself from having a baby.

Why would I think that?

I had an unconventional childhood.  

By the standard of todays more child-centric world I think my sisters and I were probably quite badly neglected but this was the 70s and no-one intervened -  although it was clear that neighbours and the parents of friends were keeping an eye on us.  

In retrospect I can see my mother was depressed and overwhelmed bringing up three small children on welfare after her husband left her for another woman.  

She was a diabetic with a drinking problem and her way of dealing was to not deal.

Block it out and blame everyone and everything else.  

Do not take any responsibility for anything at any cost.  

In the absence of anyone else taking responsibility (my older sister would get angry that my mother wasn't acting the way proper Mothers' were supposed to and storm out, my younger sister just cried) I took a lot on my shoulders.  

I dealt with stuff, but resented it and clearly remember swearing to myself I would never allow myself to be in the same situation - responsible for children without the wherewithal or money to keep them safe and happy.

I studied and practiced hypnotherapy when I lived in New York in the early 2000s. 

In sessions with former clients who came to me for their fear of public speaking, the root of that fear would most often be a time when they were young and said something that people laughed at which made them feel embarrassed.  

They would swear to themselves they'd never put themselves in a situation which made them feel like that again which manifested as the fear of speaking in public.  After resolving this conflict in our sessions the fear would be gone.  

You see the parallel?

So I was looking for something quite specific.  

There are many hypnotherapists who can give you relaxation and guided visualisation sessions but I wanted someone proficient in more interactive techniques.  

It was really tricky to determine from the websites I reviewed whether or not the practitioner had the skills I was after.  

Eventually I phoned one who offered past life regression - not because I wanted that, but because regression requires the interactive skills I was looking for.

Unfortunately he was a out to go abroad for some time, but referred me to a colleague who I called and made an appointment with.