My first weekend alone with Kalindi was only recently, when she was a year and eight months old.
As a parent living in India, I’m so blessed to be able to afford lots and lots of help. We’ve had help with Kalindi from day 1, and I feel like I’m a more peaceful and relaxed mother because of that. I’ve had enough time to heal, have been able to balance my life with motherhood and have assimilated a lot of tidbits about child rearing, culture and even boundaries.
There’s a pigeon who has laid eggs outside the window of my bathroom. Every time I open the door of the bathroom, no matter how quietly, she gets disturbed. I feel bad, acutely. When I was shown into this room Dheeraj told me they noticed the eggs for the first time when they came back from Diwali break, and they didn’t have the heart to push them out. Every time the pigeon flutters in alarm and walks away from her eggs I feel an ache in my heart. I know how the pigeon feels. I don’t want to be responsible for its fear, I want it to know her eggs are safe.
In 2019, on my last trip to the Iyengar Yoga institute in Pune, I would have never thought it would take me 6 years to come back to the Iyengar institute in Pune. Over the years many visitors I was in touch with have told me about the changes – there’s a new entrance, even a waiting area. The old order (Pandurang Sir), has given way to the new.
A pandemic and a baby later, here I am, back in Pune’s verdant climes awaiting the commencement of the weekend workshop at the Iyengar Yoga Institute in Pune.
I’d love to say that now, when my daughter is one and a half, I have a fixed routine for yoga practice. Pre-pregnancy I would wake up at 4.30 to practice. Now those days seem like ancient history. Today my days are a disorganised mix of teaching, practice, working out, trying to get a full night’s sleep, writing, school runs…I’m grateful I can practice with some regularity, but often pine for those days when I turned in at 9 and woke up at 4.30, ready to give my practice my all.
I have started attending RIMYI online classes again, a practice that feels especially grounding during Navratri. More often then I’d like, I end up following along with the pre-recorded Iyengar yoga sessions. I’d love to say it’s an hour and a half I have to myself, a time when I can immerse myself in the yoga. But the truth is Kalindi often joins me on the mat, and wants to type on the keyboard or play with the TV remote. She clings to my legs when I’m in downward dog, or lies down on the mat, making me want to cuddle with her. Often I find myself speeding through a class to avoid interruptions.
This morning’s class was a restorative session, and at the end of the class when we were lying in supta baddhakonasana with our arms stretched out and chests wide open, Raya spoke about Navratri, drawing our attention to Durga’s strength. What he said was perhaps the most relevant thing I’ve heard in a long time.
In my continuing quest to understand motherhood and become a better-informed parent, I’ve been reaching out to yoga teachers who can shed light on this path for me. Recently, I had an illuminating conversation with Rosa Santana, a mother of three daughters and a lifelong yoga practitioner.
“You never stop being a mother,” she says. Her own journey is inspiring—she was a gym rat long before she stepped into yoga, and she took her first yoga class while six months pregnant. She admits it was a terrible experience at the time. Up until then, she had taught step aerobics, which gave her fitness discipline but didn’t prepare her body for the nuances of pregnancy.
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