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There is perhaps no time, with the possible exception of facing death, that greeting “things as it is” as Suzuki Roshi once put it, is more called for than during pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood. Facing the birth of a child may not be the final frontier, but it is a frontier – complete with all the excitement, challenge, and adventure that confronting any unknown territory brings.

Moms and Mood

From hormones to stretch marks, labor pains to diaper changes, motherhood is an adventure like none other. The rapid changes in your body, your lifestyle, and your very identity call for a certain mental and emotional agility, like running an obstacle course or training for a marathon. And while motherhood is a source of great joy for most women, recent data suggest that up to 18.4% of pregnant women are depressed during their pregnancy, and as many as 19.2% of first time mothers may have major or minor depression in the first three months after delivery. Psychological disorders other than depression are also prevalent in the perinatal period, with 12% of women experiencing mood disorders, 8% facing post-traumatic stress disorders, and 7% having anxiety disorders. Over and above the estimated rates of perinatal mood disorders above, 20-25% of women experience mild to moderate levels of affective distress during the first three months postpartum.

A very robust scientific literature links postpartum depression to impairments in mother-infant bonding. In addition, a large body of empirical evidence in both animal and humans studies indicates that stress and mood disturbance experienced during pregnancy increases the risk for preterm birth (which is considered one of the most pressing problem in maternal-child health in the U.S) and other pregnancy-related complications, and may adversely affect the developing fetus. Prenatal maternal stress may also be an important mediator of the observed relationship between race/ethnicity and rates of preterm birth.

Meeting a Need – Developing the Mindful Motherhood Program

In comparison to the potentially far reaching benefits, relatively little research has focused on developing interventions to reduce stress and improve mood during the perinatal period. In response to the need for a brief, low-cost, non-pharmaceutical intervention to reduce stress, improve mood, and decrease the effects of stress and distressed mood on mother-infant bonding, and based on our own experiences as parents, my colleague John Astin and I developed the Mindful Motherhood program. Bringing together elements from several different mindfulness-training pro¬grams, as well as our own newly developed material, we piloted the program in a group of ten women.

Based on participants’ feedback and our experience as facilitators and researchers, we made some changes to the program after this group ended and tried it out on another group of women. Finally, we compared two groups of women—one that received the training in pregnancy and one that did not. The women who did not receive the training during pregnancy participated in it when their babies were between three and six months old.

Though small, this pilot study showed that it was possible to learn mindful awareness during pregnancy and early motherhood (even with baby in tow!), and women who engaged in mindfulness training during pregnancy had reduced negative emotions and anxiety during pregnancy compared with women who did not participate in the training (Vieten and Astin 2008). There were also trends toward reduced symptoms of depression and increased positive emotion.

What Is Mindful Motherhood?

Mindful motherhood, the way we teach it, is focused on being present, in your body, and connected with your baby no matter what is happening. It’s being aware of your experience from moment to moment, as it is happening, without pushing it away, trying to make it stay, or judging it as bad or good. It is meeting each situation as it is, and over time, more and more often, approaching whatever is happening with curiosity and compassion.

Mindful motherhood is a way of approaching the good, the bad, and the ugly of motherhood to the largest extent possible with open eyes and an open heart. Whether those experiences are internal, like thoughts, feelings, or body sensations; or external, like relationships, workplace situations, or the situations in your environment, mindful moth¬erhood is about increasing the capacity to be with whatever is happening, no matter what it is. Exactly like mindfulness practice in any other situation. But motherhood demands a special kind of practice.

Mindfulness in Relationship

For one thing, mindful motherhood requests that you be mindful in relationship with another being. This ends up being true of any mindfulness practice – it’s no mistake that lovingkindness practice is the ultimate conclusion of most retreats. But in this situation it defines the practice. Silence, solitude, retreat, refuge – the lone wolf-style of “I’m going to sit here quietly with my mind until I see clearly,” is very rarely an option in early motherhood.

Down and Dirty Mindfulness

Second, in mindful motherhood you can forget the aspects of mindfulness that are of the transcendent-detached-observing-with-great-equanimity variety. Mindful motherhood is a practice that is living, embodied, down and dirty, sensual, centered and grounded in this world, in this body, in this moment. It’s about being present, in your body, and connected with your baby. It’s playing with your baby in the dirt, rather than worrying about how it’s going to get cleaned up. It’s spending all morning in bed together, playing peek-a-boo, eating, napping, and cuddling. It’s allowing anger to well up as you walk your baby back and forth for the sixth time that night, or allowing yourself the shivery shudder of being sick with the flu and still being the primary source of sustenance for your baby. There’s not much time off from motherhood in the early days, no matter how much support you have.

An Embodied Practice

So mindful motherhood is an embodied practice. In the first year of your child’s life, your body, much more than your mind or your words, is your primary communica¬tion tool. You receive almost all the incoming information you need from your baby through your body and its sensations (as opposed to the communication we tend to focus on as adults—the exchange of ideas). And all the outgoing information you deliver to your baby goes through your body as well. You connect with your baby through your facial expressions, your warmth, your touch, your tone of voice, and your tension or relaxation in each moment. Your body is likely the primary source of nutrition, and even if you are bottle feeding, your body during feeding times nourishes your baby with important skin-to-skin contact.

In fact, everything your baby knows about you and is learning from you during this time of ultimate brain plasticity, when neural pathways are being laid down for life, is happening through the communication between your body and your baby’s body. This communication is for the most part non-conceptual—it’s made up of sensations and emotions rather than ideas. It’s really staggering if you stop to think about it. It’s as though you’ve had to learn sign language rather than verbal language, but the sign language isn’t just with your hands—it’s with your whole body. Because your body is so vital to your communication, paying attention to and centering your awareness in it becomes extremely important. Which is where mindfulness comes in.

Being Here Now

Finally, mindful motherhood above all is a practice of being present in the moment. If being nonjudgmental, accepting, curious, and compassionate, and observing your experience and letting it be as it is without struggling against it are some of the rooms that make up the house of mindful motherhood, being in the present moment is the foundation of the house.

The great news for many of us is that being present with our babies can be really easy. Their adorable little selves can be incredibly compelling. You can find yourself just hanging out in the present with the baby and observing everything that is going on with great interest, curiosity, and love. In some ways this is the pinnacle of mindfulness, so it gives you the opportunity to experience it naturally without even having to try. When all the hormones line up right and you are hanging out with your baby, this experience often trumps that hyper-vigilance about everything else. You get “mommy brain,” where everything else drops away for a while. These moments when mindfulness comes with ease are real gifts.

On the same note, when the baby is crying, it forces you to be present in ways that you may sometimes wish you could avoid, but can’t. It’s really hard to ignore or be distracted from your own baby crying. In some ways, these moments are also gifts. They provide a great opportunity to be present as the moment is demanding and to begin to learn how to let go into the present moment, to relax into it, and walk right through it without all the extra suffering that comes from resisting it or trying to make it stop.

Finally, mindful awareness in pregnancy and early motherhood opens the door to experiences of deep content¬ment, expansive joy, fierce love, and warm sensuality that can exceed anything you’ve experienced up until then, and when you are really present, they hold the potential to be trans¬formative. Being open to this depth of feeling can change your understanding of who you are and what you are capable of.

The Time is Now

The gist is that pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood are not a time to put your mindfulness practice on hold and accept that you just won’t be able to attend to that part of your life as much during this period. Quite the contrary, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood stimulate mindful awareness. When you lean into it, your mindfulness practice makes you grow as a mom (because essentially, the same ingredients that make up mindful awareness, when applied to your relationship with your baby, add up to being a good mom), and becoming a mom encourages mindfulness in a way that few other life experiences can.

Yes, pregnancy and early motherhood can be uniquely disruptive to your usual self-care routines, such as setting aside time for meditation or yoga. But this period of time also provides an opportunity to cultivate a practice of radical mindfulness—one that is deeply embodied, and infuses itself throughout your everyday life. The bottom line is to be gentle with yourself. There are limitless opportunities to cultivate mindful motherhood in pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, and in the rest of your life.

Much of what I’ve talked about in this book will come to you naturally, and more than anything, the information I’ve tried to convey is just a reminder to stay true to what is most real in each moment. Stay true to your center (your breathing, your body, and your connection to your baby), to that part of you that is awake, aware, and encountering each moment of motherhood for the first time. Rather than being a big project or a strenuous endeavor, mindful motherhood is about giving yourself permission to rest in this moment…and in this one…and in this one. Rest into whatever it is that is happening, and explore the adventure of motherhood with open eyes, an open mind, and an open heart.

Excerpted from Mindful Motherhood: Practical Tools for Staying Sane During Pregnancy and Your Child’s First Year (New Harbinger/Noetic Books, 2009)© Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D. (www.mindfulmotherhood.org)

Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist, director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, associate scientist at the Mind Body Medicine Research Group at California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute in San Francisco, CA, and co-president of the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology. Her research on mindfulnessbased approaches to dealing with addictions, mood disorders, and for stress reduction during pregnancy and early motherhood has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the State of California, and several private foundations. In addition to Mindful Motherhood, she is coauthor, along with Marilyn Schlitz and Tina Amorok, of Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life.