When my daughter was little she explained the meaning of imagination to me. I’d expressed playful skepticism over her imaginary friend and, in response, she fixed me with a pointed stare. “We don’t just see with our eyes, Mommy,” she declared. “We see with our minds.” I fell silent while Dora the Explorer’s lilting voice murmured in the background. Had my roly-poly six-year-old just served me a slice of Buddhist credo?
My practice had come to a halt after her birth. In the early months, sleep-deprivation and hormonal surges left barely enough brain power and energy for the nitty-gritty of caring for a newborn. As the chemical tides abated, however, and with the colicky days behind us, months stretched into years—and my practice was still not the way it used to be. I felt a lot of regret over this. And that day, my daughter’s pithy remark stirred a pang of resentment.
I’d envisioned an effortless blending of new motherhood and my practice, complete with divine epiphanies. But there was nothing transcendent in the smelly depths of a diaper bin. Clouds didn’t part after endless intonations of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
What I found instead was a flood of complex, intense emotions and sensations. Alongside the universal pain of parenting, I experienced the private agony of being a mother with a history of childhood trauma. Motherhood resurrected ghosts that I’d believed were long buried. Distilling these elements from my maternal experience—all while discerning that shadowy line between pain and suffering, connectedness and attachment—has been a wholly unmagical, messy, and faltering process. And yet, the experiences of being a mom has tethered me more deeply to my humanness. It has revealed to me how being a parent is, in many ways, the mother of all illusions.
Early on, I was gobsmacked by the dissonance between what I’d imagined motherhood would be—me, sanguine, in downward dog while my baby cooed in her crib—and its staggering reality: a wailing, colicky infant sliding down my bouncing knee while my bleary eyes fluttered open and shut. Those daily three-hour cryfests, arriving like clockwork, became the chronometer of my days—each one dissolving into the next. The sanitized, rose-colored version of motherhood that I’d unwittingly absorbed fell away like the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.
There is an unkindness in the chimera of motherhood as an entirely joyful, wholesome experience. It sets rigid standards that reject real emotions and lived experience, and it bolsters the voice of the critical inner parent. In those early years, my gut churned with an irrational fear that if the real me were exposed, I might somehow lose my daughter. The real me being the woman who forgot to shower for days until the scent of sour milk wafted from her skin—the one who, jolted awake in the middle of the night, angrily pummeled her own head with her fist before tending to her child.
I was slow to recognize my own suffering as a new mother. The sudden powerlessness over my body was a shock to my system. Breastfeeding was especially confusing. As my baby’s warm weight settled into my arms, feelings of tenderness washed over me. But with each let-down also came a sharp sense of despair—a familiar helplessness when the body is being used for another’s needs. In this way, breastfeeding became a visceral reminder of past abuse.
Historic grief often flooded through me without warning, locking me in a state of hyperarousal and making my physiological responses grossly disproportionate to the moment. What family and friends assumed was postpartum depression was actually postpartum anxiety for which I hadn’t yet found a way to apply the tools of the dharma. Becoming a mother poked at the dark underbelly of my trauma. I needed time.
Confronting the riptide that engulfed me had a radically different quality from the calm probing of meditation I was used to. To experience the disorientation with present-moment awareness meant abandoning the familiar conditions of practice: silence, a cushion, solitude, a well-rested mind. The idea that dharma practice required withdrawal or separation was no longer tenable. Checking out wasn’t an option. I had to stay put on the sticky, cluttered floor and meet what came, wherever it found me. In this process, I realized how radical truths in the dharma often reveal themselves most vividly in the thick of resistance and grasping. Motherhood was a spiritual boot camp.
In Tibetan Buddhist teachings, I had only known Yum Chenmo, the Great Mother, as a metaphorical figure. On the surface, there seemed little difference between this symbol of perfect wisdom and the exalted images of motherhood in Instagram stories and Huggies ads. Machik Labdrön, a historical emanation of Yum Chenmo, was revered for her devotion to the dharma despite having children. Yet her story offered little guidance in navigating both roles. More importantly, it didn’t show me how to use motherhood, layered with the imprints of trauma, as a form of practice itself.
An evocative line from the Heart Sutra often comes to mind when I reflect on the intrinsic emptiness that Yum Chenmo represents: “No eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no appearance.”
I’d thought what I needed was a teaching with form, but I came to appreciate the abstraction as necessary. It left space for my personal story to unfurl and for me to fashion my own means of discernment. Becoming a new mother thrust a different narrative onto how I related to my trauma history. The raw questions that bubbled up in my mind were no longer, “How could they have done this to me?” but “How could someone do this to a child?” And there was also the most dreaded question: “Am I capable of doing the same?”
Parenting as practice has been a continuous exercise in letting go—a training that still chafes against my compulsion to hold tightly, much like my sleeping baby’s grip on my finger. As a parent who is a survivor, the simultaneous assault from present and past circumstances is an invisible battle. There’s no badge of honor in achieving the monumental task of the bare minimum. Today, while other parents look back and bemoan the transience of time, I secretly delight in this common ache. It represents a personal, inner transformation: the ability to finally experience the pure, mundane pain of parenting.
My heart now understands that my daughter, too, will suffer—she will experience pain, age, sickness, and death—and she, too, is capable of darkness. I’ve seen this poignant truth show up tragically for others: my aunt collapsing from physical agony upon learning her son had taken his own life and the debilitating guilt my friend, a devoted father, carries after losing his spunky girl to the impersonal streets she now calls home.
Pain, more than love, has been the greater teacher in the spiritual lessons of motherhood. Staying with the agony—observing how it eventually shifts and softens in my body—opened my heart to a fuller experience of love. A mother’s love is often taken for granted. In both Buddhism and consumer culture, it is held up as the symbol of selfless compassion: immediate and unquestionable. While I have experienced the truth of this, I’ve also learned how such notions can dismiss or underestimate the possibility of growth within this sacred realm.
My challenge in experiencing unconditional love has been less about giving it than receiving it. Accepting my daughter’s love, at a deep and fundamental level, was painful. Yet I understood, implicitly, that doing so was how she would feel loved and safe. I know firsthand how the absence of security, and the premature loss of innocence, can place additional hurdles along one’s spiritual path. My wish for her is that this rudimentary sense of safety will chart a different course to her heart-mind, guiding her toward liberation as she faces an uncertain world.
We are all stars in a constellation—separate but connected. Each interaction holds a lesson in impermanence, nonattachment, and the potential for profound awakening. But for a mother, some stars will always shine more brightly than others. As if making up for lost time, I sometimes give myself permission to grasp one close to my heart and linger in the blissful, timeless dream of non-awakening.
Happy memories fill my mind today, sixteen years later. Sometimes, I’m back in those quiet moments, holding her in my lap as she drifts into sleep. I remember how, through heavy lids, she’d gaze at the tattoo on my arm, her chubby index finger tracing the inky outline of the Tibetan letters, over and over, like a lazy prayer.
“It says ‘Hail to the jewel in the lotus,’” I explained to her when she was older. “It means there is something special, like a precious diamond, in each of us—and this makes us all the same, no matter how different we are.”
“Like shining stars in the sky,” she nodded, innocently offering up another truism—one I’m now able to delight in.
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