How to Come Back to Your Centre — A Slower Kind of Life

This post is part of a series on Essential Skills for New Parents: How yoga practices can help you parent with peace and presence.

It is easy to be pulled off centre as a new parent. Fatigue, messes, unpredictability, arguments, and more messes arise daily leading to strong emotions like anger, frustration, fear, and judgement.

The baby wakes up again.

The laundry you just folded gets dumped onto the floor.

You cut the toast the wrong way.

Things don’t go as planned or hoped.

Seemingly small triggers can accumulate gradually until you are crying into your cereal bowl and don’t really know why.

We may like to think that we are always operating from our highest wisdom and making clear and wise decisions. However, the reality is that we are often pulled off-centre by strong emotions, beliefs and perceptions and our resulting actions may not always be skillful or helpful. When I am off-centre, my vision is skewed and I am not seeing clearly.

Anytime you are being swayed by strong emotions or feel like you have no options, then you are probably off-centre.

Operating from your centre is a yogic practice that means making decisions and taking actions from a place of mental and emotional clarity. There is a place within of mental and emotional clarity. This place exists within you, even when things seem messy. Even when you are engulfed in emotions, it is there. It is your centre. The key to operating from this clear place and not the mess of emotional reactivity is recognizing when you are off-centre and finding your way back.

How to Come Back to Your Centre

1. Become aware that you are off-centre. You will be acting from the strong grip of a negative emotion.

2. Follow your breath back to calm using the instructions in How to Stay Calm When the Baby is Crying.

3. Place your attention on your heart-centre. You can place your hand there if that helps.

4. Cultivate a positive or regenerative emotion such as calm, appreciation, care, or gratitude.

5. Repeat to yourself a grounding phrase like: “I am functioning from my centre” or “I am doing a great job”, “I am in alignment”, “I can do this”.

The secret sauce is generating a positive emotion. That is what puts you back into alignment.

I know that I am not operating from my centre when my mind is preoccupied with imagined pressures, expectations, and judgements. When my head swirls with what the “experts” say, or what I imagine someone else will judge. My baby “should” be on a nap schedule, “should” sleep in the crib. My toddler “should” be able to pick up his toys, “should” respond positively to my requests, I “should” know what to do… I actually usually only catch myself after I have already acted unskilfully and have created more imbalance.

If I function from strong disruptive emotions, I often can create more and more imbalance. I tend to be demanding, commanding and have high expectations. My son reacts; I react. It can spiral. I find my son reacts to my off-centre behaviour like lack of presence, harsh words, or inappropriate demands, by doing something even more off-centre like climbing the fridge, throwing all of his clothes out of his drawers, or hitting me. It’s like his nervous system is more sensitive my being off-centre and he reacts in a big way.

By recognizing that we are both off-centre, rather than add to the situation, I can regroup, reset and find our way back.

In the next post, I will share how to enjoy parenting more by seeing the light in my child and in myself.

This post is part of a Series:

Essential Skills for New Parents: How yoga practices can help you parent with peace and presence.

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