Find Your Mama Groove: 5 Steps to a balanced, happy, connected life and family

By Joanna Hunt

Do you want motherhood to be easier and more fun?

Being a mom can be hard work. It's easy to run yourself ragged looking after everyone else without ever listening to your own needs or taking any quality time out for yourself. This eventually leads to exhaustion of your mind, body, and spirit.

This book is for

• Language: English
• Publisher: Known Publishing
• Release date: Aug 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913717063

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Why Families Are Out Of Balance

To all the frazzled, burnt-out moms out there. I see you. I feel you. I was you. Sometimes, I am you. And, I get it. You do A LOT. Your to-do list is ever-growing, and so are the bags under your eyes. Nap time is never long enough, if you’re lucky enough to get one at all. You feel like the world is going to collapse if you aren’t always on your A game. You beat yourself up when you deliver anything less than perfect. You feel every mom, but you, has her life together (not true by the way). Your inner critic is a real bitch. You get frustrated more than you want. From time to time, you use a tone you are less than proud of. And your mom guilt is a strong force within you.

When it comes to you and your family there are no boundaries. You are in a constant state of giving and it feels like your partner and kids are in a constant state of taking. You have lost your balance – or maybe feel you never had it in the first place. Being out of balance is the root cause of the chaos within your home and family, and it’s in your control to get things into a peaceful state.

I can tell you first-hand, that a burnt-out mom, a workaholic dad, and child who knows just which buttons to press provide the perfect ingredients for marital distress, and unhappiness all round. This combination can suck the good energy out of any home (and marriage), leaving both partners with very little time and energy for one another, and the child or children feeling invisible. Without a safe, supportive and high-mood place to talk about feelings and emotions, lots of stressors and frustrations can get bottled up. This is the case for every member of the family, especially the parents. They are the ones that usually need to do the most sharing, processing, and forgiving. In fact, most of my clients feel the biggest results within the family came from creating more joyful, relaxing, heartfelt moments between the partners.

The changes you and your partner make will have a massive impact on the well-being of your children. Your children mirror you: they simply reflect back the actions, habits, language, and beliefs that they observe from you, both the helpful and the harmful. The same goes for your attitude towards taking responsibility for your health and happiness, or lack thereof. Without a doubt, your attitude towards seeking help and support around the challenges within your life is the biggest factor in your child’s ability to do the same. Just think about it. How can you expect your child to be vulnerable and take action to improve his or her mental, physical, and spiritual health if you are not doing the same and leading the way? That is the genius in conscious family coaching – it provides a platform for parents and children to casually and openly discuss fears, dreams, embarrassments, frustrations and challenging behaviors, all while feeling safe, loved, and connected to one another.

MY STORY

Anxiety and ADHD

I remember my first panic attack well. I was eight years old, and it happened before bedtime on a school night. I remember not being able to breathe and feeling sick to my stomach. My mom stayed up with me for hours trying to figure out what was wrong. I remember sitting with her on the bathroom floor with the shower blasting at full steam. She was hoping the steam would make it easier for me to breathe. It did not. So, off to the emergency room we went. The doctor on duty diagnosed me with asthma. All the other warning signs had been ignored: my constant state of worrying, my emotional sensitivity, my crying fits, my forgetfulness, my disorganization and simultaneous perfectionism, the tedious hours it took to complete schoolwork, and my shyness. Clearly, it was asthma! After all, it is often easier to accept a physical ailment over an emotional one. So, we welcomed the diagnosis and the very next day picked up my first inhaler from the pharmacy.

I grew up accepting the side effects of asthma as normal. I also noticed that they became more severe when my home was a mess, my dad was stressed out from work and taking it out on my mom, or my mother’s to-do list was overwhelming her. Simultaneously, I learned to mask how I felt by keeping my worry to myself, viewing my perfectionism as a gift, and finding a few good friends who were similar to me. Thus, by the age of nineteen, my doctor had agreed that I had outgrown asthma (like many children do) and no longer needed my inhaler.

It was also at the age of nineteen that I found yoga. Or more accurately, yoga found me. It found me. It changed me. It saved me. I hadn’t realized how bad my anxiety and attentional issues had been until they were gone. I could only manage to make them go away while I was living in the present moment. It took me a few years before I was able to truly transfer the presence I felt in the yoga classroom into my everyday life. But, once I learned to do this, I healed myself in a way that I previously believed impossible. Yoga cured me on such a profound level that I devoted my life to helping others discover how to do the same.

CHAPTER 2

My Conscious Approach To Working With Families

My counseling background

My high school guidance counselor was my first introduction to the role of a counselor. He was a jolly man, with a big red face, round belly, and happy-go-lucky smile. When I first met him, I was fourteen years old, painfully shy, and had just started my freshman year at a high school where I knew no one. He had helped me with my course selection during the summer before the school year started, and made it a point to remember who I was when September rolled around. When he saw me in the hallway, he would chant my name as loud as he could, until I’d come over. Then he’d ask me questions, skillfully probing me on which after school activities I was getting involved in. At a time when I felt invisible, he saw me. He made a girl who felt like no one, feel special. It was that feeling of being special that inspired me to become a counselor too. I want every child who feels ordinary to feel extraordinary, which was the gift he gave me.

I love counseling children, and the more challenging the better. But, in my years of experience, ten times out of ten, the best results within the children occur when working with the whole family. All children have one thing in common – they long to be loved, understood, and accepted for exactly who they are. And while it is beneficial for a child to feel that sort of rapport from me, nothing is as powerful as supporting him or her build that kind of relationship with themselves, as well as with his or her parents and siblings.

One of the first jobs I took on as a counselor was working at an alternative high school. I worked with forty high risk students who were on the verge of dropping out completely and not graduating with a high school diploma. In addition to working with them 1:1, I was assigned the task of creating and teaching a Health and Physical Education curriculum. I was not a yoga or meditation teacher at the time, but I started every class using those practices. We would share what we were grateful for, find time to breathe into our bellies, do a light stretch, and truly acknowledge each other’s presence before we began our learning. The students loved it. I did too. It was the perfect segue into the lessons I prepared for the day and often promoted more focus, more dialogue, and more peer connection.

A month into our class, a student asked to meet with me privately. He told me that he wanted to feel the way he felt in our class at home, and wanted his mother to experience it too. He asked if I would ever consider letting his mom come into the school and going through the opening practice with us. He felt it would be a good way for his mom to feel calmer and for him to be able to talk to her about some of the troubles he was dealing with. So that is exactly what we did. I held a private session for him and his mom, and it went brilliantly. We practiced gratitude, we breathed, we stretched, we connected, we shared, we cried, we laughed, and they left promising each other that they would make time every week to talk in this way moving forward.

The mother and son had shared some pretty heavy stuff during our session. He was suffering from depression at that time and was having suicidal thoughts. He had wanted to tell his mom sooner, but didn’t want to add to the amount of worry that was already on her plate. He also feared that if he had told her within their home, she would have gone into full-blown over-reaction mode instead of calmly listening to how he felt. That is when I began to discover the importance of mood, attitude and calm listening within family discussions. At that point in my career, I never would have dreamed of creating a methodology that combined counseling and yoga. I just felt that particular experience was a one-time thing. But, I knew moving forward that I would be committed to creating more unique opportunities for kids and parents to connect with one another.

My yoga background

In January of 2015, I enrolled in my first yoga teacher training in Boston, Massachusetts, with the sole intention of deepening my personal practice. I remember telling the other yogis on the first day that I would never teach, and was solely there to learn as a student. Yoga had become my grounding force over the previous ten years and I wanted to learn more, feel deeper, and grow spiritually. I had been using yoga to holistically manage my anxiety and attentional issues, and it had become my ultimate outlet to de-stress from my work as a traditional counselor. Looking back, it was quite ironic to see that the traditional counseling profession was sucking the life out of me. I needed to find external ways to motivate and inspire myself so that I could be effective at my job, and yoga did the trick. The training was seven months long, and by the sixth month, I was forever changed. Something within me awoke. I deeply felt that the principles of yoga were supposed to play a larger role in my counseling method, but was unsure of how. Instead of figuring out the how, I dropped into my intuition and signed up for my next yoga teacher training in New York City.

I went into that next training with a different lens – the lens of an aspiring teacher. I took a summer sabbatical and arrived in New York City with the vision of completing a one-month intensive yoga training before heading back to my old life and job in Boston. At that point, I had planned to teach yoga on the side of my job, and didn’t know where the journey would take me.

During that month, I practiced yoga every day for ten hours and was vibrating higher than ever before. That vibration landed me an outstanding job that I could not turn down. I was asked to be the Director of After School Programming for one of Manhattan’s top middle schools. Within that position, I was able to create over 200 art, wellness, and leadership programs that were deeply rooted in social and emotional learning. I then trained teachers on how to implement those programs within classroom settings. The students thrived off the creative content and peer connection. It was a rewarding job where I was able to witness the power of fun and play in learning. These programs provided a space for the kids to explore genuine interests mindfully and methodically. I felt I had found another crucial piece in the puzzle of my purpose: I wanted to create these types of programs for more than just children to enjoy, I wanted to create them for the entire family.

My training in yoga therapeutics

In 2017 I traveled to Bali, Indonesia to train in Yoga Therapeutics because I wanted to learn the exact yoga poses, meditations, and breathwork practices that brought about healing for specific conditions – like depression and anxiety. At this point, I was already integrating yoga within my work as a traditional counselor and After School Program Director, and wanted to bring my knowledge and understanding to the next level. It was on this trip that I confirmed my purpose in life was to methodically combine eastern medicine and philosophy to western counseling practices for families. It was also on this trip that I met my husband, Pete, but I will save that story for another time!

As I examined the role of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) within the ancient practice of yoga, I had more ah-ha moments than I’d had in the rest of my life. Everything within my work began to make more sense. I had known that integrating yoga, mindful breathing and meditation practices into my counseling sessions worked, but it wasn’t until I was in Bali that I understood the science behind why. You see, the mind-body is deeply interconnected and illnesses and pathologies do not just arise out of nowhere. Your thoughts, your dreams, your worries, your motivation and your will directly impact organ and brain function, and vice versa. This knowledge gave me a greater understanding