Mommysattva: Contemplations for Mothers Who Meditate (or Wish They Could)

By Jenna Hollenstein

“Mommysattva is a wise, funny, and refreshingly real guide to what happens when the ideals of mindfulness practice meet the chaos of everyday motherhood.”
—Anne Cushman, author of The Mama Sutra: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Path of Motherhood

In Mommysattva, writer, meditation teacher, nutrition therapist, and mom Jenna Hollenstein envisions motherhood as the most spontaneous, impossible, and hard-won path to wisdom and compassion.

The book is not a guide to motherhood; it’s a collection of bite-sized essays examining motherhood as a spiritual journey that includes compassion and vast expansion of the heart. It explores many of the felt experiences of those who mother–from the intense metamorphosis of becoming a mother to the practice of motherhood as a teaching on what it means to be present to a mother’s innately activist role in bringing about positive change. And also irritation, resentment, endless snacks, and, sure, vomit. How to bring it all to the path without shame, virtue signaling, or setting up endless years of therapy for your kid? Hollenstein, in a deeply honest exploration of her own journey as a mother as well as her Buddhist practice, offers a view of motherhood that is deep, kind, and real.

The essays shimmer with the message that every single thing we do as mothers is an opportunity to embrace the power, love, chaos, and possibility of this magnificent path.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lionheart Press, a division of the Open Heart Project
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781732277670

Jenna Hollenstein

Jenna Hollenstein, MS, RD, CDN is a registered dietitian, non-diet nutrition therapist, and meditation instructor with a private practice in Manhattan, where she works with people struggling with chronic dieting, disordered eating, and eating disorders. Jenna is passionate about helping people transcend the diet culture, rediscover the pleasures of eating and being in their bodies, and live life with joy, connection, and compassion. Jenna is also the author of Understanding Dietary Supplements, a handy guide to the evaluation and use of vitamins, minerals, herbs, and botanicals for both consumers and clinicians, and the memoir Drinking to Distraction. To learn more about Jenna’s work and to download material related to this book, please visit eat2love.com.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

It is 5:30 on a Tuesday morning, five months into the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, and I am up to start putting together these thoughts. Pre-motherhood, I was not a morning person, but now, when else do I have the time, space, and mental real estate to do such a thing? My five-year-old son will be up within the hour, and my attention will be diverted from reflection to more immediate needs like breakfast, reminders to pee, and negotiating activities other than playing video games (on which I have relied heavily during this period and which may very well have contributed to a new facial tic I noticed in him a couple of weeks ago).

Once schools were shuttered, his pre-K class time consisted of a mere 15-minute virtual morning meeting—no fault of the teachers—followed by a series of optional activities, or in other words, homework for the parents, mostly moms. Everywhere, moms scrambled to deal with the rapid shift in expectations. Then summer officially started after his moving-up ceremony with most camps canceled and other summer activities not an option. Our flight to Sicily to visit my partner’s family—that delightful annual respite of sea and cousins and childcare carried out by persons other than me—was out of the question. My partner was back to work full time at a research institute, so if not for the pathological helpfulness of my parents I would have had to stop seeing clients or (shudder) work in the evenings when my brain and body have used up all their capacity and I am counting the minutes until bedtime.

Our newfound freedom from our plans leaves us at loose ends. We try to get outside—a challenge in New York City due to the congestion and the summer swelter. We try to see other kids—complicated by the refrain of Six feet! and dissolution of social skills from five months of homeschooling. We try to do some form of learning—practicing writing his name, reading Mo Willems, journaling the progress of his expensive butterfly habitat, adding and subtracting gummy bears, playing sight word bingo. Usually we just get through the day and I try not to feel too badly about it.

We spend a lot of time together. He’s growing in front of my eyes. I know this because my eyes are on him every waking moment. More than my eyes—my entire body is attuned to his throughout the day. I’m constantly sensing his moods. Is this sadness, anger, exhaustion, hypoglycemia? Is it the irritable perfectionism he inherited from me (god help him)? I navigate the fine line between relieving his discomfort and helping him learn to deal with it himself.

My body is his home base. My eyes must witness his invention of a new dance move or when he puts on slippery socks and speed skates in the living room like Frozone from The Incredibles. My ears and mouth must hear and affirm when he discovers what N-E-S-T spells or unlocks a new Marvel video game character. Yes!, Yes?, and I’m listening are repeated hundreds of times each day. If my body disappears behind the bathroom door, it isn’t for long. My body is the most powerful instrument I own, the constant that communicates with presence and touch and reciprocity that I am here for him no matter what, that my love for him only grows, even—or especially—in difficulty.

When he wakes, he’ll come in for a quick cuddle and then sit alongside me, watching Pencilmation on his iPad but needing the reassurance of my body nearby. At this point I’ll abandon my laptop, the sanctity of this space and time interrupted until tomorrow morning before we begin our day all over again. (Harold Ramis, wherever you are, it’s time for a remake of Groundhog Day from a mom’s perspective.)

This squeeze of time and space replicated in households all over the globe makes it nearly impossible for mothers to recognize, reflect on, value, and share the work they are doing, let alone convey that value to the world. Knowing every other mother on the planet is going through some form of this right now provides little comfort. The monolith, Motherhood, is heralded by many as the hardest job in the world, yet the lack of systemic support for mothers—scanty maternity leave (in the United States and other mostly non-EU countries around the world), lack of affordable childcare, few broadly accessible mental health resources, limited supportive communities, inconsistently supportive partners, rare candid discussions of the challenges faced by mothers, zero safety net in the case of, say, a global pandemic—says otherwise.

This strange time has shone a spotlight on the attitude we hold toward motherhood, reflected in The New York Times articles such as In the COVID-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both, America’s Mothers Are in Crisis, and How Society Has Turned Its Back on Mothers. We’ve forwarded these articles to one another in the wee hours of the morning, but they haven’t sparked a national debate (let alone action) about whether this state of existence is just, sustainable, or humane. Anyone invested in having that debate was too exhausted to engage in it anyway. The disconnect between our own awareness of the true importance of motherhood and the capacity to change how it is regarded in the larger culture makes motherhood something we largely experience alone. Long before the order to shelter in place, moms were already isolated, individually doing the mental math of how to work and parent and take care of all the things in a focused, present, worthwhile way, often feeling judged by one another and perhaps even more harshly by ourselves.

As a practicing Buddhist and meditator of more than thirteen years, the lens through which I view my own life and our interconnected lives is one of ordinary sacredness, of energies in flux, and of infinite opportunities to experience enlightenment in everyday life. I did not arrive at this view through conceptual understanding—although I appreciate intellect very much. I realized this through experiencing the movement of my mind as my body sat in stillness. That act alone, though shockingly difficult, has been alongside motherhood the most instructive arc of my life. As a result, I strongly feel the cognitive dissonance of our personal and collective imbalance, confusion, and crisis.

In Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine, Lama Tsultrim Allione writes:

The loss of feminine qualities is an urgent psychological and ecological issue in modern society. It is a painful loss in our emotional lives and a disastrous loss for the safety of life on earth. In woman, it affects her central identity; and in man, it affects his ability to feel and value. The loss of the feminine in man causes him to feel moody and lonely. In woman, it causes her to lose faith in herself. We are slowly awakening to the crisis of the earth and the effect of the loss of the sacred feminine, but few people understand that the causes of the crisis have spiritual values at their roots—values of the sacred as immanent, imbued in all of life, and all life as interdependent.

The Buddhist view of feminine and masculine is concerned with energies, not to be confused with gender and how its constructs have come into being in our current culture. Just as we all possess a left brain hemisphere and a right brain hemisphere, we all possess feminine and masculine energies. Both as individuals and as a collective society, feminine and masculine energies are expressed in ways that can contribute to balance or imbalance, wisdom or confusion. As Lama Tsultrim states, and as I have observed as a mother in a culture that does not seem to have my back, we are in a chronic state of imbalance and confusion.

In Buddhism, especially Tantric Buddhism, a harmonious balance of masculine and feminine qualities is necessary to realize enlightenment. The Buddha is very often represented as having a perfect balance of the masculine and feminine. Although we know that the representations are of a man-bodied person, if we did not know this, we might well think them images of a woman. This is very much on purpose as an illustrative metaphor of masculine and feminine. How these qualities unfold and express themselves in the individual and in the environment is the true foundation for waking up to reality.

During quarantine, my partner taught himself how to play the piano. Granted, his brain works differently than most, and he becomes a dog with a bone whenever something is challenging and interesting. Five months in and he is playing Chopin, Pachelbel, and Handel. He has this newly acquired skill, this bucket list accomplishment, to show for the months in isolation. The pieces he plays have come to serve as the soundtrack for my loading and unloading the dishwasher, folding the laundry, chopping garlic and onions.

It would be easy to feel aggrieved: he gets to learn and practice a glorified skill while I have to look after all those less glorified and more mundane tasks around the house. (Before you hate him too much, know that he works his butt off, pays all our bills, cooks half the time, and is the chief IT officer and travel agent in our household.) And at the same time, I deeply enjoy doing these everyday tasks. They are not the only things I do in a day, but these quotidian duties are the glue that holds it all together. I take pride in cooking for my family, cleaning up the apartment, even doing the laundry (though I’d give anything to have a washer and dryer in the apartment instead of in the basement of our building). I just wish, however, that they occupied the same overall value as piano playing. In our productivity-obsessed culture, I have wondered, Do I have something to show for my time in quarantine? The answer I keep coming back to is That is the wrong question.

So what is the right question? It has something to do with whether and how we met the challenges of having the rug pulled out from under us again and again. It is related to our capacity to open to uncertainty and change—and how we modeled that for our kids—rather than clamping down on some sort of project or self-improvement scheme to distract us from the reality of the difficulties. I’m fairly certain the right questions include Were you there for it—the uncertainty, the discomfort, the groundlessness? Did you show up? Did you stay with it? Did you allow yourself to feel?

Even if we personally value and derive satisfaction from whatever tasks we routinely engage in, domestic and otherwise, it matters that the larger society does not. We feel deep internal conflicts for doing the work that is viewed as menial while loftier accomplishments are prized. Or we feel the need to absorb those tasks into an even grander scheme of doing it all and having it all. In the words of Michelle Obama, That shit doesn’t work. Even if we enjoy these undertakings, we can harbor resentment if we have not been given a choice about doing them, if no one else is contributing, and, for me especially, if they remain invisible and unappreciated.

A mother’s version of the classic John Lennon song might be Imagine there’s no wage gap / It isn’t hard to do. But, seriously, imagine if women were paid equitably for their work inside and outside the home. Imagine if employment benefits packages included daycare and after-school care. Imagine if hospitals and midwives handed off new mothers to the care of outpatient mental health support systems with regular check-ins. What would life be like if support groups for mothers were as plentiful, varied, and ordinary as Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—those for moms of kids with special needs, foster moms, adoptive moms, stepmoms, moms attempting to blend families with wisdom and compassion? What if mom guilt was a thing of the past, and what if in response to rare relapses regarding prioritizing convenience in meal prep, delegating housecleaning to family members or a paid employee, or forgetting School Pajama Day, everyone invoked the now well-known phrase Momma, you’re good? Call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

It would be easy to internalize society’s value system in which the grit and monotony of motherhood is seen as lesser. Whether stay-at-home moms (SAHMs), mompreneurs, moms who work outside the home, moms seeking work at a living wage, or moms who are in transition between any of the above, we face an often unwinnable battle for feelings of accomplishment, productivity, and usefulness. But suppose we flipped the script? Rather than it being the number of widgets sold, emails sent, or papers pushed, or the appearance of being Instafabulous and showing the world how you are rocking it, imagine if we chose to prioritize moments of presence, gentleness, and compassion.

There is a vast chasm between how we experience motherhood internally and how it is regarded externally. To collectively view motherhood as of the utmost importance would require a complete renovation of our principles and ideologies. A smashing of the capitalist patriarchal system to value presence as highly as productivity, kindness and compassion as highly as dollars and cents. A dismantling of the oversimplified hierarchy that places SAHMs on one rung of a ladder and the working supermom on another. A view that goes beyond the rigged game encouraging moms to accept themselves as good enough while simulta­neously inventing unattainable mom goals and selling distractions disguised as self-care. One that celebrates mothers in all their rage and joy and grief and ecstasy. That venerates the mother’s body for its astounding physical and emotional capacities and the succor it provides, rather than reducing it to a superficial object to aspire to, fix, or camouflage.

A mother has a vested interest in the world being a more compassionate, cooperative, and sane place to live. She has no choice but to take an interest in leaving the world better than she found it for those in her care. So not only does the mother commit to devoting her life to the benefit of her own children, she must also be thinking bigger; she must be ever widening the circle of her compassion.

Who Is a Mommysattva?

This book is an ode to the path of enlightenment that is motherhood. Individuals who dedicate their lives to being of benefit to others are known as bodhisattvas. They vow to work with their own minds to develop wisdom and compassion but delay their own enlightenment out of the knowledge of our interconnectedness with all living beings. Whether or not she intends to, and regardless of whether or not she’s Buddhist, a woman who becomes a mother takes the vow to be of benefit to others. She becomes a mommysattva: a warrior of compassion, wisdom, and lovingkindness.

Inherent to the mommysattva is an expansive definition of Mother. A mother is the woman who gives birth to her child. A mother is the woman who adopts a child she has not birthed, becomes a child’s stepmother, or fosters a child. A mother may be a grandmother, father, older sibling, or another relative. A mother may be someone outside the traditional family circle with whom a mother–child bond is clear. A mother may be chosen by the child. She is the default caregiver, the primary influence in a child’s life, their North Star. She is the one who takes ultimate responsibility for the child and does whatever is necessary for their care. Ultimately, a mother—the one who mothers—is the center of the mandala.

A mandala is a geometric shape, usually a circle (it is the Sanskrit word for circle), that is used to demonstrate the organization of an entity and how and where the various pieces of that entity fit together. It is an image ultimately of the relationship between different parts of a whole. The mandala was a source of inspiration for Carl Jung, who believed that it provided a visual and mental tool to discover the authentic self. By moving from the outer circle toward its center, individuals could discern the true self from the illusory one. In Buddhism, mandalas are used to tell the stories of individuals, such as the Buddha or various bodhisattvas, or the stories of central themes, such as the nature of suffering. Always at the center is the person or entity from which all else arises.

In the summer of 2020, during a rare escape from the city to my parents on Long Island, I was finally able to get into the ocean and look out over the water. When I turned back to the beach and saw all the beachgoers playing in the waves and on the shore, I was deeply struck by the fact that each and every one of these bodies originated in the belly of a woman. That they entered the world by being pushed out through a vagina or lifted directly out of a uterus. That each body was cared for by that originator or someone else who stepped into the role. Mothers create the world and those who mother tend to its inhabitants.

The weight of the mother–child relationship—its presence or absence, how it underlies the way we speak to ourselves, how we love others, build relationships, navigate difficulty—cannot be overstated. It is deeply connected to the narratives we carry with us for the rest of our lives. It is the vast constellation of seemingly infinitesimal moments in which mothers guide, validate, nurture, and are present for their children, which in turn influences who they ultimately become and how they contribute to the world. A mother’s attention, attunement, patience, steadfastness, and grace (for herself and others) communicate to her children that they are good, worthy, and deserving of unconditional love and compassion. In this way—sometimes quietly, other times loudly—mothers create the world. The role of the mother is foundational. Determinational. Sacred.

With the role of mother so universal and so integral to the mental and physical well-being of the Earth’s inhabitants, and if so many of us are experiencing the same struggles, why do we continue to feel isolated, undervalued, and unseen? Why do we not recognize motherhood as the transformational path to awakening that it is and connect with other mothers as divine and powerful sisters?

The solution lies in recognizing the mommysattva. She understands the full importance of the responsibility she has assumed. She is invested in working with her own confusion, uncertainty, and difficulty. She craves realness, wishes to discover the nature of reality, desires to get to the heart of the matter, and is not afraid of the struggle, pain, and true joy required to do so.

What Is the Mommy Sangha?

The Open Heart Project Mommy Sangha was founded in 2016 and has met every single week with few exceptions. Moms of all backgrounds and from all over log into Zoom to practice meditation together for a few minutes, reflect on the Buddha’s teachings as they relate to motherhood, connect, and share a space in which motherhood is regarded as sacred.

Founding and leading the Mommy Sangha has shaped my understanding of motherhood as a path and practice. Week after week, together we have realized how our experiences as mothers reflect the most basic questions inherent in being human: about happiness and suffering, how to work with difficulty, issues around being versus doing, learning to accept our lives as they unfold, finding stability and joy in the midst of our messy, imperfect lives. We have realized how in narrowing our focus to a single point—whether in feeling the breath in meditation practice or in the laser-sharp attention we pay to our children’s cries—our connection to all beings actually expands.

When the pandemic hit, I was relieved that the Mommy Sangha already existed. Many of us with school-age kids felt as if we were back in the newborn stage of motherhood: tethered to the home, our mobility suddenly dramatically restricted, isolated from one another without access to our usual coping strategies. Some mothers of children with special needs felt that others were experiencing what was their norm before the pandemic. Within the community of the Mommy