"Buddhist Principles : A Working Example" or "How not to lose your s**t when your baby won't sleep at 4 in the morning"

"I wanna Bertie Beetle"

The scenario is nothing unusual.  Mother of a 9 week old little boy who although he is the most beautiful little treasure in the world, isn't always so great at sleeping at night.  Dad has a demanding job and gets up with our other two cherubs in the morning (besides he lacks some of the necessary equipment) so it's Mummy on night duty.

 

Needless to say that after nine weeks of broken sleep.  Mummy's starting to get a little tired, cranky and teary.  We mums are very good at putting on brave faces in the light of day but let's face it when you're staring at a tiny little person in the middle of the night who has decided that rather then go back to sleep they would rather play or cry over nothing in particular for an hour and a half you start to go a little crazy.

 

I have been reading Sarah Napthali's "Buddhism for mothers with lingering questions" and have found her advice to be both logical and helpful (both key tests of advice as far as I'm concerned).  I decided at 4am this morning (man I used to be partying at this hour) as I started to tear up again that it was time to put this advice into practice.

 

The first piece of advice is to be in the present moment.  Rather then starting the dialogue in my head of how it's always me getting up to and having to settle the baby in the middle of the night (the past) and how I'm going to be exhausted tomorrow and as I can't see me catching up on that sleep any time soon I'm going to end up sick and run down (the future.) I chose to stay in the present moment and found that the tears stopped as soon as the back story ended. 

 

The next piece of advice is based on Buddhism's second noble truth "Our suffering is caused by our attachments and aversions."  Napthali (and Buddha) suggest that understanding that it is our attachment to or our aversion toward a thing/person/event that causes our suffering not the thing/person/event itself.  Right got it, my aversion toward the crying and my attachment to  sleep are what is causing me to suffer right now, not the fact that my baby won't go back to sleep.  OK time to let go of the aversion and attachment and just deal with what is in front of me.  I can do that.

The next piece of advice is to ask what the present moment requires of you.  Easy, the present moment simply requires me to get my little man settled and back to sleep.  I've done this before, it's not so bad.  Calmly cuddle, walk, pat and jiggle until he falls back asleep.  So much more effective than crying, swearing, storming, huffing and puffing.  Who'd have thought. What often took 90 minutes took just 10 and I was back to my bed and sleeping before I knew it.

 

I'm not saying that I'll never have another teary, non-sleeping episode again but it's nice to know that I now have some tools in the tool box to help me when I start to feel out of control.  Now if only I could deal with the attachment to a well rested functioning brain and the aversion to being vomited on I'll be sorted.

 

What great advice have you been given recently?

Hung up on housework?

Now where's that kit kat?

So here I am at home exhausted but happy after spending a few days cleaning my home with the energy that has returned with the second trimester of my pregnancy.  Happy I said, more like completely chuffed with myself.  The floors were done, the kitchen fully cleaned out and organised, the furniture was polished, the kid's rooms were spotless and the bathrooms were sparkling.  The house looked amazing for the first time in a long while and I was loving it.

Now let's rewind back and have a look at the last few months when I was completely zonked with early pregnancy and the constant nausea taking it's toll on me.  The house was never a bomb site but it was also never amazing and I felt this everyday as disappointment in myself for not being able to stay as on top of things as I would have liked.  

I found myself often in tears and yelling at my darling boy as he had yet again decided to change our carpet from white to psychadelic with whatever tools he had at hand (wax crayon, fruit juice, playdough, whatever he could get his hands on really.)  I took every attempt from my children to mess with the tidiness of my house as a personal insult and when they really trashed it I felt hopeless defeat for a while.

Seriously who buys white carpet?

Now as I stood there feeling chuffed about my amazingly clean looking abode it occurred to me that I had invested a lot of myself and my self esteem in my ability to keep a tidy home.  It might seem like something reasonably harmless and that heaps of people do but when you stop to think about it it's completely crazy.  I was investing my sense of wellbeing and happiness in something that not only has no affect whatsoever on the fate of mankind (my ruling stick for the import of anything,) but was also totally at the mercy of two children, my energy levels and my schedule.  In hindsight really not that clever.

Buddha amongst his many teachings brought us the idea that human suffering was caused by either attachment or aversion.  Attachment to things that we have or desire and aversion to those things we don't want.  Buddha taught his disciples that to achieve true happiness we need to rid ourselves of our attachments and aversions.  He wasn't suggesting that we never want for anything ever again but that we didn't attach ourselves or our current or future happiness to that desire.

Buddha also taught us about impermanence.  The fact that nothing in this universe including ourselves is here forever and that even the giant mountain of today will be a slightly different mountain tomorrow as it is affected by it's environment so that one day it may be worn away to nothing.  

Understanding the implications of impermanence helps us to let go of our attachments and aversions as we understand that those things that we feel we can't be happy without won't last nor will the happiness that comes with attaining them.  Also those things that we waste energy on hating, wishing away or avoiding will also not last and we can accept that with  time the cause of our aversion or our aversion itself will simply cease to be.

What does this have to do with my housework scenario? Everything.  I had attached myself and my happiness to having to have a clean home.  When my home was clean, I was content with this aspect of myself and would allow myself happiness until as is inevitable this condition for happiness goes away and I am back to denying myself happiness until the condition is restored.

So what to do?  While I don't endorse never cleaning your house again as keeping a clean home helps to ensure a safe and healthy environment for us and our families, I am suggesting that my sense of wellbeing is to no longer be impacted by the condition of having a clean home or not.  Now that I have awareness of my actions I can understand that while my home may not be as clean as I would like, this condition will not last and so I needn't waste my energy and happiness on wishing it to be different.

Gimme, gimme, gimme

I've talked about having a clean home but there are many different ways we display attachments and aversions that will be manifesting themselves in my life and yours.  Do you feel ashamed of yourself when unable to stick to your chosen eating plan and totally pumped when you get it right?  Do you think of yourself as a queen or king when you have achieved that longed for figure/muscle tone and a dog when your body looks different to this ideal?  Is your sense of self love affected by the behavior of your children, state of your bank balance, prestige of your occupation, make of your car?  The list goes on.

My challenge for myself over the next week and I hope you'll join me is to look at those things we have attached our sense of wellbeing to, list them down and then get real with ourselves about the impermanence of these things and the craziness of attaching our happiness to them.  I reiterate again that I am not asking you to stop working on a healthier you or stop working but to understand that these things are not you and you are not them.

Good luck and if you like what you read don't forget to follow my blog by subscribing at the top of this page.

Your balance buddy

Renae X

P.S Is there anything you can think of straight away that you have unknowingly attached yourself to?