Chime (postpartum)

I hosted my first group in my home in Oakland and every Wednesday 9 moms with their young babies gathered in my living room. This diverse group of East Bay moms were wise and witty, open and brave enough to be vulnerable.  We drank tea, ate chocolate, and wondered aloud together about the mysterious habits of mind and swells of the heart that arise during motherhood-- the outsize love, yes, and also the darkness of despair and doubt, the mind’s spinning and paralysis in the minutiae-soup of a million decisions to be made (both arbitrary and consequential) while raising a tiny human. Each week I offered my set of tools and practices that I had developed to soothe and assist new moms and I was delighted to hear how many of the women described their mental habits changing, becoming more flexible, and feeling more free and relaxed as the weeks went on.

Now I have two children and my house seems to be getting smaller so I rent other East Bay spaces for my groups. What started out as a new moms support group plus some mindfulness tricks has now become ‘Chime’- a psychoeducational therapy group with a fully developed mindfulness-based curriculum tailored specifically to the mental and emotional challenges of the postpartum phase. In addition to the two hour in-person weekly workshop with me (and 6-8 other new mamas), workshop members also get one-on-one consultation with me during weekly “office hours” when I am available to talk with them about difficult mind states or emotional challenges as well as anything else that the postpartum moment has drudged up.  I think of Chime as a ‘workshop’ in the truest sense and I invite group members to engage in real time with the material when we meet, to really ‘workshop’ their habits of mind in group in order to benefit fully from the curriculum and the group experience, and as a reminder that we are all works in progress, that we can relax into the truth that honest parenting, from the very beginning, means being humble enough to keep re-working, and re-attuning to what is healthiest within ourselves and for our relationship with our children.

*Update- my kids got older and it turns out that mind tricks are still needed in parenting them, even more so now, so I now also lead Chime Workshops for parents (of any age kids). Check out ‘Chime (for parents)’.

The Chime Postpartum Workshop began as a labor of love after I’d been practicing as a therapist for 10 years and studying mindfulness/meditation for almost as long. My daughter had turned one and I was sleeping again. Slowly, I felt my rational mind returning to me. Reflecting back on that first year of motherhood, I realized that I had instinctively been doing mindfulness ‘tricks’ on myself and trying out other therapeutic interventions to manage my mind and body during what I now affectionately call “the drowning phase” of being postpartum.  The suffering of ongoing sleep-deprivation coupled with the physical pain of recovering from childbirth turned out to be the most fertile ground on which to try out all the techniques I had studied formally for years. I was relieved to discover that many of them worked and where they didn’t, I made up my own.  I felt compelled to share what I had learned with other moms who wanted to do more than just survive those early days and who might want to learn how their own minds could grow in new ways and be transformed into more peaceful places.