(gentle piano music)
- The arrival of a baby is like having
a live-in Zen Master parachuted into your home.
As any reputable Zen Master will do,
he's going to push every single one of your buttons,
every place where you have any kind of attachment
that things should be a certain way,
you're gonna find out that things don't necessarily
have to be the way you think they have to be.
This is an enormously powerful lesson for us,
if we can be open to it, so that rather than
forcing the baby to conform immediately to
your particular desires, that actually
it'd be much better to give yourself over to listening
very, very deeply to what the baby's true needs are,
meditate if you will, on who this creature is
and let them teach you everything
that you need to provide to allow for
a healthy relationship that's not going to be healthy
for a month or two or three or four,
but that's gonna be healthy over
days, weeks, months, years, decades
and basically, hopefully the rest of your lives together.
That's very, very powerful, and
to start off on the sort of ...
on a good footing with that kind of intention
to see who this baby is, and to not know who the baby is,
and to appreciate the adventure of finding out,
and also having that baby in some sense
reflect who you are; and you may be
finding out a lot about yourself
that you didn't even know was there,
in terms of paternal instinct or
maternal instincts that might come out.
This is a tremendously wonderful opportunity
to experience love, in a way that has profound purity to it.
So to really begin to see how much
love there is in you as you connect with this,
and notice all the different ways that you connect.
It's not simply through touch, but it can be through sounds.
It can be through gaze. It can be through motion, and to
really allow oneself to be aware of the different aspects
of this relationship, and what it's bringing out in you.
It's a tremendous period of joy,
this kind of awareness of parenting,
which I sometimes call "mindful parenting,"
is a kind of process of nurturing our children
in the number of ways that we're
called to nurture our children,
and at the same time, in the best and deepest of ways,
in ways that are almost impossible
to do in any other way, growing ourselves as well.
Don't let your anxiety inhibit the joy,
or suppress the joy, if you will.
If you need to get some kind of information
about how to hold the baby, make
sure that the neck is supported and so forth.
Yes, by all means, there are many people
including the grandparents, who
can give you that kind of advice, but I would say
to a large degree, trust your instincts
and be as gentle and as present as possible.
The babies that I know are completely present
from the moment of birth, and they are
in some sense calling out to us
for a kind of relationality that
confirms and affirms who they are,
and that actually influences
their biological development, virtually
hour by hour in the early hours.
That doesn't mean that you have to
be uptight about it or worry about it.
Your natural instincts come out as a parent, and they're
very, very much in line with atunement and caring.
(gentle piano music)