Postpartum and finding your centre
The mind-bending, body-transforming changes in the postnatal mind-body
When I first went for a walk after having my second baby, I barely recognised my body. It felt like I had zero core strength - no centre - or at least a centre that kept veering off-course, which could not seem to easily move one foot then the other. In my mind I wanted to strike forth with purpose, but there was no anchor, no steady place to move from.
The muscles that help us to move forward start deep within us. In pregnancy, the core - the abdominal muscles front side and back, the diaphragm, the pelvic floor - has been on the receiving end of tremendous pressure, with resultant change to shape and form. Postpartum recovery isn’t just about strengthening, but about finding a new orientation, the body learning to listen and respond again to a new state of being.
Post natal: after birth, a state mothers inhabit for the rest of their lives. Bodies are bound to be profoundly affected in the early weeks and months after the monumental acts of carrying and birthing babies, but so many of us are surprised how some changes can reach forward into years too. Postpartum can feel stretched and unsteady, weak and loose, tight and tense, aching and contorted into strange shapes by sleeping curled around a toddler, or pushing a buggy up a hill, or jiggling jiggling jiggling a newborn in the early evening hours.
Alongside the physical changes, I remember this stage as a time when it was hard to trace the boundary between myself and another, when the invisible cord between us was pulled tight. We were one: taking a walk around the block alone induced the agony and profound longing of separation within me. Postpartum alarm systems are switched on easily: a relative taking your baby out of your arms without asking, intrusive thoughts about tiny bodies slipping from hands on a balcony, or whizzing off down hills into traffic, or being attacked by packs of roaming wolves. Waking in the night seconds before the baby does, being continuously convinced that you hear crying in the shower, starting to lactate on the train when another baby cries: so responsive, so easily alerted, dilated pupils in the mirror showing us the animal we are.
I am certain I can see this as an expression in my eyes when I look back at photos of myself in early motherhood. I can see something old and something new - some kind of ancient realisation, some recognition of the unknowable: yes, this is it, this thing I was both expecting and not. Something young and something old - why do I look so girl-like in these photos? And the shock, the shock, the what the actual fuck. The heaviness of love when it’s born with such profound responsibility. I am certain I can see, in later photos, the moments when I was passing through, and had then passed through the most intense of this stage. A lightness, an ability to love and not be pulled under. Fun! The sweet part of matrescence when we feel familiarity, a form of return to ourselves but also a witnessing ourselves as a new iteration. Something old, something new.
In the Chinese tradition, the postpartum time is one for balancing the intense, outward focused, yang energy of birth. In vaginal births, women have birthed a baby down their vaginal canal and out into the world; for Caesarian births, the baby has been brought from the warm cocoon of the womb through the abdomen, up and out into the world. New in the world is a baby, a mother, a whole web of relationships. For some women, the reality is complex recovery, birth trauma, forceps, tears, emergency C-section, pelvic organ prolapse, bladder or bowel issues. These occurrences are often deeply emotional, replete with their own complications in terms of body image, shame and embarrassment, fear of moving, a struggle to recognise ourselves.
Birth and becoming a mother are generally wild reckonings, life-changing threshold moments. In Chinese medicine the aim is to balance these untameable events by what happens in postpartum. Yin energy is calm, slow, inward focused. It comes postnatally via rest and warmth - warm foods and drinks and clothing. All efforts are made to restore the body to balance; in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) this is to ensure a good flow of energy/qi through the body, in order to prevent future illness.
I remember reading a Chinese American woman on the internet being driven mad by her mother’s insistence on her wearing woollen socks and padded slippers in her postpartum, even though it was boiling hot summer, in order to stop heat/energy escaping from the feet and letting cold in. A porous boundary, a porous self. I had my son in January 2021 and it was cold - we had snow in the weeks afterwards - and I remember being absolutely obsessed with keeping my feet warm. If they even touched the ground without socks I felt an almost physical pain. I couldn’t work out whether it was simply the power of suggestion, that once I knew the feet were a conduit for chills emanating up into the body, for creating imbalance, I couldn’t bear to let this bad energy in.
And then I wondered if it was genuine biology: there’s a fascial line, a deep tissue chain between feet and pelvic floor. I would engage the arches of my feet and feel a little echo of connection in my pelvic floor. The feet and the womb. Everything related.
Learning about Chinese medicine or Ayurveda feels like such a jolt for us in the West because of its holism, its focus on more subtle connections. Over the course of time Western medicine started to feel more open-minded as it’s begun to “prove” certain connections via clinical studies. We now know, for example, trauma is held physically, as an emotional store in the fascial tissues of the body - and fascia encases everything in the body, for example nerves, organs, muscles, bones. Imagine, then, how much our bodies are holding. Imagine what might need to happen for them to start to let things go.
The wobbliness we feel in our bodies, the aching and the pain, the mess and the chaos is often matched by the sense of grief at old lives, gone forever; by the reordering of values and priorities, by the disintegrations and awakenings of transition. In some women I work with or know, I see healing at the level of the body but things that have not been worked through in the mind; in others, there is a good flow in terms of movement through the process of matrescence but bodily challenges that have not been addressed (there is zero judgement on either of these stages of evolution! I have been stuck in all the tight places myself.) Of course, we can’t really separate the mind from the body, but for simplicity’s sake we must, and one aspect out of balance affects the other, sometimes in ways we cannot easily understand. Like invisibly interwoven lines in a matrix, one element sends loud or tiny signals to its neighbour, calling out, asking to be heard.
In training to become a yoga teacher and then with consequent postnatal core rehab trainings, I learned about the surprising links between things: how the way we breathe affects the function of our core and pelvic floor, how back pain could come from the feet, how our emotional state affects the functioning of our organs, how limited movement in one place creates a compensation pattern elsewhere. Rehabilitative exercise at this stage is about re-training awareness and creating strength and responsiveness gently and steadily, from the inside out. Muscles and bones that have moved apart can come together again. We want the core not just to be strong, but able to relax, to be fluid and responsive to other parts of the body and external influence. We want everything to listen to everything else, a dance, a symphony.
In re-learning how to exist as a whole of inter-relating parts, the body has much to teach us about becoming a mother, how it changes us at every level, and how postnatal women should be supported, body and mind. Rehab, particularly core rehab, often holds a lot of emotion, and it works best when the nervous system is in relative balance. Are we being supported to believe in the possibility of change and growth? Is someone reassuring us to go slow and be kind to ourselves, to meet change with curiosity? Are we being co-regulated by the presence of others?
At the heart of my work as a postpartum doula, and for anyone who works to support mothers, is a recognition of the need for other people in our journey of matrescence. Things fall apart and sometimes come back together, and sometimes they do not: it is the natural order of things that sometimes we lose our centres, and the map needs to be drawn. But it is other people that help support this process.
It’s deeply unfair that recovery depends to an extent on luck and money, on the colour of your skin and the resources you have access to. That being said, even those with an abundance of these precepts can have trouble steering their way to a sense of healing that feels holistic, realistic and profound, especially in a culture that has lost its collective memory about how to care for new mothers, and indeed exactly what motherhood gives, and what it takes from us. Using our voices to reach out, to share our struggle or loneliness or sadness is often the first step, whether online, in a cafe or at a baby class. Writing it, speaking it, moving it, understanding it through the right information. Your body is your own but you are not a body alone. To truly believe it we need to feel it: in the structure of our bones, in hearts that pump blood through us, in the hormonal dance that settles in relief when someone comes to hear us.
Wild reckonings, indeed, what a stunning way you have of articulating the inarticulable