When did you first start practicing mindfulness and why were you motivated to do so?
Koichi: Looking back, I started mindfulness when I started martial arts in my early 20’s. I studied Shorinji Kempo in San Diego and learned how to listen to my breath and pay attention to how my body moves when under stressful situations (like punches and kicks coming your way). I was motivated to be more aware to be able to be a more effective at sparring. My reasons for practicing mindfulness has expanded a little since becoming a new parent with Lisa.
Lisa: I began studying yoga when I was a college student almost 20 years ago. I was motivated by my teacher, Arturo Galvez, and by meditation, stillness, and the invitation to become aware of the moment I am actually living in. The word “mindfulness” didn’t enter my vocabulary until 2006, when I took Nancy Bardacke’s Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting class with Koichi, when I was pregnant with Kane.
Our course was a nine-week class for couples expecting a child, with a commitment to daily practice, and to reading and discussing excerpts from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Full Catastrophe Living and other selections. We explored mindfulness as it related to preparing for the births of our children, and the potential to stay present and embrace the basic pillars of mindfulness as a way to powerfully experience those births and enter parenting together. There were ten couples in the class, and nine of those couples have continued on as a parenting group over the past four years together.
How has mindfulness made a difference in your life?
Koichi: Mindfulness has made a big difference in the way I relate to my mischievous little son, Kane. He knows how to push buttons… I don’t take what he says personally. Sometimes I catch myself interpreting his actions or comments in a way that hurts me (or my ego) and I can just listen with love. In the beginning it was harder. Now that I have 4 years of practice I am beginning to get the hang of it, sort of.
Lisa: This is a humbling question to answer, as I find it rare to truly find the present moment buried under my to-do lists and preparations and hindsights and doing, doing, doing that comes with mothering, especially. It is mindfulness that has illuminated many of those mundane moments as sacred – slow walks in our neighborhood with my sons, the cyclical routine of our days, the tired sigh of my sweetheart, and much more. It is in the madness of running from one activity or commitment to another, dragging my children there and back and feeling deep upset as I race the clock and curse the economy that I turn to mindfulness to save my life – what is ACTUALLY in this moment, right now? – and connect with my family and breathe and feel my body and usually find an incredible sense of abundance, and the capacity to listen and prioritize and be present buoys me back to the surface of myself.
Finally, I cannot separate my mindfulness practice from our Present Moment Parenting group, as well as the Mindful Families Co-op childcare that evolved out of this group. It is the connections and conversations with all of them that inspire me and teach me and motivate me to continue to explore mindful living.
What do you do for your livelihood and does your practice of mindfulness affect it?
Koichi: I am a chiropractor by trade and it makes a really big difference for me and my patients. The developer of the technique I use (Network Spinal Analysis) showed us a way to help get patients “mindful” of their symptoms by using what Donald Epstein called AAA: Awareness, Acknowledgement, Acceptance. I use AAA/mindfulness often to show patients how powerful their focus and perception can affect how much pain they feel and how they feel about themselves.
For me, I get present to when I lose focus or check out with a patient and I practice coming back into my body and with the person I am working with.
Lisa: I am a teacher and educational consultant, and have worked in a variety of jobs since becoming a mother four years ago. My practice affects my choices as an educator in many ways. First, I continue to have the incredible privilege to choose to primarily stay home and raise our children, working part-time outside the home. I know that this early time in their lives is such a foundation for all of us as a family, and it is essential to me that we are the primary caregivers for our sons. I also have worked recently as a faculty member with UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, teaching student-teachers and supervising them in their student-teaching placements. I found myself weaving in mindfulness and authenticity as topics with my student teachers, and know that this practice had a strong influence in how I coached my student teachers, as well.
Is there anything else you would want people to know about mindfulness and you?
Koichi: I see many paths have led me to being mindful, but it was Nancy’s compassion, humor, and how she articulated the work that birthed my mindfulness practice. In fact because of her class, we now have a community of families that took her class keeping our practice and our conversation of mindfulness alive.
Lisa: It is easy for me to cheat myself into labeling that I am mindfully doing something, without keeping a formal practice of any sort. In meeting with our parenting group, I sometimes have argued that sitting in the dark with my son at bedtime was a meditation, or that walking my crying infant around and around the area rug in the living room was walking meditation. They are and they are not; it is when I actually make space in my life for a formal practice that I feel the strongest impact on those “non-practice” moments. Formal practice is so worth it — and it is still a struggle for me to create that space in my days.
