How Has My Meditation Practice Changed Since Becoming a Father?

After a decade of intensive Vipassana practice, immersed in many 7 to 15-day intensive silent retreats, I've been faced with the most intense challenge to my practice since I began. That of becoming a father.

A kind of intense retreat that seems not to end but keeps bringing new challenges, as my son goes from infant to toddler, starting to crawl, walk, and now begins to talk.

Vipassana meditation focusses very much on one's inner experience, the bodily and mental experience one has. The focus shifts from a mind oriented outwards to the world, and one's role in the world, to noticing what's going on inside oneself: the ever-changing flow of thoughts, feelings, sensations as we move through our days, different circumstances and life situations.

Vigilance Instead of Daydreaming

Becoming a father has turned this focus inside-out again. I'm having to be much more externally present than present to my inner world. When my son was an infant, it meant engaging with him, with eye contact, sound, touch. Now as he is a toddler and moves around exploring his world intensively, it means being ever-present and ready to intervene, as he himself has not developed a sense of what is dangerous, whether it's stopping him from walking onto a busy road, or turning around to find him suddenly holding a knife in his hand. One inattentive moment later and he's somehow standing on top of a two-metre-high ladder.

This constant vigilance pulls me out of my inner world and into my environment, into a kind of spatial awareness and readiness that gets me out of my dissociative daydreams.

However, it is also painful, because I see just how much my character, or maybe the practice itself, has made me into someone who lives quite deeply in his own world. These moments of inattention, which now come at a much higher cost than before, are a cold-plunge awakening into the present moment, and there is not much room for error.

„...Hmmm… what is the meaning of existence... why am I here……BOOM! Oh shit, the baby fell off a chair"

On Interaction

My son is also teaching me about interaction and connection, and makes me painfully aware of how unavailable I actually am. When he is playing and exploring, to truly connect, I have to be right there, in the same experiential world as him.

His attention is caught by different things, whether it's a button to press, a knob to fiddle, or an elastic string to pull and release. He is fascinated by these subtle tactile worlds that I, in my usual state of consciousness, completely miss or dismiss. To connect with him, in his world, I have to be right there with him, seeing the world through his eyes, engaging and directing his attention, and letting mine be shaped by his perception. Further, this experiential world keeps changing week by week, as his perception and senses change and become more sophisticated, so every trick you learn stops working a week later! It means being present in a very different and new way - one that is not habitual or conceptual but embodied and immediate.

Emotions

Emotions! No bigger shadow side for a meditator with dissociative tendencies like myself. A baby is full of emotions: anger, joy, curiosity, sadness, fear, frustration, ecstasy, confusion, and the complexity of these keeps growing as he does. With my partner and my therapist both pointing it out, I quickly became aware of how far I lived from my own emotions.

I thought of myself as a Zen meditator who had learned to transcend those states, because I lived in a world of calm and collectedness. I am realising more and more that this is just an artificial buffer between me and my emotional world. A kind of withdrawal mechanism that kept me protected as a small child.

When my son has emotions, the intuitive response I have to those is the same one I have to my own emotions. The way I related to him - the outer child, is the same way I relate to my inner child. When he gets angry and I get distanced, I understand, "Wow, I distance myself from my own anger". When he gets sad and I get dismissive, guess how I relate to my own sadness. Slowly, these deep patterns are rewiring. A few moments here and there of true connection, a true meeting with the raw energy of his emotions, and I can feel how much that has opened up my own emotional world. Emotions are the relational language of connection and they are worth engaging in, expressing and understanding how to ride so that I can meet and be closer to my son.

The Deep Dark Shadows of My Own Mind

When it's the middle of the night, you haven't slept properly for weeks and weeks, and the baby will not go to sleep, I am faced with the darkest demons of my own psyche, the thoughts that I don't even dare to write down here. Thoughts of escape, destruction, and despair.

So many times now I've been plunged into these realms. Not only in the nights being kept up, but also during the days, when my entire existence seems to revolve around the survival of this creature that, early on, as the father, I have not yet had the chance to develop a deep emotional bond with.

The Ego-Self structure that I had built around freedom, Thailand, deep practice, and being able to do what I want, when I want, is kicking and screaming when I am bound by my duty of fatherhood. It is these moments where mindfulness is truly tested, and I cannot just sit quietly observing. No, I have to keep doing dishes, changing diapers, cleaning the house, making food. I cannot say that I went through these times smoothly with perfect equanimity.

Watching a Self Come Into Being

As his journey goes from being an embodied consciousness with micro-twitches to being a fully embodied self that explores, interacts and relates to his world, it is also teaching me a tremendous amount about how consciousness, perception, senses, and self and world start coming into existence and grow together organically, day by day. All of the things I learned theoretically through the Buddha's words, or from one perspective through my own experience on the cushion, are right there in front of my eyes as he develops day by day.

A Taste of Pure Compassion

Perhaps the biggest teaching of all is a taste of pure compassion, when it seems my consciousness merges with his: I become him as he squeals with joy when we play, gets scared at the loud, unexpected sound of thunder, or wakes up disoriented and afraid in a new environment, putting one hand on his mum and one on me to know he is safe.

How Has My Meditation Practice Changed Since Becoming a Father?

I cannot even call it the same practice. It is now tested, every day. I am faced with the true meaning of informal practice and living insight. I see that the true quality of the practice is measured when it is interrupted, when we cannot practice because the baby woke up early, and when we cannot disappear into bliss on retreat and are instead faced with challenging emotions and our own habit patterns. When we have a reason to stay present, not only for ourselves but for another being. This fatherhood journey continues to be the biggest practice challenge I have faced. In the words of Ken Wilber:

Waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up.