The Baby Is the Bell: Motherhood Is Zen Practice
When a baby cries, the mother's milk flows
This week marks one year since I gave birth to myself as a mother.
This past year has been a whirlwind—an almost out-of-body experience, except for how much was required of my body. My skin, my belly, my breasts, my spine, my sleep. My voice. My presence. My surrender.
I’m still reeling from the transformation. Outer, inner. Mythic, mundane.
And in this moment, I’m reflecting on my practice.
When I was debating whether or not I wanted to have a baby, the thought of having less time for practice was one of the biggest items on the “cons” list. I read books on attachment parenting and imagined a kind of spiritual exile—a years-long pause where sesshins would be off-limits, dawn zazen out of reach, and any hope of deepening would have to wait until he grew up enough to need me less.
I was afraid that motherhood would take me away from the path. Afraid I wouldn’t sit sesshin again until he was three, or four, or five. Afraid the long arc of awakening would have to pause while I tended to the short rhythms of diapers and feeding and sleep.
But the minute he was born, I knew I was wrong.
I hadn’t been taken away from practice. I had been plunged into it. Not metaphorically. Literally.
People say motherhood is like Zen. That it’s a metaphor. A poetic analogy. A detour from the real thing.
But on the cusp of my baby’s one-year birthday, I think they’ve got it backwards—
Motherhood isn’t like Zen.
Zen is like motherhood.
The monastery reenacts the nursery. Zen forms are ritual echoes of the everyday labor of care. And the deepest dharma gate is the one with a diaper pail by the door.
“Practice is not about going to a special place. It is about embodying the truth of your life, exactly as it is.”
— Charlotte Joko Beck
We’re told to return to the cushion when things settle. But in this body, in this house, with this baby, everything is already rising and falling. Impermanence. Emptiness. Interbeing. It’s all here.
This isn’t an interruption of the path. This is the path.
Not like Zen.
Zen.
1. The Baby Is the Bell
Monastic life begins with the bell. Early. Before the sun. The bell calls you from sleep to stillness, from dreaming to breath. It doesn’t ask. It announces.
“When you hear the bell, stop everything and take three breaths.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
My baby is my bell. He cries, and I move. He stirs, and I sit up. He whimpers, and I enter the present moment, not because I’m trying to, but because I am compelled to.
“The bell of mindfulness reminds us to return to ourselves.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
In intensive Zen retreats, part of the training is to sit through exhaustion. To ring bells and bow and serve and remain mindful even when sleep-deprived. The point is to cultivate stability in the midst of fatigue, to learn that compassion doesn’t depend on being well-rested.
There is something about being tired that makes us sharp. Tight. On edge. And for most of my life, I let that edge show.
But not with him.
When caring for my baby, I don’t want him to feel that the person he depends on most is fraying. Not in my voice. Not in my touch. Not even in the subtlest vibration of how I pick him up.
He feels everything. Even the softest sigh of frustration lands in his body.
So this has become the deepest bell of all: Can I move with care even when I am empty?
Can I choose gentleness even when every cell is asking for sleep?
Every movement becomes a mudrā. Every touch becomes an offering. Not from discipline, but from loving-kindness.
Because someone needs me. Because someone is watching what love feels like.
Because practice is not an escape from reality, it’s the form that helps us stay kind within it.
This isn’t a practice. This is the bell ringing through the night. And I rise.
2. Zazen by Another Name
Zazen, “just sitting,” is the heart of Soto Zen. Not sitting for anything. Not even to get calm. Just sitting.
When I am nursing at 3 a.m., watching my breath so I don’t wake the baby, or swaying in place as his body rises and falls against mine, what is that if not zazen?
“Zazen is not step-by-step meditation. Zazen is the dharma gate of joy and ease. It is the practice-enlightenment of the Tathāgata.”
— Eihei Dōgen, Fukanzazengi
It doesn’t matter what my posture looks like. I am not separate from the practice. I am the dharma gate. I am the still point, the one who doesn’t flee.
When I stay even when I want to run, especially then, I am embodying Dōgen’s “practice-enlightenment.” I am not becoming the Buddha. I am am the Buddha holding the Buddha.
3. Soji Is Everywhere
Each morning in a monastery, there’s a short period of cleaning called soji. Monastics sweep, scrub, polish, even if nothing is visibly dirty. The point is not cleanliness. The point is presence.
Soji doesn’t wait for inspiration. It is not about outcome. It is devotional maintenance.
Sound familiar?
“Wash the dish as if you are bathing the baby Buddha.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness
Parenting a baby is continuous soji. Laundry, bottles, wiping down the high chair, wiping again, changing diapers, changing outfits, changing yourself. Everything is undone the moment it’s done.
It is the same principle as samu (work practice). The Zen kitchen is not about gourmet meals. It’s about attention. Awareness. Offering. Care.
“When you see the pot as the Buddha’s head, your eyes see with respect.”
— Eihei Dōgen, Tenzo Kyōkun
The dishcloth, the bouncer, the burp cloth, they are Buddha relics.
4. Sesshin Was Always Postpartum
Sesshin means “to touch the heart-mind.” A Zen retreat is a week of silence and structure. Every minute is scheduled. Meals are eaten in ritual form. The ego has no room to stretch.
But you don’t need a zendo to lose your self.
The fourth trimester is sesshin. You eat fast or not at all. You sit through discomfort without asking for relief. Your thoughts collapse into the rhythm of someone else’s needs.
“When the body and mind are one with practice, the Dharma manifests.”
— Kosho Uchiyama Roshi
We usually think of spiritual retreat as a choice. But postpartum life is not selective. It isn’t for practice. It is life. You become it.
You bow to it even when you resent it. And that’s not a lesser practice. That’s a real one.
5. Koans You Can’t Answer
Zen koans are riddles that break the conceptual mind:
“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
“Does a dog have Buddha nature?”
“What was your original face before your parents were born?”
But none of these are as immediate as:
“Why won’t you sleep when you’re tired?”
“Why are you crying when you’re fed, changed, and held?”
“Who is the self I lost when I gained you?”
You don’t solve these. You sit with them. You let them undo you.
“The point of a koan is not to answer it, but to let it transform your whole bodymind.”
— John Tarrant Roshi
When the baby screams and there is nothing left to try, you enter the most sacred space in Zen: not-knowing. Being-with. Tenderness without fix.
6. Interbeing Is Not an Idea
In Zen and in Mahāyāna, we speak of śūnyatā (emptiness) and interbeing, the truth that no self exists independently. That all things arise in relation.
But when you become a mother, this is no longer abstract.
“Mother’s milk is, I think, a symbol of compassion. Without mother’s milk we cannot survive, so our first act as a baby together with our mother is sucking milk from our mother, with a feeling of great closeness. At that time, we may not know how to express what love is, what compassion is, but there is a strong feeling of closeness.”
— Dalai Lama
They cry and you cry. They calm, and you breathe. You learn, in your cells, that there is no such thing as a separate self.
This is not philosophical. It is physiological. The nervous systems entangle. The skin boundary softens. The self stretches wide enough to include another being.
This is not codependence. It is dependently arisen compassion.
7. Don’t Wait to Return to Practice
So many mothers are told to wait. Wait until you sleep more. Wait until the baby is older. Wait until you have a sitter, a retreat, a quiet house.
But Zen doesn’t wait. It meets you where you are. It begins with what is.
“If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”
— Dōgen
The crying is the bell. The nursing chair is the cushion. The daily schedule is your liturgy. The baby is your koan, your bodhisattva, your Buddha.
This isn’t metaphor. This isn’t poetry. This is dharma.
8. The Dharma of Impermanence, Lived Hourly
Motherhood is the most profound practice of impermanence I have ever experienced.
I used to contemplate anicca (impermanence) on the cushion, watching thoughts come and go, noticing breath dissolve into space. But nothing could have prepared me for the way impermanence lives in the body of my child.
He changes before my eyes.
A nap steals the version of him I knew that morning.
A week reshapes the contours of his laugh.
One day he needs my arms like air; the next, he wriggles to crawl away.
And I grieve softly, daily, deeply.
Just as I fall in love with one version of him, he’s onto the next.
“What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.”
— Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
He is not a fixed being. He is a swinging door. And my love for him must swing too, open, open, open again.
Sometimes I catch myself grasping, longing to hold on to a giggle that only lasted a week, a smile that has already changed, the way he once fit perfectly against my chest.
But he is not mine to keep. And I am not mine to keep either. This is the teaching.
“All conditioned things are impermanent—when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering.”
— The Dhammapada, verse 277
Motherhood offers no choice but to see. It puts impermanence in your arms. It dares you to love anyway. It trains the heart not in detachment, but in reverent surrender.
While death is the last bell of the practice of impermanence. Birth is the first. Two great gates of coming and going.
But in between, there is this strange terrain of constant change. And every moment with my child is a chance to bow to what will never be again.
What if Motherhood Was Always the Original Practice?
We think the Zen monastery came first. But what if it’s the other way around?
What if the oldest temple was a home?
What if the first bell was a baby’s cry?
What if every sacred form is simply a way of remembering that the care of the small, the vulnerable, the everyday was always the path?
To mother—regardless of gender, biology, or status—is to become the practice.
To serve what needs serving. To bow not out of submission, but recognition.
“When we truly see with the eyes of compassion, we see no separation between ourselves and others.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
Motherhood is not like Zen.
Motherood is Zen.
Or should I say Zen is motherhood.
A thousand silent bows in milk-stained robes beneath the full moon of the baby’s face.
In spiritual solidarity,
🧿 Constant Craving ✨
This is so stunningly beautiful. In awe as usual at the way you weave together scholarship and experience in such skillful ways.
Wow. I so relate to this post, thank you for this brilliant articulation. My formal sitting practice dissolved when I had my first baby whilst living in a tiny caravan. Everything became practice as you describe. My children, now 19 and 22, have been the path. And although I began to sit retreats again when they were 3 and 6, the vow & need to care for them has been the whole path. The impermanence of watching your little best friends change form over and over, continuously, is a visceral understanding of anicca. I haven’t read many pieces about dharma practice and motherhood, and appreciate this post.