The Yoga of Parenting with Sarah Ezrin

Women + Wellbeing Interview Series #4

In a society that is driven by revenue, generating, production, and greed, we've lost sight of what it means to be in connection and in family…It feels like we are set up to fail. We're not meant to be alone, and many of us are left out to sea.

~Sarah Ezrin

This is the fourth installment of the Women + Wellbeing interview series. Today’s interview is with Sarah Ezrin, mother of two, author of The Yoga of Parenting, and a long-time yoga teacher.

Sarah’s book beautifully explores the rich depth of yoga and how its tools can actually help parents become more patient with, present with, and accepting of their child(ren) and their Self. I intentionally choose not to read a lot of parenting books because I don’t like being told what to do. Sarah’s book surprised me. It is more about becoming the best version of you as a person and a parent than it is about doing the right thing. I first heard Sarah talk about her book on Shannan Crow’s The Connected Yoga Teacher Podcast, and when I realized she had a Substack I knew that I needed to interview her for this series.

Meet Sarah Ezrin

Sarah Ezrin, E-RYT 500 is an award-winning author, highly sought-after yoga educator, maternal mental health advocate, and content creator based in the Bay Area. Her willingness to be unabashedly honest and vulnerable along with her innate wisdom, make her writing, teaching, and social media great sources of healing and connection for many people.

Sarah writes extensively on the subjects of yoga, parenting, and mental health, often interweaving these themes. She is a regular contributor for Yoga Journal Magazine, Motherly, Yoga International, Healthline, Scary Mommy, Mind Body Green, Mantra Magazine, and LA Yoga Magazine. She has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Bustle, LA Weekly, and NBC News. Her book The Yoga of Parenting released through Penguin Random House–Shambhala Publications in Summer 2023.

Born in Toronto, Ontario and raised in Los Angeles, Sarah currently resides in Marin County, California with her husband, two sons, and their dog.

Be sure to subscribe to Sarah’s Substack Let's Get Real with Sarah Ezrin. I hope this interview helps you feel seen and supported!

The Interview

This interview has been edited slightly for clarity and brevity.

ASHLEY ZUBERI: What does wellness mean to you?

SARAH EZRIN: There are a lot of misconceptions about what wellness is. Wellness is a holistic and individualistic experience and also communal. It's much bigger than our physical health, or our mental health, or our spirituality. It's all of these things in combination and how they're all integrated together. It's unique to each person, but we also heal in a collective. Wellness is everything, all things, and also just our thing.

ASHLEY: So how do you not get overwhelmed by that?

SARAH: I am always overwhelmed. There are a lot of different buckets that need addressing. We need to eat well, and we need to sleep. It's not like you spend Mondays on your mental health and Tuesdays on “X”. Everything is feeding into the next—eating well is going to affect my sleep, which is going to affect how my body is physically recovering, which is going to affect my moods and my hormone regulation. All these things are actually quite interconnected. I try to do little rituals every day; in Ayurveda it is called dinacharya. Little things that you do every day that are sacred all accumulate and add up.

ASHLEY: What do you think the difference is between health and wellness?

SARAH: I personally think they're synonymous. I think it's a matter of redefining health. In the West, what we think of when we hear the word health is what we see with our eyes or what tests can show us, like blood tests and performance tests. But health really is in a bigger picture.

Health includes what's happening internally, what's happening within our family systems, what's happening in the greater world. I think it's a matter of the general world redefining health to be a much bigger picture than just what our bodies look like. For example, people that are in larger bodies are often labeled obese, but they could be extremely healthy. They're eating well, they're working out multiple times a week, but because of the number on the scale they’re grouped into this category. Let's stop looking at it on paper and start looking at it for how people are feeling.

ASHLEY: What are some of the little things that you do or you find really useful every day in your own rituals?

SARAH: I wake up between 4-4:30am so I'm beating my whole family to the punch. That allows me to have time to myself. I scrape my tongue every day. I either sit for meditation or lay for breath work and I always take my time with my tea in the morning to really enjoy it. I just slow myself down. Washing my face is a big one too. It’s less about the result of washing my face and more about that moment of slowing down and treating it like a meditation.

I actually wrote a whole article for Yoga Journal about this. The process is a moment of tender care. Especially as moms, we’re so tender with everybody else, but we tend to rush our own practices. Just take that moment unapologetically, and take an extra five minutes in the shower.

ASHLEY: Do you have any specific practices that you find helpful in being able to take those extra five minutes in the shower? So often I hear mothers talk about the guilt. It's just really hard for them to take time for themselves. What's worked for you or what have you seen work for others?

SARAH: The thing that has been the most helpful for me is actually not a spiritual practice or a traditional yoga practice. Attending Al Anon, which is for friends and family of alcoholics, has helped me get really clear about what I am responsible for.

There is so much conditioning, especially with women and with mothers, that we are responsible for everything and everyone. If you are a single mom and you don't have help then it's a very different circumstance. If you happen to have a partner or another caregiver nearby, or a sibling that's helping you, or your own parents, take those extra few minutes.

We can only take care of other people if we take care of ourselves first. Period. End. This is not up for discussion. Rushing our shower, coming out all frantic and rushing to the baby is actually going to serve them less. Take the time to get the nervous system to settle. I’m not saying I'm in there for two hours; we are talking a few minutes. Look at the benefit for the child or the caregiver that you're leaving the child with. Those extra few minutes are opportunities for a relationship to build. I reframe it this way: I can step away because I'm gifting my sister and my son a beautiful opportunity for bonding.

We were meant to raise children in villages. We're meant to have aunties. We're meant to have alloparents around, which are people that are not necessarily blood relatives but who help to take the load so that the baby is constantly being moved around the structure of the village.

It's not meant to just be women and moms. And that, unfortunately, is the reality now. It's the lie that a lot of Western civilizations are selling their people. When you look to more collectivist and tribal cultures, the responsibility is shared so it doesn't feel like it's all falling on the mom.

Unfortunately, a lot of us don't have the opportunity for a village. We live very far from our family. My mom is not alive. My husband's dad is not alive. We have to make that village. We have to select people to be key players in our childrens’ lives. That 20-minute shower is not going to make or break our kid.

If anything, it's gifting them an opportunity to bond with another caregiver that you trust and that they trust. We have to take care of ourselves first, or we have nothing to give anyone else.

ASHLEY: Why is it so hard to have young children? Why is this stage so challenging? It's challenging for me. I think it's challenging for you. I hear it being challenging for most people, so I'm just curious in your words, why is it so hard?

SARAH: It comes back to the culture. We are in the United States and we don't have systems in place that help support families. There's no paid family leave, dependent on your state. Maternity leave is few and far between. Some mothers are having to return to work two weeks after having their babies. Paternity leave is a new concept. The systems aren't in place to support us. Then childcare is so unaffordable. We're being spread thin on all levels. We’re living super far away from our families. For many of us our families are on other coasts or they are also spread so thin that they don't have the bandwidth to be able to support each other.

In a society that is driven by revenue, generating, production, and greed, we've lost sight of what it means to be in connection and in family.

Look at the shape of the school system schedule. It was not built for two parents who are working. It's built for someone to be at home. Who's going to be more likely to be at home? The person being paid less wages. It feels like we are set up to fail. We're not meant to be alone, and many of us are left out to sea.

ASHLEY: What are some of the systems that you've put in place?

SARAH: Number one is where we chose to live. We were living in the city of San Francisco. It was very isolated. I did have my brother there, but he also is underwater as a parent to two children with both parents working.

We were having a really hard time meeting families. We decided to move somewhere where there were lots of families. We got very lucky that we moved into a neighborhood at a time when multiple families with kids of the same ages were moving in. We formed this beautiful community and village where we watch each other's kids. I love these children as if they are my own. The moms are a support network. The dads are friends. That's a big, big deal.

Seek out the community. Go to things like mom groups. This is something I'm creating now in my own business. I’m creating some mom support groups for mothers with children of all ages, not just babies up to crawlers. Even moms of teenagers need a place to gather.

The other thing is the system within the home. I have very frank conversations with my husband, and, I'll be honest, he is the primary earner. I'm a writer and a yoga teacher. I'm not bringing in the big bucks. My schedule is much more flexible as a freelancer. There are many times when I have to be the primary parent because he is the main earner. That said, I also still will stand up for my time, and I will still say my time is valuable, and I need support in this way. If he can't step up to be that extra support, then we need to put our heads together to figure that out.

ASHLEY: Amazing. Thank you for sharing. Are there certain practices that you found through what you offer in your book, The Yoga of Parenting, that have really resonated with other moms?

SARAH: Everybody really talks about the breath breaks. Within each chapter, I offer a pause to take an inhale and an exhale. It’s just that reminder to slow down. It doesn't have to be a 30-minute sit for it to have a big impact.

The other one that people love is the idea of observation. Becoming an anthropologist in your own home. One of the practices in there is to just sit and observe your family. So often we're up and we're doing, and we're folding, and we're cleaning, or we're refereeing. Watch things as they unfold, including sibling rivalry, within reason—if someone's climbing a 10-foot wall, then you must step in. Can you sit back and be an observer and have this very wide-lens view of what's going on in your family? It helps to be able to view things from all sides. Sometimes we're just so close to something it’s hard to see. We have much more of an appreciation because we have that moment of taking everything in. There's a moment of gratitude. Then the people that we’re watching, they have space to figure things out. We don't leave the room, we're not leaving the house, we are there, we are the container, but we're giving them the space to make the decisions on their own. Oftentimes with enough space they figure it out.

ASHLEY: How have you worked through the transition of going pre-kids to then having kids and still showing up for your work and your practice? What shifted, if anything?

SARAH: I'm not really teaching yoga asana right now. I’m teaching other things and I'm teaching in other ways. The biggest shift is reclaiming connection as yoga, as opposed to these flashy shapes, which I was very much interested in in my twenties and broke my body trying to achieve.

Nowadays it's much more about the roots of yoga, the eight limbs, truthfulness, connection, practicing contentment, practicing being kind and what that means both to myself and to others. I’m taking the yoga off the mat and into my life, which was something that I used to talk about all the time in my twenties, but I'm not sure I really was walking the walk.

That's been a huge shift. Even now, I will only do yoga asana once or twice a week because of some injuries that make the traditional poses like a downward facing dog or a sun salutation difficult. I sit for meditation every day, or I do my breath work practices. I still do mindful movement classes. I even do high intensity interval training classes, but I will treat it as a yoga practice in my intention. So it's all about what the intention is behind them as opposed to what they look like. That's been a huge shift.

ASHLEY: When did you start writing your book? How old was your child when you started writing?

SARAH: I signed my contract and got pregnant four days later [with my second child.] I was thinking, “Oh my God, how the heck am I going to do this?” My book and my second child were due at the same time. It took me about a year to write my book.

The process was fast, but I feel like it was a lifetime of preparation. Then I was working on revisions with my second child barely out of my womb. That was interesting in its own way.

Reading back on it there are some things that I definitely would change, but most of it still holds quite true. Having my second child really blew the book wide open. It was such a learning experience.

ASHLEY:  What inspired you to bring yoga into this topic? Were you writing about parenting before?

SARAH: I've been writing about parenting since my first pregnancy,  which was just a natural stepping stone from writing about fitness and mental health. Honestly, I wrote the book that I was looking for. I was hard pressed to find any books that were about yoga and parenting.

There's a lot of amazing mindful parenting resources out there, but many of them are from the Buddhist perspective. I was missing our language. Many of the books that I was reading were leaving me feeling worse than when I started.

There was a little bit of judgment sometimes by the writer, or these impossible scripts, or step-by-step lists that you had to follow. As we know from the yoga mat, no one body, or child, is the same. My body is not the same day-to-day. My children are definitely not the same, and my children are not going to be the same as someone else's children.

I don't believe in these one-size-fits-all scripts. I wanted to create a resource that had the yoga language in it, but that also was as forgiving as what my yoga practice had become, which was choose-your-own adventure, trust your intuition, and tap into the parts of you that know. I interview a ton of other parents in there, go to experts for the guidance, but at the same time, always come back to that place of deep knowing inside of you.

ASHLEY: I love that. That to me is the essence of yoga. You’ve got to figure it out for yourself. Here's all the information, find what works for you. You can have a teacher and a guide, but ultimately you have to make that choice for yourself. Oftentimes people just want to be told what to do. That's not how yoga works.

Anything else that you wanted to offer on the wellbeing of parents?

SARAH: This is just particularly to moms: we’re so hard on ourselves for the physical transformations when we become moms, and many of us will pursue looking well over actually feeling well.

My invitation is to listen internally for the call of wellness. On the yoga mat we're listening to our breath, we're listening to our body, and we’re asking ourselves what poses feel right. Go with how you feel as opposed to what things may look like on the outside. Trust that health and wellness is an inside job. Just by being curious, reading this article, following you, this is a huge step in the right direction. This is the true self-care.

Let’s chat in the comments:

Do you have any examples of how yoga has helped you in your motherhood journey? Please share in the comments!

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