The Mama Sutra: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Path of Motherhood

A heartfelt memoir of motherhood as a spiritual practice by a longtime yoga and dharma teacher.

Sutra is the Sanskrit name for a short spiritual teaching in the yogic and Buddhist tradition, and it comes from the same root as the English word suture, or stitch. This story of motherhood as a path to awakening, is, says yoga and dharma teacher Anne Cushman, an homage to the long threads that run through all human lives, stitching up what’s shredded and ragged in our hearts. Like Cushman’s widely published personal essays, the book offers deep insight through the intimate details of everyday life. The Mama Sutra spans an eighteen-year journey through motherhood as a spiritual practice, chronicling Cushman’s first pregnancy; her daughter’s tragic stillbirth; the joyful birth of her son; the home retreat of early motherhood; the challenges of parenthood; the diagnosis of her son’s developmental disorder; the meltdown of her nuclear family and its reconfiguration into a new and joyful form; and more. Readers–whether they have shared similar parenting experiences or not–will recognize some aspect of themselves in Cushman’s emotions–painful yearning, deep ambivalence, ecstatic joy, bottomless grief, or surrender–in this powerful story of the rawness and beauty of life.