Reflections On My MBCP Teacher Training
- Ashley Cruz
- May 2, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 22
There is a particular kind of learning that doesn't announce itself. It doesn't arrive as revelation or milestone. It settles, quietly, into the way you listen — into the pause before you speak, the quality of attention you bring to a room. That is what this training has been for me.
I completed my MBCP Teacher Training through mindfulbirthing.org — a programme rooted in Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting, developed by Nancy Bardacke. I came to it already holding twenty years of yoga teaching, a meditation practice, a child, and a growing sense that the threads of my work were moving toward something I couldn't yet fully name. What I didn't anticipate was how much the training would ask of me — not as a teacher, but as a person.
My meditation practice shifted over the course of it. Not dramatically, and not in a straight line, but in a way I can feel. Practice became less about formal sitting and more about texture — the quality of presence I bring to an ordinary moment. I still catch myself reacting from that automatic, contracted place, especially in parenting. But I notice it sooner now. Sometimes even as it's happening.
Mindfulness hasn't made me calmer so much as it has made me more honest about when I'm not.
🌿 On Teaching
My meditation practice has deepened over the course of this training — not in a linear or tidy way, but in a very real and embodied one. Practice has become a quiet, steady companion in the background of my full and layered life: as a mother, yoga teacher, doula-in-training, and now MBCP teacher-in-training.
It has offered me grounding during difficult moments — especially in parenting. I still notice myself reacting from that automatic, "animal brain" place, but mindfulness helps me see it (even after the fact) and gently return. I'm more familiar now with what it feels like to meet my edges — physically, emotionally — and how to stay with those moments, rather than push past them or collapse beneath them.
My formal sitting practice isn’t always long or structured, but mindfulness in daily life — especially in parenting, teaching, and reflection — feels more alive and sincere than ever before.
🧘🏽♀️ Teaching as a Space of Integration
Even before this training, I experienced yoga as something more than physical — as a space for breath, sensation, and inner listening. The idea of yoga as moving meditation wasn’t new to me, but through MBCP, I’ve begun to embody that understanding more fully in my teaching. I feel more confident now in naming that quality for students — gently pointing toward the subtler layers that often go unspoken.
My language has softened and slowed. While I’ve never taught from a script, I’m more attuned to when I fall into familiar patterns, and I try to return to presence — to what’s actually unfolding in the moment.
I’ve also begun offering yoga and movement to underserved communities, including single mothers. These classes often open into conversations around embodiment, parenting, and self-compassion — woven together by shared breath and mutual care.
Even my web design work — especially with women-led holistic businesses — has started to feel like a kind of holding. These threads, once separate, are quietly beginning to weave together.
🌊 Fears and Hopes About Teaching MBCP
As I move closer to offering MBCP classes myself, I’ve noticed some quiet fears arise. There’s a part of me that wonders: Will I hold the space well enough? Will I do justice to this work that has given me so much?
There’s also the very human concern of capacity — of balancing this sacred offering with everything else I hold: motherhood, livelihood, community, activism. I want to give it my full heart. And I’m learning, slowly, that what this work asks of me is not perfection, but presence.
Despite those fears, the training has given me a grounded trust. The content doesn’t just live in my head — it lives in me now. It has become part of how I listen, speak, mother, and move. And because of that, I feel ready to begin.
🌀 What I’ve Learned from the Training
Each seminar brought insights. Early on, I saw how much I still cling to “doing it right” — and how mindfulness invites me to meet myself exactly as I am, without needing to fix or perform. The inquiry practices reminded me that holding space doesn’t mean having answers. It means being present. Curious. Willing to sit with what’s real.
The seminar on postpartum vulnerability was especially powerful. It helped me name something I’ve long felt: that the weeks and months after birth are often more disorienting than the birth itself. That insight stirred something deep in me — a clear call to support others through that fragile, tender threshold with honesty and care.
Other sessions offered structure and tools — learning the 9-week course arc, exploring the physiology of birth — and I now carry those with me like trusted companions. Just as meaningful, though, was being held in community by fellow trainees and teachers. That sense of mutuality and shared purpose continues to nourish me.
✨ Becoming the Teacher I Needed
My journey as a developing MBCP teacher has been one of remembering and returning. Remembering the wisdom of my own body. My own birth story. My own parenting struggles. And returning — again and again — to the breath, to presence, to what is true in each moment… not what I wish were true.
This training has brought together so many threads of my life — mindfulness, motherhood, trauma-awareness, service, embodiment. I feel more prepared not just to teach, but to hold space for the messy, beautiful process of becoming that this work invites.
Above all, I’ve come to understand that becoming an MBCP teacher isn’t about mastering a curriculum. It’s about becoming the kind of presence in which others can trust themselves. That is the heart of the work. And that is a practice I’ll be walking for the rest of my life.
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