I was going to write about cows tonight, and I guess this gets to a cow in a roundabout way.

When I was pregnant in 1987, there was quite a lot of encouragement for natural childbirth. The belief at the time was that rapid medical advances of the 1950s and 60s had taken childbearing away from the mother and infant and messed it up with medications (thalidomide one of the disastrous pharmaceutical errors), scientific formulas, scans made of x-rays and sonic vibrations, and caesarian-sections. The mother was often anaesthetized, and missed the precious moment of birth, and the opportunity to bring her infant soon to breast. The infant at times was affected by the anaesthetics as well, and was thus slower to breathe.

This is not to snub the advances that had been made that improved rates of survival for mothers and infants. But somehow, the successful, nurturing process of many thousands of years was being broken.

My husband and I attended a series of natural childbirth lessons together to prepare for the birth (since unfortunately, we didn’t know how to give birth like cats or deer or bears in the woods). We used the Bradley method. (The Lamaze approach was probably better known and was very popular.) A core aspect of those lessons, though not referred to as yoga or meditation, involved awareness of breathing, and how to use breath and imagery to relax the body through contractions and birthing the child. One bit of homework we were given was to practice the breathing exercises, and to come up with images that were calming to the expectant mother.

Here’s where the cow comes in. I came up with two relaxation images. One was of our cat Pearl peacefully sitting near the fireplace. The other was of a cow in a field chewing her cud on a mild afternoon, white cumulus clouds adrift in the blue sky.

Now, cows in India have been revered across centuries. I don’t know much about why. The domestic cat was held with esteem by the Egyptians. That wasn’t on my mind though at the time of the lessons. It’s just a cow’s steadiness can be very calming, and Pearl, our cat, was a tolerant friend of great serenity.