Parenting adult children & navigating end of life care with Carter Siegel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwEJD8OLB2w

I so enjoyed this conversation with my business partner, neighbor and friend, Carter Siegel. We explored how yoga can help us be more present and less reactive parents and how parenting changes when our children are grown and living their independent lives.

We also talked about the "brutiful" experience of caring for our aging and dying parents and how yoga can give us the awareness, courage and strength to be present for them at the end.

Transcript Of Conversation:

Alice: Welcome to our Conversations with Moms series. I’m so happy to be welcoming Carter Siegel to our conversation today.

We’ll be talking about being a mom to grown children, and also how we care for our parents through old age and, ultimately, their passage to death.

Carter is my good friend, neighbor, and business partner. We co-own Mill Yoga Studio in downtown Exeter, New Hampshire, as well as the Yoga Life Institute of New Hampshire Teacher Training with Allison Park Dugas.

Carter has been teaching yoga for over 20 years. She teaches regular classes and workshops at Mill Yoga, works with yoga teachers, and also has a personal yoga therapy practice where she works one-on-one with clients.

Carter lives just down the road from me in Exeter, where she raised her two daughters, Noa and Zoe, who are now in their twenties. Her mother passed away about four years ago, and Carter played a significant role in her care during the time leading up to her passing.

Carter, thank you so much for being here. It’s always a pleasure.

Carter: It’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Alice: We often talk about how people are drawn to yoga through different avenues—sometimes for flexibility or strength, often for stress relief, and sometimes through a deeper sense of spiritual seeking.

Could you start by sharing what your path into yoga looked like?

Carter: Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me. I love talking about this and could probably talk for days.

I also love that you’ve created this platform to share different perspectives on how people find yoga and how they use it in their everyday lives. The kind of yoga you and I support is really yoga for householders—how we apply yoga within the complexity of daily life, with families, work, and responsibilities.

I first discovered yoga about 25 years ago. At the time, I was a mom to very young children—around five and seven—and I was a pretty anxious mom. I’m naturally a Type A, perfectionist personality, so anxiety showed up often.

I exercised regularly—I ran and worked out—but I felt like I needed something different to help manage that internal stress.

There was a beautiful yoga studio in downtown Exeter called Blue Moon. One summer morning I went in and took a class with a teacher who was a former Navy SEAL. I had no prior experience with yoga, but when I left that class I thought something just shifted. I felt completely different in a way I hadn’t experienced through other exercise.

From that moment I wanted to explore it more. Over the years it became a deep and evolving journey.

In the beginning my practice was very physical—focused on movement, strength, and postures. That strong, dynamic movement was the only thing that could quiet my mind.

But over time my practice evolved into something much more subtle, and that’s what I resonate with most now.

Alice: Can you say more about what you mean by the “subtle aspects” of yoga—and how they affect both your life off the mat and your experience on it?

Carter: Yes. The subtle aspects of yoga tend to emerge over time.

For many people, the entry point is physical—we need to move, to release energy, to get it out. So we begin with postures and breathwork.

But gradually deeper qualities begin to surface—equanimity, balance, calm, and peace, while still feeling energized.

If you look at yoga through the lens of the Eight Limbs, the physical practice is just one part. Over time we move toward a state of inner equilibrium where the mind becomes calmer and more steady.

The subtle aspects are more about internal awareness—a felt sense of being present. It’s the ability to step back and observe without immediately reacting, judging, or needing to insert your opinion.

With practice you become more familiar with tools that help you pause. And in a culture that is often reactive, that pause is incredibly powerful.

It creates more openness, more ease in relationships, and ultimately the energy you bring is the energy you receive.

Alice: That feels especially relevant in motherhood, where the relationship between you and your child is so immediate and intimate.

That ability to pause—to respond rather than react—can completely change the dynamic. It helps break cycles of stress and tension.

Carter: Yes. Words matter.

How we respond to our children can shape how they feel—whether they feel supported or judged—and it also affects how we feel afterward. So many of us have had moments where we think, why did I say that? I wish I had handled that differently.

And of course there are those moments where a child storms off and says, “I hate you.” That hurts.

Yoga gave me a framework to understand my habitual responses. As someone who tends toward control and perfectionism, I had to learn that things don’t always go according to plan.

That’s one of the first lessons in yoga—things change. And how we respond matters, because it shapes the entire dynamic of the relationship.

Alice: And it affects our relationship with ourselves too. When we’re holding tightly to control it creates stress and dysregulation, and that impacts both us and our children.

Yoga helps shift that into a more positive cycle—the more we practice, the more it influences how we show up and how we relate to others.

Carter: Exactly. Dysregulation is a great word for it.

When we’re emotionally dysregulated it can be very hard to come back to center. We get caught in mental loops—replaying what happened, what we said, what we wish we had done differently.

So the first step is awareness—just noticing: I’m feeling activated right now.

But that awareness takes practice. We have to train ourselves to observe what’s happening internally. That’s why we call it a practice—we’re never done, never perfect.

Even now my kids will call me out. They’ll hear me doing breathwork and say, “Mom, I can hear you breathing,” or “Maybe you should take a breath.”

And I think, I’m trying. But we’re always practicing.

Alice: How has your parenting evolved as your children have become independent adults?

Carter: One of the biggest shifts for me was becoming intentional about listening first and responding second—often through inquiry rather than advice.

Instead of telling them what to do, I try to ask questions that help them find their own answers. Whether it’s relationships, decisions, or work challenges, it’s about supporting them in discovering what’s already within them.

As my children moved into their own lives, I really felt this is what’s meant to happen. We raise them so they can go out into the world and function independently.

My role changed, but it felt right.

They still call when things are hard—and they always will—but parenting adult children requires recognizing they are now navigating adult challenges.

My role is to listen, support, and help them think things through—not solve everything for them.

Alice: I love that—releasing control and allowing them to be at the center of their own lives. That’s such an important part of a healthy transition into adulthood.

Carter: It really is. And it’s not easy, because we naturally want to fix things. It’s hard to see people we love struggling.

But growth comes through challenge. Without challenge we don’t evolve—we don’t discover our capacity for resilience.

Alice: Let’s shift into the other part of our conversation—the experience of caring for a parent at the end of their life. That’s such a profound journey and one so many of us go through in midlife. Could you share a bit about what that time was like for you?

Carter: Yes. It’s something I think about often.

My mom passed away about four years ago now. About five years before she passed, things got really complicated with her health, and I found myself right in the middle of what we call the “sandwich generation.” So I was still parenting my own kids, and my parents needed me.

You’re being called in two different directions that require you to constantly adjust and shift, and figure out how to manage very different energies coming at you.

With my mom, helping her in the last four or five years of her life was a big teaching moment for me. I don’t know how I would have done it without yoga to fall back on, because my practice and my yoga community constantly brought me back to: how do I use yoga as a roadmap for this?

My relationship with my mother wasn’t perfect. It was a challenging relationship—both of us being Type A, both perfectionists, both control-oriented. So yoga helped me step back and understand that this is a process, and we’re all going to get there. We’re all going to be in that state at some point, in different ways.

We’re all going to need our families to help us.

So I started asking myself: if it were me, what kind of support would I want?

It became both brutal and beautiful at the same time (I call it "brutiful). The process of sharing her final journey was sacred and very difficult.

My role was to support her, be present, and help ease her path. Watching her navigate the medical system was also very hard—it’s not easy to be elderly in our system, and I found myself needing to advocate for her a lot.

Ultimately, she went on hospice. It was her choice; she decided she was ready.

From there, every day I turned to meditation, breathwork, sitting with sadness, memories, regrets, anger—all of it. All the emotions are present when you are walking with someone through dying.

But it kept me grounded. And I think it gave my mom a sense that I was there—present, advocating, supporting her.

It also brought us to a very special place in our relationship after a lifetime of some conflict. It felt like a way to make amends and end on a good note.

Alice: I can really relate to that “brutiful” feeling. When I lost my dad, it felt very similar—so hard to see them vulnerable, and not taken seriously.

There’s part of you that wants to run away, but your practice gives you the courage to stay present. And when you do stay present, there is also beauty in it—the intimacy, even in the heartbreak.

Carter: Yes. It’s having the courage to be present with what comes up—the emotions, the emergencies, the hospital visits, the physical pain.

It’s like the parent becomes the child, and you become the parent.

And I also see it as a duty. My mom parented me. She did the best she could with the tools she had. So for me, it felt important to be able to give back in that way.

We all have baggage, and this was a way of coming to terms with a lot of that.

Alice: I feel that there’s so much loss in motherhood in general. Our culture celebrates the joy and growth, but it doesn’t always talk about grief and loss—the gradual loss of our children as they grow, and then the very profound loss of our parents. Yoga seems to give us language for that, which isn’t always available in our culture and helps us process those feelings.

Carter: Exactly. Our culture is very focused on forward motion—what’s next, what can we achieve—rather than how we can be and be present with our humanity.

But when we develop presence and awareness, and allow things to be as they are, it’s actually in that space that we move forward. That’s where we evolve.

Alice: Thank you so much, Carter. If people would like to work with you, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Carter: The easiest way is through our website: millyoga.com.

You can also reach me by phone through the contact number there, or email me at carter@millyoga.com.

I’m always happy to talk about what someone might need and whether we’re a good fit to work together. I really enjoy one-on-one work and that direct relationship.

Alice: Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. It’s been so rich, and I really appreciate your wisdom, as always.

Carter: It’s always wonderful to talk with you, Alice. I’m really excited that you’ve created this way to connect with people.