Tumbling, twisting and twirling
Our daughter, Molly, had her sixth birthday yesterday. I know, time flies.
We spent the morning at the food market in The People's Park near our apartment with some of our closest friends who Molly loves, eating nice things including Teddy's ice-cream with a flake and sprinkles. Aren't birthdays great?
The afternoon was spent trying on her new clothes, playing with her new Spirograph® from Auntie Sharon, doing handstands and cartwheels on the grass, jumping on her cousins' trampoline, more presents, then watching a few cartoons, dinner, bath, and bed. An objectively good day for a six-year-old.
Just before she went to bed we had a little cuddle and I asked her if she'd had a good birthday. She said "It was ok. I hurt my two fingers" (she does yoga in school and she's been practising Bakasana since last week, she fell out of it and bent her two fingers back a bit), "Andrew stood on my foot, I scraped the back of my leg against the steps outside and I fell on my head when I was trying to go from handstand into bridge" (urdhva dhanurasana or a backbend to you and I).
Before you feel too sad about the terrible hurt that was inflicted upon her on her birthday let me just tell you that this is a totally normal day for her. She's always either cartwheeling or hand-standing or doing back-bends. In fact, she's almost never the right way up! And because of her love of tumbling, twirling and twisting she usually ends up hurting herself in one way or another.
It doesn't stop her though. A quick cry, a hug and a kiss from myself or Suzanne and, before you know it, she's upside down again.
I wouldn't say she's an unusually fearless child; she's afraid of dogs, not too confident climbing trees, shy around people she doesn't know. But she's so determined to master different things (handstands, backbends etc.) that she doesn't let little accidents stop her along the way.
I'm sure a lot, if not most, kids are like this but, somewhere along our life-journey we start to allow ourselves to be stymied by little setbacks in our lives. When does it change? Which of us really knows? But many of us are so much more cautious as adults than we were as children.
Ashtanga yoga can help us to reconnect to the child we once were. It can help us to regain the fearlessness and the determination we had as children to master something physical. But, even for us ashtanga yoga practitioners, we can fall foul of injuries, falling out of postures, hurting ourselves while practising. We mustn't fear. We mustn't let it diminish our determination or, most importantly, stop us from enjoying our practice and our lives.
We have to learn to approach yoga practice and life like a six-year-old. Maybe we should start sending her into the shala, instead of me and Suzanne, to really teach us all how to live a fuller life!