Yoga Lessons from a Toddler

Reading from Tuesday and Wednesday, May 5 and 6, 2015 yoga class

The following excerpt is from an article written by Jason Crandell, a yoga teacher, who I think is excellent.  He writes for Yoga Journal and teaches workshops all over the country.  This is from a post on the website for Yoga Tree, a yoga studio in San Francisco.  It is probably one of my recent favorites.   I hope you enjoy as much as I did and the students who were in classes this week.  If you would like a copy of the entire piece, let me know, and I will send it to you.

He entitles the article:  5 Yoga Lessons I've Learned from My Toddler.  He has a daughter, Sofia-Rose, who looks to be about 3 years old in the picture that accompanied the article.  First, I am going to list the five lessons.

1. Life is chaos--embrace it
2. Sometimes, we all need to be witnessed
3. The body is a beautiful, powerful thing
4. To be happy, engaged fully in the task at hand and let go of the results
5. Everything is temporary


Here are the two that really spoke to me:

3. The body is a beautiful thing
I love watching my daughter live in her body.  She has no perception of whether she is tall or short, whether she's chubby or skinny, of whether her eyes are blue or brown.  She just loves to be in her body.  Lately she's been exclaiming at full volume, "My feets go fast!" and then taking off at top speed down the hallway, all hair and limbs skittering this way and that.  Right now, her body is her ally.  It's her means for learning and exploring.  She loves how fast her feet can go and how high she can jump and how smooth her skin feels.  She loves what her body can do; she doesn't focus on what she can't do or what someone else can do or how she looks.

4. To be happy, engage fully in the task at hand and let go of the results
I often talking about how amazing it is to witness a human being develop from scratch.  One of the most remarkable things is how perseverant we all have to be in our earliest days to learn the simplest tasks. I so clearly remember watching Sofia-Rose roll over for the very first time.  We'd lay her down on her quilt after bath every evening and she'd whipped her little arm back and forth, back and forth, night after night, time after time, until one evening she figured out how to whip her arm and her leg at the same time and voila! The whole family celebrated.  I will never forget the intense focus she had at that moment or the pure joy she expressed at having accomplished the task.  This has always been her attitude with the zillions of tasks she learns daily: keep at it, keep going, keep exploring.  She has no forethought of failure.  She doesn't worry about what anyone will think if she falls down.  And her ego doesn't hold her back.  She doesn't get in her own way.  She just plows ahead, learning and growing.  She commits. Fully. Wholeheartedly.  And she delights when she gets positive results.


You know... that little girl is still inside us...that place where joy is...it never goes away...it just gets covered up with all the stuff before our eyes...all those distractions of living in the world.  Yoga helps us access our inner self... that place where we fearless, determined, and just perfect.