I had had a rough morning. March was supposed to be a ‘no booze’ type of month for me. Alas, I decided to have a couple of drinks the night before. As a result, I slept like shit, and having slept poorly, I decided to drink some coffee— another vice I had prohibited from my daily routine.
Once the caffeine dissipated, and after beating the crap out of myself for the first six or so hours of the day, I finally started to mellow out and I was able to think clearly. While finishing up my daily tasks I begin planning my yoga class.
As I drove home to prepare to teach, I pulled up to a stop sign in my neighborhood and I looked to the left. This is when my whole attitude changed.
I am fortunate to live in a very nice neighborhood. It’s affluent but not snooty, and it’s very quiet and calm with a nice combination of older folks and young families.
On this particular day, at this particular moment, in this particular driveway, I looked over to see a kid of about eight. He was standing in the center of the driveway, dressed in a T-Shirt, sweatpants and snow boots…and he had both of his arms shoved all the way down his pants as if this was the optimal way to keep warm. And he was staring right at me.
It was a warm afternoon, I had my window down. So I looked at him and said “sup, dude?”
He looked back at me, and with a distinctive air of Matthew-McConaughey-in-Dazed-&-Confused swagger simply said “sup”. Obviously, I’m not gonna take a picture of the kid, so this is my closest approximation:
I drove away and two things crossed my mind:
1. It’s awesome that I live in a neighborhood where kids can hang out in their yard and be weird like when I was little.
2. Damn…the cajones on that kid. I wish I was that confident…
Needless to say, I thought it was hilarious and inspiring enough to write a blog post about it, and I can confidently say that my yoga class was better than it would have been otherwise.
Yoga is an opportunity for adults to move like we once did– yet another important facet of what you can carry out of the yoga room and into your daily life.
Move Like A Kid
When it comes to movement children are quite simply natural movers. If you’ve ever seen a kid do yoga, it is really a sight to behold. All of the poses and movements that you struggle with thanks to the chronic tightness we inflict on ourselves through sitting and doing the same movements incessantly are not an issue for them. The burden of stress– both physical and mental is a non-issue for kids, and they just move, effortlessly doing things that simply make us feel old.
And they do it without the tension and rigidity that we drag into our yoga practice by trying to act or look a certain way.
This is the driving principle behind the philosophies of guys like Ido Portal and Erwan LeCorre, both of whom have devoted their lives to getting people to move like they were once able to. Check out Erwan’s take on kid movement in this post, and Ido training Conor McGregor in this short video.
Act Like A Kid
Children have the innate capacity to bypass self-judgment and simply to just be. It is a learned behavior to constantly weigh our abilities against others, to initiate harsh inner monologues about how we can be better or where we perpetually fall short. Most kids don’t do this— at least not to the degree us dumb adult do. Kids just tend to not give a shit. We grown-folks are too busy trying to worry about things to be carefree (because face it: if you think carefully about most of your worries, you’re kind of addicted to them.)
So next time you’re doing something that has your brow all furrowed and your shoulders scrunched up next to your ears, try to find that goofy kid that still dwells deep down in the belly of your grown-up stress-monger soul.
That little punk is definitely in there somewhere, being as light-hearted as you once were, unscathed by your tight hamstrings or unpaid credit card bill. That little kid is just dying to move around…or maybe just stand in the driveway with his hands down his pants 😉
(But I wouldn’t do that if I were you.)