why so serious?
A few months ago, I started teaching yoga to a group of teen girls - which turned out to be nothing at all what I expected. To be honest, I’m not sure what I expected…perhaps to be some yoga guru that taught these girls all about inner peace and stillness. I recall stepping to the front of the room on the first day and telling the girls to lie down on their backs, close their eyes, be still, and breathe deeply. Instead, they fussed and fidgeted on their mats, talked incessantly, and broke into fits of sporadic laughter. As the class progressed, the laughing and chatter only continued to crescendo, and I remember the tight smile I had on my face as I tried to regain control of the chaos, clapping my hands in a desperate effort to silence the relentless giggles. An hour seemed to last an eternity. At the end of class that day, I thought to myself: what did I sign myself up for?
Alas, opportunities always seem to arise in life just when they are needed the most. As the weeks went on, I realized that I had become gradually complacent in my own practice; teaching and practicing the same way day after day, forgetting the pure joyof stepping onto the mat and having those aha! moments - you know what I mean, when you finally discover what it means when the teacher offers a beautifully nuanced instruction like, “Press your upper thighs back to lengthen the spine in downward dog,” or standing in front of a class and letting the teaching flow through you rather than spewing out the same scripted sequence. It happens (dare I say inevitably?), but that’s exactly what wake-up calls are for: to remind you that there is always something more, another way to grow, something new to discover.
Teaching teens brought some fun back into my practice. They reminded me that yoga doesn’t always have to be so serious. These girls dance all the time. They bop up and down in downward dog. They swing their hips from side to side in balancing poses, come crashing to the ground, and get right back up and start dancing again. They come up with their own poses like the “sassy flamingo” (balancing on one foot, one knee bent into the chest, arms out to the sides, wrists limp). They put their warrior faces on in warrior II. They are fearless when it comes to playing with inversions.
As we grow older, we seem to forget what having fun is like. We lose touch with our childlike selves; those that threw back their heads and laughed until it hurt, those that were unafraid of falling down or even trying something new. We go to work, we pay the bills, we let our passions fall to the wayside. I remember sitting at my desk in my old corporate job, ruing the fact that to laugh in the office seemed like breaking some unspoken rule: adults aren’t meant to be happy, and work is not meant to be fun. We even step in to the practice room and immediately get irritated when someone comes in late and “disturbs our silence”, we curse when we fall out of a balancing pose, we hurt ourselves in an effort to achieve the physical expression of some pose we want to “master” - and for what? Yoga is supposed to make us more flexible, not less!
As the Joker says, “Why so serious?” (lame joke, I know). But “SERIOUSLY”…can we all just take this as a reminder that we both need and deserve to have fun? Channel your inner 13-year-old! When I was 13, my teacher signed my yearbook saying “Your laugh will haunt me in my dreams” (I laughed at everything, all the time). I was insulted by it then; now, I’m going to smile and take it as a compliment.
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