Baby Mudras

While the four of us meander through the haze of sleep deprivation, the obstacle course of identities shifting and egos large and small swelling and shrinking, and the ache and anxiety of early winter sniffles and coughs, we pause with each energetic connection between us. We notice acutely the warmth of love between us when the two children—so beautifully getting to know one another, and yet have known, already, for a long time, it seems—make one another laugh. The baby boy is purely entranced by his older sister, who seems as if she's lived in the world for far longer than her 3.5 years. And our daughter's sweetness pours out of a new place just for him...why, just today she snuck into his sleeping place while he was meant to be napping. And I watched her on the monitor smiling tenderly at him, reassuring him, drawing him into her world with kind words, modeled in part after her parents' words to them both, and drawn in other mysterious ways from a source much larger. In what can be a blur of a day of responsibilities we share —awaken, shower, switch babies, nurse, rock, make breakfast and lunch, take children to school, practice, go to work—these moments of connection create a peace and a silence, so important to the grand project of perspective.


And while we come together in these places of connection, each child navigates his or her own body in baby mudras that are palpably awesome and always instructive. My daughter has learned to snap, a skill that began with watching, then fumbling her tiny fingers around one another, then placing thumb to middle finger...and the tiniest audible snap. And now, after so much practice, a perfect snap, as loud as 3-year-old fingers will allow. Clear, spot on. What does this mudra mean? Thumb to middle finger: shuni mudra. An expression of living in the present moment; the "seal of patience." She uses it to clear her own mind sometimes...a reminder of how simply a mudra can locate us here. Now.

And the baby has found his toes. Ah...this does not get old. It is something to see it again in another child: the parent is wiser, the parent trusts herself more, and thus she trusts her child more. She's not looking, and there he has gone, tracing the hand down the midline—sushumna nadi—toward the toe. The hand finds the toe, and there is the mudra. What does it mean? Judging by his face: strength, grace, joy. It makes him smile. Or, perhaps, it makes me smile and then makes him smile. Either way, the joy of a hand to a toe? I think of Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana...such a challenge. The body shakes with the test of balance. Could I think about it more joyfully?

Yes.