Our little Sophia is 9.5 months now and she’s already walking around! Most of the time she still needs help and at times looks a little drunk. But she is absolutely amazing!
When she goes down to the floor with some control, she will often fold her leg underneath herself or one of her feet gets bent and sat on. If I did that to myself, it wouldn’t only hurt, I’d be hard-pressed to walk again:). Her body is so bendy (flexible) and squishable.
Her body is so resilient, I can see how one might look at that and say “you definitely lose that as you get older”. And that may be true more or less as we grow and get stronger and learn to live upright. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t remain resilient, bendy and squishable:). It just means that we can work at it.
Dave (who’s in his 70’s) was in recently and he remarked: “Maybe if I stretched every day, I wouldn’t be so stiff”. I replied: “Welcome to my world”. I may not stretch everyday, but I do something everyday to practice my resilience. Stretching, meditating, having Neuro-Structural care, doing breathing exercises, mobilization exercises, lifting weights, body weight exercises, cardio, the list goes on and on.
Another thing I love about watching Sophia is that every time she falls, she gets up. Every time she gets frustrated, she expresses it with her body: either she grunts or screams or cries. She doesn’t hold it in and she doesn’t think about it, she’s just in the flow. I suppose being in the flow doesn’t mean that you never get frustrated or upset that things aren’t going smoothly. Being in the flow means expressing what you’re feeling and not thinking about everything and analyzing everything before you feel it.
If you consider that our moment to moment experience is like a movie, then one of the functions of the mind is to take that movie and look at it frame by frame so that we can learn from it. However, the very nature of this prevents us from being in the flow.
Sophia is teaching me all kinds of things. I’m looking forward to the next lesson!