Rougheart MMA Journal

I’ve had this Rodney Yee Yoga for Beginners DVD for the past year now, and I’d been on a roll with it for a while. I don’t know much about yoga. This video seems to give a good basic routine for the purpose of energizing you. Having slipped off track for a while now, bolth in covering local MMA (due to a tight schedule, car-trouble, child-care issues, camera malfunctions, etc.) and in my daily spiritual routines and physical exercise, I decided to start stepping it up a bit more. My hope is that if I can get my life balanced, I will be able to pierce through this brick wall of dilemma after dilemma. The little guy is the most important though.

Try to get a three year old kid to perform yoga with you. I dare you. There is no use in trying to get him to do it along with you, at the same time. I did the routine myself, mountain pose into downward facing dog, downward facing dog back up into powerful pose, warrior one to bolth sides, warrior two, cobbler’s pose, cobra pose, and so on. All very basic.

Then I tried to play the video and instruct my completely disinterested son. Can you blame him for being disinterested? He just got done watching a Monster-Truck show last night with Mom and Dad, has a billion different toys all sprawled out through the entire house, and a brand new NASA Space Shuttle to play with. That’s his little yoga routine. That and drilling away on his new Black & Decker tool-bench, which I have to say I’m a little bit jealous of, even though it is made entirely of plastic.

I hold him in mountain pose for a few seconds after finally luring him into the living area with a peanut-butter rice-cake. He was excited to get on the yoga mat after taking a few sloppy bites of his peanut butter frosted treat. He seems to get the first pose, but then he goes limp and starts to chuckle as I’m holding him up by his arms. I laugh too, then straighten my face out to show him I’m serious. “Come on, reach up, stand up,” I tell him. No use. He wants to wrestle now. He digs his heels into my thighs, climbing for my shoulders. “No, no, no, lets keep trying dude.”

He does all the downward reaching on his own, but he won’t stay in the position long enough to convert to downward facing dog. “I’m not giving up yet buddy.” I wrangle him into cobra pose. He’s seen me do this one before, and he’s tried it with me, but has always gone immediately back in to something more interesting, like pulling all the toys out of his toy-box and distributing them across his bedroom. I remember doing that when I was little too. Just turning my bedroom into complete chaos as I come up with adventures for all my action-figures. 

He also likes stacking things. I don’t know why, but he just does. His new favorite thing is taking the plastic lug-nuts from his Black & Decker, and stacking them up on the kitchen table, so he can knock them all down. It is quite genius actually, especially for a kid his age.

Standing still for cobra-pose? Not so much. 

It is a different yoga that I will have to try with the little guy. One that involves not just a balance of our physical body and mind, but a balance of schedule and routine. Where there is chaos in my life, my desire to pull all the toys out of my toy-box, cluttering my room needlessly, I have to pull out only what is necessary, one thing at a time. When I pull something out to do, or a task I’m setting out to accomplish, it will have to be for the right reasons, and at the right time.

The little guy comes first, and that’s just the way it has to go. It should always be this way.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2012 at 9:02 pm by Joshua Scott Beranis and is filed under My Head on a Swivel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.