Supple as a newborn child

Last fall, at the Ojai Yoga Crib, I had the great good fortune to listen to the author, Stephen Mitchell speak and read from several of his books. Afterwards, while browsing a table set up by a local bookseller, I realized I owned most of them already except the Tao te Ching which is one of my favorites. I came across this lovely piece in the notes on the text.

"Can you let your body become

supple as a newborn child's?"

Stephen say it literally means "can you concentrate your chi (prana, vital energy) until..."

He adds this from Emilie Conrad-Da'oud...

"There is no self-consciousness in the newborn child. Later on, the mind wanders into self-images, starts to think Should I do this? Is the movement right? and loses the immediacy of the moment. As self-consciousness develops, the muscles become less supple, less like the world. But the young child is pure fluidity. It isn't aware of any separation, so all its movements are spontaneous and alive and whole and perfect.

If an adult body becomes truly supple, though, there's a quality to its movement that the child's doesn't have, a texture of experience, a fourth dimension of time. When we watch a seventy-year-old hand move, we feel, 'Yes, that hand has lived.' All the bodies it has touched, all the weights it has lifted, all the heads it has cradled are present in the movement. It is resonant with experience, the fingers curve with a sense of having been there. Whereas in a child's hand there's a sense of just arriving. The child's movement is pristine and innocent and delightful, but a truly supple adult movement is awesome because all life is included in it."