Baby Yoga For Parents - Learn Basic Human Movement Vocabulary From Your Child

Find and re-discover your original movement vocabulary with baby yoga for parents. This time around, the babies are the teachers, the parents the pupils. This is baby yoga, coming from its root source, your own baby.The great advantage is that, as soon as you start learning yoga from your baby you will begin to feel more able and competent on a physical, and emotional level. This, in turn, redresses the imbalance of a non-physical, predominantly verbal way of life. But first, what is movement vocabulary?

Movement Vocabulary

Movement Vocabulary is the amount and range of motions available at one's disposal for physical behaviour. Parents teach their children verbal vocabulary, the alphabet to read, write, and generally, parents are nice people. They try to help their children be better understood for an easier time in their future lives. Unfortunately, during this early-educational process, parents often neglect, indeed even unknowingly hinder their child’s physical development by constantly telling children to sit still and behave.

Watch this video by Juliette Kando showing adult / child interaction which induces growth of Body Movement Vocabulary for both partners, adult and child alike.

The development of human motion in a Darwinian sense began from

• climbing trees to standing upright to cave dwelling and
• running to escape from predators
• while carrying your baby

That’s probably why we decided to stand upright, so we could escape while carrying a baby or a weapon.

Development Of Baby's Movement Vocabulary

Individually, there is the development in utero, from swimming to amphibian to (some of us) sucking your foot, to human. Stronger movements start for real, with the sheer exercise of pushing oneself through the birth canal, slipping out into the real world, like a wet fish, now having to learn to move from scratch. First things first, we cannot even hold our heads up yet.

Have you ever wondered why human babies are so helpless at birth in comparison to some of their fellow mammals who can immediately stand up and run after their mothers teats? Well apparently, the reason is that our proportionately huge brains make a human skull too large to pass through the birth canal after a longer gestation period than nine months. The baby could easily do with more time in mother’s belly but if its head grows any bigger, it won’t be able to come out. This is why, for a further six to nine months after birth, a human baby is in the so called “in-arm” phase, a bit like a kangaroo baby, it has to be held all the time until its body is strong enough to learn to move properly.

The proportionate size of an adult’s head is 1/7th of your whole body size, while that of a new-born’s head is about 1/3 of its whole body size. So there you are, just born, with a head the size of a giant pumpkin, and you've got to train your tiny little neck muscles to hold that thing up, without it falling off your shoulders. That alone takes about two to three weeks of hard, intensive and sometimes painful training, but the battle has just begun and shall be overcome. This is YOU I’m talking about; we’ve all been through this.

That's right, if you want to do the Lotus position, start with the simple tailor-sit position you enjoyed as a baby. Getting off chairs and using the floor for moving is a good idea. Just copy the baby. Sit on the floor, knees bent, feet together, straight back, and bring the knees to the floor. If your knees don't reach the floor, place little cushions under them for support. Later, when you are looser, take the cushions away.

Before a baby learns how to stand upright to walk, it has to perform thousands of deep squats (often dropping down on the butt). As a 9 month old little athlete, you grunt and puff to find the strength in your legs and your balance, or you’ll fall. But you never give up until you can walk un-aided, run, skip, jump, why and where does it have to stop? Unhinderd, kids could move like monkeys.

Climbing Stairs

Now you are a little toddler and you can climb your first stairs. Do you realise that those first steps you climbed were giant steps, reaching as far up as your thigh? Could you do that today, climbing thigh-high steps?

In this way we can observe that the movement vocabulary of children is actually far richer than that of adults.

Children can move in so many mysterious ways, long lost in adult bodies. Just try, for one hour only, if you get the chance, to be in a room with a lively one year old and copy all its movements. Observe the positions, slow down the moves, and, with proper breathing, you are doing baby yoga free of charge. That experience will give you the best workout you’ve ever had. Then consider that YOU, yourself, used to move like that when YOU were one year old. Some of your original agility may return and increase your movement vocabulary for greater health and comfort in your body now.

I hope that “Baby Yoga For Parents - Learn Basic Human Movement Vocabulary ” has been a bit of an eye-opener for you. Adding baby yoga moves to an adult’s daily movement vocabulary, should keep you fit for a life time. How many of the above moves have YOU performed today? And those are only a few ideas. You will discover many variations on your journey to increase your movement vocabulary by watching and copying your baby, creating your own baby yoga. Go on, get up, make some space and try some of the moves your baby gets up to, just for the fun of it; and let us know how you get on.

See you soon,

SUE ADAMS