More than a rest stop, Child's Pose requires you to surrender to gravity and a state of nondoing. In his classic book Mastery, American aikido expert George Leonard details the beginner's approach on the journey to mastery: Start with something simple. Try touching your forehead with your hand. Ah, that's easy, automatic. Nothing to it. But there was a time when you were as far removed from the mastery of that simple skill as someone who doesn't play piano is from playing a Beethoven sonata.
For most students, this simple example is analogous to how you begin a yoga practice. If you're lucky, it's in an introductory class in a room full of similarly inexperienced students. The teacher's first instruction sounds like a foreign language, and although you consider yourself relatively healthy and intelligent, dyslexia attacks: You forget where the left hand is, or the right foot, and look around the room, suddenly frightfully aware of your limited faculties of perception.
Having taught an "Intro to Yoga" class for years, I know this is a familiar scenario. So familiar, in fact, that I have simplified the initial instructions I give in class to vocabulary and movements that are recognizable to most beginners. But even after you are not a beginner anymore, going back to basics—doing less, but with more awareness—allows you to find the essence of the most fundamental poses and touch "beginner's mind."
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