untamed / joie de vivre

We’ve become distanced from nature – screens, technology and artificial distractions lead us to disconnect from the outside world. We no longer take time to gaze at the sky, take in the scenery, observe wildlife, insects and nature. So often, we’re couped up in artificially lit rooms, shut off from the noise of birdsong, the breeze of the air. Technology means we’ve lost the wonder in our world. Instead of marvelling at the distance of ocean, height of mountains, forming of islands, we simply enter a line of text into a cyberspace and an answer magically appears. As if fact.

In distancing ourselves from nature, we forget all the lessons it offers. We forget that we are nature.

A few weeks ago, I took my dogs to the River Alde where there was a fishing competition. A young boy, maybe 12 years old named Walter was with his papa. He had zero technology and was simply happy to wade in the water, and help the fishermen measure, compare and return the fishes. He watched insects, spoke with everyone who passed by, played games, and you could see he was delighted by nature. You could tell he was joyful – and a joy to observe.

It’s so rare to see a child without a mobile or iPad of some description. And as Walter played with my dogs, I realised all 4 of them were full of joie de vivre.

We see this in this movement practices where linear, structured movements are favoured over the childlike, instinctive, animal-like, primal motions. Adults rarely crawl, roll, tumble or balance. We don’t like to appear messy, imperfect or incapable. Yet linear movements aren’t natural. Our bodies are designed to crawl, climb, twist, turn, run, shift in balance and transfer weight.

In class, if we roll on balls, there’s always laughter – which is a form of movement in itself. We are meant to move with and through joy. My dog, Gigi used to be famous in Hyde and Regents Parks for chasing squirrels; she’d stalk and chase them like a maniac and fell into the lakes more than once, or flip rolled as she nearly caught a tail or had one cornered. As she’s aged, her movements are less adventurous, yet she’s way more mobile than most of her contemporaries, most likely because she never suppressed her joy of life and her untamedness. She was allowed to run, fall, trip, twist and land rough when others were preciously pushing pups in prams along Marylebone High Street.

I suppose that’s my point: that to be joyful in life, to really appreciate all that life offers, the magic, the glimmers, pain and pleasure, we need to be prepared to move in all the ways on – and beyond – the mat. It’s not just about physical movement, yet that’s a good starting place to remind us of how it feels to just enjoy the basic nature of our selves.

It sounds obvious, but falling out of balance literally teaches us how to pick ourselves up from emotional falls as well as literal falls. Crawling reminds us of when we were little, and we’d reach for what we wanted. Did we give up at the first hurdle? Absolutely not. We carried on, regardless of the outcome. None of us would be standing if we’d given up at the first fall.

Linear feels tamed and tidy to me. Of course, those shapes have their place in healthy alignment of muscle, joint, bones. But we mustn’t forget how to move playfully, joyfully, untamed. Because there’s too much linearity in life; this “follow the pack” mentality. We need to move outside the box, get out of our comfort, embrace the possibility of pain and loss because pain is a pathway to pleasure and vice versa.

If we really want to fully embrace the real joy of life, we need to be willing and able to taste all the flavours, to move in all the ways, and to speak our truths in the most untamed, authentic ways imaginable. For that is our nature.

We need to allow our unique bodies to step beyond learned alignment to tell us what our ranges of motion, edges and limits are. That’s untamed and where the joie de vivre exists.

We are nature.

And all the lessons are there for the taking. We just need to look away from screen and out into the wider world.

(For our beloved little Gigi La Boo – who may or may not be here for July 1st but will forever and ever be in our hearts)