A mudra is an intentional positioning of the body into a shape or pose that expresses specific, sacred meaning. Most commonly they are identified with special ways of arranging and holding the hands and fingers within yoga practice and meditation. You might have seen someone sitting cross-legged, with thumb curled to index finger, while the other three fingers remained unfurled, resting on the leg, palm up.
That is a more recognizable mudra, but there are hundreds of them within South Asian yoga lineages. They can be very simple, and subtle, or more pronounced, and literally symbolic in their shape. With sufficient intention, and breath, they are enough to constitute a deep, intensive yoga practice on their own, no twisty, sweaty body needed.
As I’ve witnessed my daughter’s first year, I now know that we all come into the world as natural practitioners of mudras. Initially, they don’t need to be learned, but arise from the body as a new life explores through instinctual curiosity.
In the womb, babies already settle into gestures and patterns with their hands, habitual poses they return to for comfort. Ultrasound images document your baby’s preferred in-utero mudras – I could always count on her to have one hand curled and nestled by her face.
Out of the womb, it takes some months before a baby “gets” that she has hands. She can place her hands on things, but the hand as a tool, or shape-maker, is not yet on the scene. My tenderest memory of that early hand stage is of how she’d barely, gently lay her hand on my breast while feeding, all four fingers in a row, with just a hint of curvature.
In months five and six her hand-consciousness began to arrive. It is a cumulative shift, until one day you notice her noticing her hands, moving them and looking at them like the sacred objects that they are, connecting her body to the body of the world. In this electric, endearing phase, I’d catch my daughter examining her hands in the early morning light, right after waking. She’d move one of them slowly, staring at it. Small glitches of nerve and muscular initiation still characterized its newborn movement, the thousands of required syncopations not yet seamlessly integrated, as they are in fully-developed bodily motion. Her hand was aglow in the early light, and she was inquisitive, and mesmerized, in equal measure.
From the dawn of hand consciousness flow the first mudras. For her, they have been waving, pointing, and clapping. All three arrived almost simultaneously, just after she turned eight months old. One week she couldn’t do them, and then after a few days of attempts, that took us a while to recognize, she had entered the mudra world of communication. Vague motions solidified into recognizable shapes of intent.
I call them mudras, and not simply gestures, because of how she makes them, and the spirit they convey. When she waves, it’s not to say “hello” or anything that semantically specific—because, of course, she’s a baby!—but to express something that is, in its own way, more laser-sharp and brimming with meaning: “My hand can do what your hand does, and we are connected in that sameness.” I’d even speculate that the motion expresses how her body and ours is, at some level, one body. If that’s not mudra territory, then I don’t know what is.
When she claps, it is clearly a bodily expression of delight — delight in the ability to make the motion, delight in her joining us in a shared shape of movement. When she was first able to clap, for several days she would simply crawl around the house and pause every so often to sit up and clap. That was her form of play, and meaning, for the day. And how cool is that?!? An advanced lesson in yoga if I ever saw one.
The pointing is for some reason the movement that made me tear up when my husband, her father, described how she did it the first time with him. I’d like to think it’s not just because E.T. was the first movie I saw in the theater as a child (where, if you don’t know it, the pointed index finger is THE sacred gesture of the whole film, an iconic image of the 80’s). I think it is because the outstretched, single finger is impossible to understand as anything other than a bodily willingness and curiosity to make contact with the world, to stretch across a gap with the body, and, in so doing, elide that gap. Michelangelo knew what he was doing when he made that image the centering force of The Sistine Chapel frescos.
Babies know all this intuitively — there is an inner ability and yearning that unfurls into a shape of the hand we have shown them, a shape that yes, we have created, but one which, when seen done for the first time by a baby, tells me its roots go way back beyond any one carnal life on the planet. There is something of the eternal in these first hand shapes, a primal goodness, a glimpse into how we are born with all the knowing we need. The mudras are in us, and emerge from us, if we simply let the body be the communicative flesh it’s meant to be.