Laura Kasperzak is not short on yogic inspiration. All she needs to do is look at the beatific faces of her daughters to find her fire.

Something I have noticed about yoga over the years is that it can get awfully serious. We walk into yoga class as if we are walking into church, when sometimes it should feel more like walking onto a playground. Not that church is necessarily a bad place to be, but often we learn more in a moment of unconstrained laughter than we do from years of solemn prayer.

In my best yoga moments I am as uninhibited as a child.

It is not my perfect headstand that makes me tick, it is my ability to dissolve into laughter when I fall out of a poorly—however sincerely—executed one. (Pre-yoga I was the sort of person who one might call a perfectionist. It is such a lonely kind of person to be.)

Which is why these images speak to me. In a discipline where we are so often concerned with form and working from ego (though we are taught to do the opposite), it is the child within us that holds the true answers.

We are all one.

When is that more clearly felt—when our defenses are down and our expectations nonexistent?

When I look at these lovely, candid shots of Kasperzak and her daughters, I don’t think, I feel. I want to run into my closet (aka my home studio) and pop into a back bend, squiggle into pigeon, and collapse in child’s pose with my precious heart beat-beat-beating and my invisible wings fluttering powerfully, but innocently, from my back.

It is important to take our own beatific faces into yoga practice each day. Life is short. Let’s embrace it with the joy of a child.

   

 

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Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photos: @laurasykora/Instagram