Last week, I taught yoga to a very enthusiastic group of 5-year-old Daisy Girl Scouts (my niece’s troop) in Tennessee. It was great fun! We hopped like frogs, soared like butterflies, stood like mountains, and giggled like, well, little girls. But I really wanted to give them a taste of what yoga really is, the deep underlying meaning into the practice. At the end of the class, I did my best to explain to them the meaning of Namaste in a way they could understand.

“It means that we all have a little shining light inside of us that connects us to each other. When we say Namaste, that little light is saying hello to the little light in other people around us.” Err… It’s kind of a hard concept to explain to little girls, I thought to myself.

I was thrilled by what happened next. One little girl looked at me with a smile on her face and beamed, “Hello, Light.” Then, a few more chimed in looking this time looking from side to side at the other girls in the circle, “Hello, Light!” I was elated. They got it! And it didn’t have to be so complicated, after all.

So, on the last day of 2010, I wanted to share this story as a reminder that while there’s so much more to the practice than we sometimes even realize, there are also truths that are so simple they can be summed up in two words. My wish for the New Year is that we all reap the benefits of both the profound complexities of the practice and those sweet little nuggets of truth that are accessible to us all.
 
“Hello, Lights!”