All about that Acroyoga

My fam has always been doing Acroyoga, we just didn’t know it.

One of the ways I bond and play with my children is getting down on the floor and letting them crawl all over me. I’m an active mother and I like to do jobs so I often feel too busy to play. I get them on an activity so I can get a few things done while they’re occupied.  To counteract that we established Wrestle Night. Sometimes we wrestle but most times we dance or give airplane rides and do leg wrestling. When the eldest was about three I invented whaf basically amounted to a Mama Amusement Park where they’d put “money” in my mouth and I’d prop them up on my hands or legs and give them rides. 

We recently hit my dear friend Ali Sumison to snap some shots of us tossing each other around.  

Only recently did I discover a community of adults playing and exercising in this way: Acroyoga.  They bumped my glorified airplane rides up to what basically amounted to art.  The poses are beautifully artfully balanced.   Often they are temporary — a few seconds of perfect graceful prettiness flanked by motion and chaos.  

I began to look at the partner yoga poses as temporarily physical art installations.  Doing them takes planning and communication and trial and error. They take strength and endurance.  They’re hard but they’re fun. They’re beautiful but they often collapse in pain and giggles.  And for me, they feel a lot like my family.  We are all of those things.  We are a team, we’re messy and beautiful. We get through pain, we try new things, we have moments of perfection.  We are creative and we are physical.  Our life as a family is our finest work of art: temporary beautiful moments supporting each other. 

I think we’ve found our medium.