Girls just want to have fun

Goddess of compassion Quan Yin

...

The phone rings in the middle of the night
My mother says when are you going to live your life right                
Well, mother dear, we're not the fortunate ones

Oh, girls, they want to have fun
Oh, girls, they
It's all they really want
Those girls, they want to have fun

Some boys take a beautiful girl
Oh, and they hide her away from the rest of the world
Well, not me,
I want to be the one in the sun

Girls, they want to have fun
Oh, girls, they
It's all they really want
Those girls, they want to have fun




In the typical ashtanga practice, our breath is the constant voice sounding in our ears. If it is a mysore practice, our teacher will occasionally speak with us during an adjustment, guiding us with both physical and verbal instruction into a specific posture. Otherwise, there is silence. Alternatively, during a led class, the voice of the teacher parallels the sound of our breath as she calls out the postures along with the designated vinyasa count, which we diligently attempt to match all the while maintaining the meditative nature of our individual practice. Then, there is the vinyasa flow class. The postures may come from the ashtanga syllabus, but their sequencing and the class atmosphere come directly from the teacher's creative engineering. 

It feels strange to admit this, given my penchant for the quiet that reigns supreme during an ashtanga class, but I do enjoy a vinyasa practice from time to time where music will not only interrupt the quiet, but occasionally will shatter it. No one shatters all expectations of the quiet, meditative yoga practice as well as one dreamy, male instructor who teaches at several of the Yoga Works studios in the Orange County region. (I cannot believe I just said that, but I am letting the dreamy description stand.) This teacher's take on verbal instruction during a vinyasa practice is like that of a DJ mixing rhythms and lyrics and noise to get the audience out of its head and into the movement. Sometimes, it is downright shocking. Many people skip this teacher's classes for just this reason. Maybe it is because his classes remind me of my younger days spent dancing in clubs until dawn, forgetting myself and my small world problems--and even some of the bigger ones--for a few hours, but I do like participating once in a while. A guilty pleasure? Perhaps.

At the end of one of his more memorable classes, while preparing us for savasana (corpse pose), this teacher told us he was going to play the song made popular by Cyndi Lauper in 1983 "Girls just wanna have fun."  Only, he was not going to play Lauper's techno pop, disco version. Instead, he was going to play the version sung by Indie rock folk singer Greg Laswell, which was used as part of the soundtrack for two movies in 2009, Confessions of a Shopaholic and My Sister's Keeper. Our teacher shared with us a personal story about this song, a story he wanted to tell in order to challenge us as we listened to the song ourselves during savasana. When he was completing an advanced degree in sociology, one of his classmates, a female student, told him she was using "Girls just wanna have fun" as the basis of her dissertation on gender roles. Our teacher's response to her: "Good luck with that." Later, however, he revised his opinion after having listened to the song without distraction. 

He was right, and that female student was brilliant, and I hope her M.A. advisor understood how ground-breaking her thesis was as well. This all came back to me recently during a trip to Mammoth where I was the sole Mom chaperone for my daughter's cross-country team. Six days, fourteen high school girls, one male coach and me cooking and cleaning and shopping and caring for all. Ask me about warrior pose now. 

Actually, what I really learned--I mean, took it straight to my heart--during this trip was the true meaning of the first yama, ahimsa. The standard translation of this, the first of the five moral restraints and limb number one of the eight limbs of yoga, is nonviolence or do no harm. And, of course, in any practice that we hope to one day adopt and use in our daily lives, this notion and practice of non-harming begins with ourselves. The idea is that once we understand how it is we harm ourselves, we will be better prepared and able to stop and/or avoid harming others. And we will have more compassion about it, to boot.

But my recent experience in Mammoth taught me something more fundamental, something a whole lot deeper--and particularly for women whether old or young--about the practice of ahimsa. Despite all of the gains made on the part of the female of the species since the women's movement of the 1960s began to change the national, and then global, conversation about gender equality, young girls and women are still taught to, first, be nice. (Just look how hard Hillary has had to work to prove her presidential chops.) After interacting with 14 teenage girls--let's face it, they really are young women--over the course of six days, where much of that interaction consisted of me working like a dog to keep them fed and, then, trying to fade into the background so as not to annoy them, I learned the following about being nice. Being nice is not the lesson nor the rule of ahimsa. Rather, being kind is my new translation of this first moral restraint. Being nice and being kind are not at all the same thing and, in fact, are quite opposite in nature. Learning to be kind leaves women with a voice. Learning to be kind leaves women feeling as though what it is they are feeling--whatever it is--is a legitimate part of whatever is going on in their world at the moment. Being kind allows women to stand up for themselves when circumstance necessitates, and when no one else is able or willing to stand up on their behalf. Ahimsa, nonviolence, means, Sister, protect thyself. This is my new take on yama number one. 

Let us not teach our daughters to be nice, aka submissive. Let us not teach our daughters to hold their tongues when someone else is using his/hers against them. Learning to be nice is more akin to learning to be a doormat whereas learning to be kind teaches girls how to blend compassionate action with self-respect. Yes, Ms. Franklin, your brand of R-E-S-P-E-C-T. That's what I'm talking about.

Let's face it. Teenage girls can be bossy and messy and mean. They can be tough and competitive. They have outside voices they are trying to understand how to use. They know how much work lies ahead of them given the 24-hour, seven-day a week academic demands and testing requirements now mandatory for college acceptance, not to mention the expectations from parents, peers and the young men they are growing up alongside. Forget about all of the social, political and environmental challenges they will face as young twenty- and thirty- and forty-somethings. They want to make us proud. Let's help them get where they are going by remembering that having a little fun should be in the cards as well. When I see young women having fun, one of my first thoughts is that I wish I had permitted myself to have had more of it when I was their age. We will all benefit--the planet, their future families, our future grandchildren, all manner of industry--if our daughters learn to recognize what having fun is all about. When women remember to make room for fun, they simultaneously validate the importance of maintaining and celebrating female camaraderie.

Think about it: What did Eve do when Adam went into his man cave?

For six days, sometimes I got to be the fly on the wall and overhear the girls talk in ways that they would not have talked if boys had been present, or their parents or teachers or anyone in that sphere of authority that expects something more of them. It sounded like so much fun. These young women, they are a work in progress. Pure art. This is their time in the sun, and it should not be the last. The encyclopedias describe the sun as by far the most important source of energy for life on earth. Let's make sure we allow our young women to take full advantage of that energy.




Cyndi Lauper "Girls Just Want to Have Fun"

Greg Laswell "Girls Just Want to Have Fun"