The Lotus Mudra and My Dad's Memorial: What They Say about the Language of the Hands

Illustration by Randy Fielding, using DALL-E

While I was thinking about what I wanted to say at my dad's recent memorial service, my hands spontaneously formed the Lotus Mudra, a heart-opening hand gesture in yoga. To move into this mudra, the palms of my hands came together in a prayerful posture and then, while my thumbs and pinkies stayed together, my other fingers flowered open like the petals of a lotus.

My hands seemed to be ahead of my mind. My mind was very busy with plans for the memorial, but my hands were working out something in my thinking, and my feeling, toward Dad.

My brother and I were struggling at the time with some hurtful news about our father's will, which brought up past times of familial hurt. I was aware of the hurt but felt the need to park it to the side while I turned to the demands of memorial planning.

Yet my hands did not wish to be parked to the side. In moving into the shape of the lotus mudra, I think they were saying something important and asking me to listen.

Gestural Symbolism

The lotus flower's roots are in a river or pond's mud and dark waters, a symbol I sensed, of a certain murkiness in my experience of Dad.  But while the flower arises from a closed-in darkness, it blossoms openly on the pond's surface, with petals radiating out and up to the sky. As my hands formed this mudra, my sense of Dad seemed to shift. Along with a sad awareness of difficult parts of Dad's fatherhood arose a quiet appreciation of qualities he embodied that I had long valued and counted on. I could learn from my hands and see the light in my memory of Dad emerge from tinges of darkness.

Further, during the memorial itself, it was not only the shape of my hands but their movement that signaled meaning. I found myself extending my hands in the lotus mudra posture outward to my extended family and friends and then folding my hands inward back to my heart. I did this without any deliberate planning or explicit intention. In this sense, my hands were priming me to communicate what I felt deeply and genuinely. Perhaps they also foreshadowed to my loved ones that I wanted to share my heart's truth.

The Language of the Hands

Yoga mudras are a classic way to both foster and express important thoughts and feelings. And there has been a lot written about mudras.

But as I acknowledged the significance of the lotus mudra in my memorial experience with my dad, it struck me that in my everyday life, quite apart from classic mudras, my hands often spoke to me and to others as well. Friends and family members have reinforced this self-observation. They have told me that talking energetically with my hands is a big part of my communication style.

But I've been a bit embarrassed by this feedback. I've interpreted it to mean that my gesturing is a sign of undisciplined and showy expressiveness, as if I'm kind of all over the place.

Yet I didn't feel this way about the lotus mudra spontaneously arising with Dad's memorial preparations. It did not feel that my hands should have been more controlled, more subordinate to my executive thinking and verbal formulations. My hands showed that they had a mind, too, and could read the situation ahead of the mind in my head. Hand gestures could be a language as worthy as words.

I thought further about everyday examples of the power of hands as a language. In the simple act of hand shaking, opening palms and joining them together with another is a step toward a friendly and trustworthy connection, even if a casual one, that may be as important as verbal greetings and introductions. Similarly, opening palms while holding space for a friend to share their deeply felt experiences is both a sign of caring receptivity and a way of encouraging that quality to begin with.

I also noticed that often I pause while I'm trying to figure out what I want to say or write and recognize that I'm a bit stuck. My hands sometimes help me to move ahead. For example, while writing this essay, I started to stray from the main theme of the article. I knew this in part because my hands formed a stop sign when my message stopped flowing. And then they moved into a forward wrist rolling, suggesting to me to keep the momentum going and not get sidetracked.

The role of hand gestures in developing, foreshadowing, and conveying meaning is a fascinating theme. I plan on exploring this further with a deeper look at yoga mudras and a greater awareness of the contribution of my hands to my day to day thinking and communicating.

Further reading: A great resource on the language of the hands is Annie Murphy Paul’s 2001 book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. See in particular the section on “Thinking with Gesture.”

PS. Special thanks to my wonderful and talented brother, Randy Fielding, for creating the picture for this piece.