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This post, Yoga & Nature: An Invitation, appeared
in the quarterly magazine, YogaIowa, Spring, 2014. [Image on left is a mock-up of a cover not used. Image on right is article as it appears..]
For $15 annual subscription, subscriptions@yoga-iowa.com,
or perhaps search Facebook, YogaIowa.
GOING “OUT INTO” nature to practice yoga may seem to bring nature
more into our practice, and yet it is somewhat of an illusion, if you grasp
what both yoga and nature are about.
We are deeply lost in
nature so that there is really no “outside.” Present as the driving force in ancestral yoga is a sense of
the body-mind [“the little universe"] aspiring to come into harmony and
balance with the larger universe for optimal health and human development and
gratitude.
The Earth is in our
practice. A praise of the sun—the
12 asanas of traditional Surya [sun]
Namaskar--is basically the heart
of what we term "vinyasa flow."
Perhaps go to YouTube and view videos of Indian practice of Surya
Namaskar to grasp its profound
depth. And there are other
sequences that explicitly attend to the natural such as, for examples, the
“Earth Sequence” and a related “Grounding Sequence” and Chandra [moon] Namaskar and “The Sequence To The Four Directions” and for some, facing East
[the rising sun] or North [polar magnetic lines]. It is difficult to be around
the yoga community and not find a rich eco-sensitivity involving a general affection for nature and specific
individual and communal and public actions to reduce one’s “eco-footprint”
[i.e., the consumption of natural resources]. This sensitivity extends into
everything, into natural fiber clothing and bamboo flooring and most other
products, as well as practice and presence in unbuilt landscapes. Practitioners may go deep enough to ask
as Ganga White does in Yoga Beyond Belief,
What
if the temple was the earth,
If forests were our
church
If holy water—the
rivers, lakes and oceans
While eco-sensitivity is
important, it does not equal eco-literacy. We will likely never
have holy water if we sense ourselves standing outside nature. In our eco-literacy, water might still
remain a “resource.” And might
will continue to perceive ourselves to be “domesticated,” not “wild.” We become our words.
“Ecology” is a rather new term, becoming popularized in 1970
with our view of Earthrise over moonscape. As theologian Thomas Berry has suggested in The Great
Work, our renascent task in this era
is to integrate into the larger Earth community. Because it is so body-mind, yoga can play a role in both
transforming our sense of the nature of health and this eco-integration.
As Henry Beston noted in The
Outermost House, We hunger for fire
[the elemental] before the hands,
because we are fundamentally from nature and know it in our heart of hearts.
Now, especially for those
coming into wondrous Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, as the whole Earth
increasingly tilts toward the sun, and we become sensitive to the rich changes
around us, we might invite Earth deeply into our practice.
And
I suggest…,
that your spirit
grow in curiosity, that your life
be
richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as
you
feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and
ambitious,
and selfish, and unrestrained—are only
one
design of the moving, the vivacious many.
Mary
Oliver, from “ The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers,”
A
Thousand Mornings [33]
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NOTE: As our
eco-literacy begins to include us, perhaps we will begin to see how even our
global urbanization [that can appear to be so separate from nature and artificial
as to be almost the destructive antithesis of nature] has not only major
ecologically adaptive features but also is wild and still young in the Earth
ecosystem. [For further exploration of this possibility, perhaps search cityasecological.blogspot.com]
