It’s such a beautiful day to ponder and share – aloha!
Many of our ancestors and those in present incarnation have blessed us with their wisdom and we are graced to have access to so much of this ancient and sacred science of life. The ancient science of yoga has been seduced by the Western world of glitz and glamour, with varying styles, teachers and beliefs to dizzy the mind of anyone feeling called into this ancient and sacred tradition. Yoga is the harmonising of forces of sun and moon, a ‘skill in action’ that weaves rainbow threads into our life tapestry. Promises of health and wellness, enhanced virility, sexual bliss and calm minds lure many into the world of yoga.
I feel joy that today many seekers are finding the deeper truths and gifts of traditional yoga. Yoga can be a sweet journey, taking us beyond the play of will and surrender into a place of ‘witness consciousness’. A place of gentle awareness beyond the entrapments of blame and shame.
We feel into the truths that our greatest strengths can be found within our gentleness and that gentleness is within our real strengths. The magic of watching a wild lion with her cubs is a manifestation of gentleness dancing with strength.
One of the many benefits of yoga is a deepening inner awareness, opening us into that dance of gentleness and strength. This can nourish us in personal relations. Expressing and communicating feelings more naturally are just some of the benefits of yoga. We begin to listen to our body and into our intuitive nature.
As we attune more deeply within, we begin to feel the wonder and miracles of life — softening into a deeper sense of peace and appreciation and gratitude. We feel into places beyond reaction and resistance and begin to notice how our bodies respond to food of all varieties. Yoga is closely linked with consciously choosing our nutritional food and the foods that fuel our thoughts.
Practising yoga is not just about the physical — it’s a holistic discipline of life embracing mental and feeling responses. It’s wonderful that many more people are moving beyond the media coverage of yoga and seeing it as a wonderful and spacious way to deepen their expression of harmonious living.
Yoga is a science of life and embraces all the vedic guidelines for living life alive.
The path of the science of yoga can reawaken our sense of ritual and ceremony, our communion with nature and our beautiful planet. Within that deepening communion with nature, I feel I take yoga out of my yoga room into the wild and open spaces. I find the sea so awesomely nourishing and healing, it will snatch my voice and carry the mind’s dilemmas into its ever rolling waters. It will cleanse my body with its salty expression and remind me of the many faces of goddess. These times for me are about ‘meditation in motion’ — a sense of yoga off the mat into life. The sands are washed clean each day, and as the tides move, so the wildlife of the rocks comes and goes, reminding me of the power of breath and its natural flow and depth.
The mind slows down and the beauty around me invites me into meditative awareness. Meditation becomes a way of being rather than a formal practice and I perceive that all of nature nourishes herself in this meditative harmony.
As I look around me, all is in harmony, nature lives in harmony with herself and her children. Animals live in harmony, eating from the earth, birthing on the earth, walking on the earth without the hindrance of possessions, clothes and doubt. We are so blessed to be in this temple of nature, to replenish our souls and to attune with spirit.
An old Sufi saying reminds us that we don’t find our hearts in a temple, we find our true yoga temple in our own hearts.
Yoga ‘sadhana’ changes along with the seasons and we are drawn deeper within as autumn brings shorter days. Persephone feels the call to return to the underworld, leaving earth barren and lustreless, until she returns in the springtime.
Create an intention to find solace in nature this coming weekend, let nature into your life and celebrate her dance. Yoga happens off the mat, beyond the body and dictates of mind. Yoga is drawn from the ancient vedic traditions, along with Ayurveda, which is a science of life. Yoga is part of the ancient and is expressed globally through many faces and traditions. Natural medicine as interpreted by the Native Americans and the Aboriginal tribes is the synergetic interaction with nature. Their perception of ‘medicine’ is yoga.
The body cannot exist on its own without breathing, the body does not come into this world with breath. It draws its breath from the environment. The body does not come with sunlight, it draws nutrients and energy from the sun. The body is in vibrational resonance with all of nature.
Sacred medicine is the honouring and interaction with the spirit of a plant or aspect of nature. The body, although primordially wise, is interactively dependent on nature’s medicine.
The beginnings of natural medicine go back thousands of years and often involved ritual, ceremony and the interaction with the lunar cycle and seasons. The word medicine does not mean a remedy, medicine is sacred. The medical industry has taken this word and shifted its meaning — medicine has become a commodity to fix people. The sacred expression of medicine has become lost in the production of pills and potions, which can sometimes create alleviation of the symptomatic manifestation of disease, but not necessarily transformative healing.
The animals, trees, plants, rocks and crystals all offer their gifts in medicine. We have lost the power of listening to the body, which might at times have guided us to the medicine it needed. Nature offers healing groves, water, sun, earth and fire. How can a human body heal in an institutionalised building with no life force, no air, and minimally nutritious food?
This is not to discredit the amount of ‘fixing’ that happens in hospitals but I don’t feel that true healing happens in these places.
We are blessed that we can still benefit through the link between modern naturopathic medicine and the ritual ceremony and spiritual traditions of medicine doctors and the ancient science of yoga.
Let us saturate ourselves with the love of this day, this life and the gifts of communion we share through Passion.
Hari Om Shanti.
Ruth Allen
xx
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