Yoga and Nature: Good, Bad and Ugly

Class brings yoga into nature zone | mydesert.com | The Desert Sun.

Yoga and nature immersion are parallel practices. There is a mysterious term in the first chapter of the Yoga Sutra – the term is prakrti-laya, or ‘absorbed in nature.’ I have been fascinated by this term for many years, since it seemed to describe a set of experiences that I had with the assistance of nature-immersion during the 1980′s under the influence of mind-body practice and Colorado’s high wilderness.

Before anything else, I want to acknowledge what is obvious. To practice yoga outdoors in the healthful air of Palm Springs – as does this remarkable group of southern California yogis – is certainly a good thing.

The teacher’s heart is just as obviously in the right place. Nonetheless, it is very important to emphasize that, in yoga thought, there is much more to Tree Pose, for example, than the ‘be the tree’ imperative. This symbolic content is important and powerful, and is not merely an adjunct to yoga asana. Yoga knowledge is the complement of yoga action, the Shiva to its Shakti, to use traditional terms.

When properly integrated, symbolic and active components reinforce one another to generate yogic experience (yogi-pratyaksha). Here, the fascinating, multi-layered symbolism surrounding the Tree in yoga thought allows the mind to attend to detail in the same way that the body attends to detail.In this mind-body practice, physical action and symbolic knowledge feed-back into one another. This mutual mirroring creates conditions proper to the experience where mind and body, Ha (sun) and Tha (moon), in-breath and out-breath, become one – and there, time (kala) disappears and the the mind (citta) identical with the breath (prana) enters the void (shunya).

The issue is not of truth, but of method – how best to unite mind and body? For those with a symbolic intelligence, bridging the two becomes an almost mind-less matter.

Tagged as: california, environmentalism, nature, symbolism