Yoga
Yoga Lessons from Nature
Abstract
The essence of developing ecological consciousness is to realise that Nature is a numinous being — Prakrrti or Gaia. In his hurry to control nature, man has mistakenly thought of controlling this grand Mother Nature, instead of his own human nature. In the process, he has ruptured the balance within himself, with his community and also his relationship with Nature. This article explores one aspect of ecological consciousness — biomimicry in the psychological sense. The examples are primarily taken from the plant kingdom. This reflective essay offers certain natural processes that man can copy to practise collective and individual yoga.
Introduction
From the flight of birds to the speed of horses, Nature has ever inspired man to exceed himself. Biomimicry in technology is well known: helicopters built from seeds that have propellers, screwdrivers mimicking the corkscrew action of seeds, damming rivers learnt from beavers, making beehive-like strong hexagonal structures, and many more. Since Nature has been experimenting and perfecting her models for millennia, why not learn a page or two from her? And not just to make our external life easier, but for yoga too, individual and collective.
Indeed, we have used art, poetry, literature inspired by Nature as psychological tools to make us resilient, beautiful, mindful and also something more than human, closer to our numinous Nature. Here are some lines from Nature-inspired poems. Sri Aurobindo writes in Savitri, “Beauty is his footprint showing us where he has passed.” There are poignant haikus dedicated to Nature such as Basho’s, “Old pond — frog jumped in — sound of water”. Some other famous poems are The Noble Nature by Ben Jonson, Wordsworth’s poem on daffodils, Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind that have these immortal verses, “Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! / I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” And these lines in Blake’s Auguries of Innocence: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour”. Individuals open to Nature can respond to these sublime experiences of poets and mould their character like the aged oak or the heavenly flower. But for the community and for the individual eager to practise collective yoga, are there lessons Nature can offer?
Individual and collective yoga
A plant burrows into the earth and grows its roots that nourish the shoot with soil nutrients and water. Roots also hold the shoot erect. The deeper and wider the roots, the stronger the tree, wider and taller too. When the roots of one tree meet the roots of neighbouring trees, they entangle into each other to form one large foundation for the trees above. The many help the individual grow taller than it could have had it been a stand-alone tree. The relationship between the human individual and the collective is similar. The collective supports the individual and the individual pulls the collective forward. Both the individual and collective yoga proceed simultaneously, helping each other forward. Let us look at some more ways the plant-kingdom inspires these two yoga processes.
Collaboration
Imagine the human nervous system with millions of neurons and axons that connect neurons to each other, in a hub-and-spoke configuration. Any stimulus sensed by one neuron is communicated immediately throughout the network and the entire body prepares to respond instantly. Similarly, a forest is networked like a nervous system, or the digital world-wide-web. The trees are the nodes and the connecting wires are the fungi that grow under the topsoil. These mycelia carry messages from a tree’s root to all the lifeforms in the cluster. The signal is fast enough for the danger to be handled effectively. If the danger is that a tree is attacked by pests, the other trees put forward their defensive mechanisms. Sometimes they give off a smell that repels the attacker. At other times, they emit a fragrance that attracts the natural enemies of the pests. And if a tree gets sick the nutrients are diverted to this tree. For a while the healthy trees sacrifice their food to this sick tree in their cluster.
Now imagine such a community of humans who live compassionately with each other, readily sharing knowledge and sacrificing for the sick ones. This does happen in families and clans, but trees are doing it for acres on end for trees they will never meet. Also of course, they are doing it across national borders. When they accept a tree as part of their circle, however far it is, when connected by the mycelium network, this tree is protected and cared for. In its turn, it protects and cares for another when the need arises. Amongst humans there are such organisations like Doctors Without Borders, Peacekeeping forces, NGOs, civil societies. But the fact that humans need such groups to heal the misery caused by one group of humans on another is itself the problem. It means there isn’t enough harmony going around to start with. Wars between neighbouring countries, whose people share similar histories, and were once one nation, could learn from the forest network and live naturally, happily. War is just a glaring lack of love, but there are many others where a unit deliberately sucks the life-energy out of another. Irresponsible firms, deep states, international geopolitics, neo-colonisation and similar selfish behaviour are very destructive forces in the public sphere. We can connect quickly using internet technologies as the mycelia in the forest to avoid a danger in any part of the world. Quick or slow, we have many ways to connect to spread universal Goodness and unite to fight all sorts of evil.
Diversity
To accept all the different kinds of people in the world in our cluster, we need what the Sanskrit maxim says, udāra caritanam tu vasudhaiva kutumbakam, the generous ones consider the entire earth as their family. Biodiversity is required to maintain the delicate balance of the earth’s ecosystem. But so is cultural diversity required to sustain humanity. Renowned anthropologist, Wade Davis who has been living with and studying indigenous peoples the world over for the last many decades weaves in these phrases in his inspiring talks:
The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being YOU: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.
In the end, it is the diversity of the world’s cultures that gives meaning to life.
Cultural diversity is a collective heritage, a collective gift that has shaped the human journey.
Our ability to understand and appreciate cultural difference is the key to building a sustainable and harmonious world.
There is no limit to the creative potential of the human mind; it is our diversity that makes us resilient and adaptable.
All cultures carry within them possibilities for brilliant insights and solutions to the challenges we face as a species.
The richness of our world lies in the diversity of its cultural expressions.
Cultural diversity is not a threat; it is a strength that can help us find innovative solutions to the problems we face.
Cultural understanding is a tool for peace, enabling us to bridge divides and foster cooperation.
Every culture has something invaluable to teach us; we just need to listen and be open to learning.
The world is a mosaic of cultures, and we are all part of the grand tapestry of humanity.
Uniformity kills the human spirit because it fundamentally goes against Nature. Totalitarian states, afraid of diversity — as imagined by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four — have become realities and many have already been wiped out. Every so often, there are drives to create a monoculture but they fail to trap the human spirit. The genie or genius is let loose before long. To know human nature, we can observe Nature. As we re-learn to live with her, let us also learn to live as her.
Symbiosis
For to live naturally is to live symbiotically. The pretty orchid that is a parasite and sucks the sap of the mother tree actually helps it in an indispensable way — to propagate itself. The orchid attracts pollinators that fertilise the flowers and turn them into fruits. The birds feast on the fruits and carry the seeds to far-off places. Complementarity is essential for a harmonious living. Man too, is not designed to survive alone, leave alone thrive. When he partners with his complement, or complements, he forms a complete team. A small team can only get a small unit of work done. But all the teams can come together and collaborate for a bigger project, working harmoniously symbiotically together.
Saprophytes are the cleaning team in the plant kingdom. They are given prized places on the forest floor because they do what other plants cannot do. They eat dead matter and replenish the soil. They do the dirty work and reward the rest with nutrients. They are the support-system that make life liveable. Humans have a large number of support personnel. But are they given the dignity of their labour? Could we also respect the trash-collectors, the gutter-sweepers and toilet-cleaners? Also, those who mop our floors, cook our foods, wash our clothes? If they are machines, we could take good care of them instead of overworking them. We could offer a glass of water to the postman and the delivery man. We could feel grateful towards those in our support-chain — the coal-miners, the goods train, the truck-drivers, the engineers, doctors who take care of all these people, trainers, teachers and all those rendering public services. When drinking a glass of water, if we could remember to be grateful, there would be plenty of times in a day we would feel gratitude. Gratitude is good for the heart — it expands it and keeps out blockages.
Resource consciousness
Regarding wastage and excess, we can learn from nature’s ways of recycling, reusing and her energy efficiency. A leaf that was the main bread-earner for the tree gets old and becomes a tailor bird nest. When it falls, it becomes humus that is rich food for various plants and insects. After passing through their guts the leaf is soil, rich in minerals that are sucked up by the root-system as food by the tree. Everything in nature is part of a cycle of life, including day and night and the seasons. Only man has a massive problem of debris that don’t fit in any cycle. And why is there such a quantity of debris? Because of man’s excess and wastage. He does not think in terms of cycles, but in terms of silos. He thinks of personal profit, not the long-term progress of the earth. He takes too much from Nature’s limited resources, gives back too little of what she can reuse. He encourages consumerism but does not know how to deal with the goods that have outlasted their usefulness. He has gone global, but has not found out how to share the excess globally. In one part of the world people die of obesity, in another of starvation. Nature believes in ‘Small is Beautiful’, ‘Simple is Beautiful’. Let us try these two models of existence. Source from what is available locally. Solve local problems with local solutions. Business cycles would become manageable, which will scale down other operations in communitarian life. Employees will not be overworked having to compete with millions of invisible others. Eventually, it will translate to an equitable growth spread equally in society. A man will not have to work in his autumnal years but can write poetry. When the natural cycles are understood in our lives and their rhythms respected, our lives fall into place. We have better health, which means no medicines, no side-effects of medicines, no medicine-induced ailments. We also learn to accept death and decay. Also, that our bodies will become earth one day to push up a stalk of wheat another day.
Compassion
Nature has figured out that sharing and caring is the only way to win. Winning means all win. Each in his appointed place plays his role well and makes the whole prosper. The cycles point to this. New shoots, new cubs and kids, happy bees and birds squeak and tweet as much. It is because nature knows when to multiply. If resources are strained, the little ones will not survive. So lesser babies are conceived. If man could follow this rhythm, there would not be a population explosion and a resource crunch. Though imbalance would still remain, because this is to do with a human behaviour — the lack of sharing and caring. We know this feeling well. We feel uncared for when the sun is not around. When the blizzard and typhoon rage, the vulnerable human shivers and prays. Whereas the tiger and deer share the watering holes, humans are using river water treatise as political leverages, threatening to stop a downstream flow and causing a crisis in the neighbouring country. A lion kills the deer when it is hungry and not to prove to anyone it is the king of the jungle. Humans can learn some conflict resolution from animals.
Resilience
The human footprint is big and often not bio-degradable. As though the noisy ego will not allow blending in. Anyone with too much of it, will meet his downfall sooner or later — our proverbs warn us and our experiences say as much. We can learn some humility by observing Nature who in her quiet way outdoes man’s achievements. Nature carves stones using the soft touch of water. She is persistent and patient. Ants build anthills many times the height of skyscrapers working in harmony — no Tower of Babel here. And when they drag food many times their size, they do so diligently all summer, so that they don’t starve in winter. The man-made granaries ensure a similar food security during times of duress. And the ants start by feeding their babies first, something humans also do. But only locally, within the group they call their own. Children in other countries starve. And when adults fight, children are left without food, medicine and sometimes parents.
Conclusion
But not all lessons of Nature are hard to copy. She can be playful and man has to learn this from her too. Male birds showing off their feathers is playful and comic while it is functional. It is a melodious dance-drama, beauty squandered in a moment in playful abandon. It’s mostly a solo show, sometimes involving duals as between antlers or a multi-party chasing game as in the kangaroo kingdom. Humans take themselves too seriously and end up complicating matters. Not playing with co-workers creates unhealthy competition. Not playing with children generates mistrust. Not interacting with different people creates misunderstandings.
A wonderful lesson we can learn from plants is turning towards the sun. And letting everybody else turn towards the sun in their own way. We embrace diversity and realise that only diversity can save us as a species, and can save the planet. Deep down at the core is the wisdom of the Śvetāśvataopaniṣad, that the wise have discovered through psychic experiments: ekam bījaṃ bahudhā yaḥ karoti one seed that is multiplied in so many beings. The One has become the Many because it wants to seek itself out in manifold ways. This is Its play, the delightful leela. The better we are able to emulate It, the better for us. And we cannot be lost when we have Nature for our guide.
Lopa Mukherjee is a psychologist and educator. She conducts workshops and teaches culture, soft skills and related subjects. She lives in Pondicherry.
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