A Teaching from the Trees
But first, What are the Yoga Sutras?
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are a collection of ancient teachings that serve as a guide for navigating life’s ups and downs. Written thousands of years ago, these sutras are a set of insights designed to help us cultivate balance, focus, and inner peace. Think of them not as a religious text, but as a manual for self-awareness, offering practical wisdom to help us connect more deeply with ourselves and the world around us. At their core, the sutras emphasize concepts like presence, practice, and letting go—timeless principles that can be experienced by anyone, regardless of spiritual beliefs.In bygone times, the yogis of ancient India retreated from society into the forest to do their practice, so they could better restore their connection to the natural world. As the sweet, long, sunny days of summer fade to the fresh coolness of fall, let’s explore a lesson from the trees.
Imagine a tree in its very first summer, full and expanded with beautiful leaves. It feels a little nervous to be naked and bare for a season, but the elder trees explained that letting go of the leaves is necessary for preservation in the winter. The tree already experienced the transition of flowers to leaves and fruits, which was also a little uncomfortable at first, but the summertime was wonderful! So the tree takes a deep breath and begins to drop each leaf, one by one, when they are ready. The getting ready part is also unexpectedly amazing... so many colors are revealed! After a few years have gone by, the tree doesn’t prefer one season or another, rather appreciates them all for what they bring.
This is an illustration of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 1.12: abhyasa-vairagyabhyam tan-nirodhah “ah-bya-sa vy-rag-ya-byam tan nee-row-da-hah” Identification with the fluctuations of mind is stopped by practice and non-attachment.
Abhyasa (practice) and Vairagya (non attachment) are given as means to free ourselves from the constant push and pull of the mind, and when that happens, it is known as the state of Yoga. It is the goal of all these practices that we do. Practice is defined in the nearby sutras as doing something to control our mind for a long period of time without interruption. It is then said that non-attachment is the letting go of our desires, and through this letting go, we fall into a peaceful harmony with the universal rhythm of life. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have desires and that we can’t enjoy ourselves as yogis. It means that what comes, we accept. And what goes, we don’t cling on to. Through non-attachment, we learn to rely less on some future or past ideal and rather learn to be content with what is.
You see, our mind works REALLY hard to convince us that this moment is not enough, that we or the circumstances could be better, that if this happened, maybe next season, or next year this season... then we can be happy. On and on it goes. But it’s only a trick of the mind. Through practice, we become accustomed to the ebb and flow - ask anyone who has practiced yoga for 20 years! A progression of changes also occurs each time we come to the mat, as we move from shape to shape. We practice the experience of transitioning between and accepting varying degrees of comfort, and learn how to approach both with an even breath, including when our experience doesn’t go how we think it should. Just as the tree learned to trust the rise and fall of each season, through yoga practice, we learn to ride the wave of each moment with increasing ease and grace.
