The value of a seasonal approach to yoga practice
You would almost think to look at the way life is designed now that we were robots.
Life is organised by numbers. 9-5, 24/7, £p/a, km/h, bpm, calories, alarm clocks, step counters and heart rate monitors.. We track everything with numbers and apps - productivity, fitness, sleep, menstrual cycles, even our meditation practice.
We are also encouraged to be the same day in, day out - consistently productive and efficient, reliably unchanging. And if you do live your life by app and timetable and spend your time within four walls, it can be easy to be fooled into thinking that is normal.
I’m sure if you’ve been practising yoga for a little while you’d agree with me that one of the aims of the practice is to reduce automatism - to spot our unconscious habits, physical and emotional, and make the invisible visible. Yoga encourages us to be responsive, alive, awake to the constantly fluctuating immediacy of Reality. And when we do wake up to what’s real - we can see it doesn’t live by a schedule.
Yoga, as we know, connects our thinking mind back into our bodies. I would also suggest that it helps us to connect us to where our bodies came from - the lap of Nature.
Nature, from the Latin verb root nat-, means ‘that which is born’. Whatever is born must necessarily die - and so Nature is by definition a world of change. (This too must pass!) When we live by rota and force ourselves to be the same every day despite the circumstances, we fight against the tide of life itself.
As much as it might be tempting to quit the rat race, throw the step counter and alarm clock out the window, I think even working within the tight rhythm of modern life we can find a way to connect back to the looser cadence of nature’s dance. Yoga can help us with this.
In particular if we take inspiration from mother nature when we design our practice - responding to her cycles and seasons.
The Benefits of a Seasonal approach
The seasons affect us! When it’s dark it’s hard to get out of bed, when it’s glorious outside all we wanna do is frolic. When we take a seasonal approach, we allow ourselves to rest when we feel tired; play and work when we feel inspired - and everything in between.
When we are more in tune with our bodies, we are no longer fighting against the messages the body is sending us. We can understand more about our appetites and digestion, our hormones, body rhythms and stress responses. It also means we know how to care for ourselves better.
A seasonal approach allows us to take our cues from nature to give ourselves what we really need, when we need it. The result is that we feel nourished and cared for - and more than that, supported by a larger context. Allow ourselves to be warmed by the sun, and have the courage to turn our hearts towards the sky like a sunflower turning to the light.
I find nature endlessly inspiring - her beauty, her power, her delicate balance. If we remember our place as part of nature we can recognise these qualities in ourselves too.
Nature helps us remember the full range of our potential. When we’re not pushing to be the same all the time, we can discover new ways of being. What can we discover when we’re quiet? What new insights can we gain from making space for digestion and integration? How can the burgeoning energy of new life in spring inspire us to decisive action?
Most of all, when we practise in harmony with nature, we can palpably experience our integration with the vastness of nature. Just as yoga tells us, everything is interconnected. What happens to nature ripples through our lives and our bodies, it’s unavoidable. Thus honouring nature through our practice we are in fact honouring ourselves and our place in the world.
How can we do this?
It can be simple enough as a shift in attitude. We can lift our gaze from the pavement (or more likely nowadays, from our phones) to the sky, to see the clouds moving or the light dancing through the leaves. Just by looking up, by feeling the breeze on our skin, by listening to birdsong we can relearn how to observe nature’s patterns. What the sun and moon do, how the flora and fauna respond to it (we’re included in that).
Luckily, there are plenty of wisdom traditions that are in tune with nature and have systematised their observations and provide practices that we can follow to cultivate harmony with nature and with ourselves. Traditional Chinese Medicine (which is a big influence on yin yoga), Sankhya (the foundation for Yoga practice as per the Sutras) and Ayurveda, Yoga’s sister science, all recognise the influence of the elements on everything in the material world.
Of course a beautiful way to harmonise with nature is to actually take our practice outdoors - allow nature to act on our nervous system (the calming sounds of trees, wind, birds, water; the restful effect of gazing at the horizon; the benefit of breathing deeply the sweet clean air)
This is certainly something I advocate! Although in the unpredictable weather of Glasgow it can be safer to keep it within four walls. The great thing is that nature is within us, and always with us. It’s simply a question of tapping into her rhythms and secrets.
This is why I absolutely love practising yoga in a seasonal way. All of my classes are influenced by Traditional Chinese Medicine and Five Element Theory. I choose physical and energetic themes based on the season and what’s going on in and around us.
Most powerful of all are my seasonal special yin to vin workshops, which consist of practices that make the most of what is naturally alive in us during that season, as well as the opportunity to slow down and to surrender to the flow of nature’s rhythms.
Join me this Sunday for the High Summer edition of this beautiful yin-vin practice - two hours of meditation, easeful movement and natural magic!
Sunday 15th August - 3-5pm - Live at Merchant City Yoga in Glasgow’s city centre - and online too!
