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Namah Yoga Lessons from Nature

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 neurons to each other, in a hub-and-spoke
mould their character like the aged oak or the configuration. Any stimulus sensed by
heavenly flower. But for the community and one neuron is communicated immediately
for the individual eager to practise collective throughout the network and the entire body
yoga, are there lessons Nature can offer? prepares to respond instantly. Similarly, a
forest is networked like a nervous system,
Individual and collective yoga or the digital world-wide-web. The trees are
the nodes and the connecting wires are the
A plant burrows into the earth and grows its fungi that grow under the topsoil. These
roots that nourish the shoot with soil nutrients mycelia carry messages from a tree’s root
and water. Roots also hold the shoot erect. to all the lifeforms in the cluster. The signal
The deeper and wider the roots, the stronger is fast enough for the danger to be handled
the tree, wider and taller too. When the roots effectively. If the danger is that a tree is attacked
of one tree meet the roots of neighbouring by pests, the other trees put forward their
trees, they entangle into each other to form defensive mechanisms. Sometimes they give
one large foundation for the trees above. The off a smell that repels the attacker. At other
many help the individual grow taller than times, they emit a fragrance that attracts the
it could have had it been a stand-alone natural enemies of the pests. And if a tree gets
tree. The relationship between the human sick the nutrients are diverted to this tree. For
individual and the collective is similar. The a while the healthy trees sacrifice their food
collective supports the individual and the to this sick tree in their cluster.
individual pulls the collective forward. Both
the individual and collective yoga proceed Now imagine such a community of humans
simultaneously, helping each other forward. who live compassionately with each other,
Let us look at some more ways the plant- readily sharing knowledge and sacrificing
kingdom inspires these two yoga processes. for the sick ones. This does happen in families
and clans, but trees are doing it for acres on
Collaboration end for trees they will never meet. Also
of course, they are doing it across national
Imagine the human nervous system with borders. When they accept a tree as part of their
millions of neurons and axons that connect circle, however far it is, when connected by the

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