THE YOGA CONNECTION
The Yoga of Gardening
Spiritual Gardening
By Swami Atmarupa Saraswati
Anyone who has spent time in a beautiful garden knows the tranquility and sense of connection that can be found there. In this age of technology and urgency, being in the garden can allow us to release our stresses and transcend time. As we sit in the midst of beauty, watching the bees, butterflies or birds, we begin to let go of our cares and worries. If we are actively involved in creating the beauty of the garden, we find the acts of planting, weeding and trimming bring about the feeling of being grounded and centered. As I work in my garden I appreciate not only the physical work and sensory perceptions, but the endless flow of thoughts, spontaneously appearing unencumbered by intellectual musings. Before I know it, hours have passed. Thousands of thoughts have come and gone, but as I worked, they required no more attention than the birds singing in the trees. I leave the garden feeling refreshed and connected to the world around me.
The yoga of gardening, or spiritual gardening, is the process of developing our awareness and using yoga techniques to better know ourselves within the context of gardening. The value of yoga practice increases when we are able to move yoga from our mats into our daily lives. The recent “Spiritual Gardening Workshop” integrated both conventional yoga practices, such as asanas to limber up before weeding, with philosophical yogic principles that allowed participants the opportunity to explore the patterns of their thinking while working with meditative awareness.
Please let us know if you are interested in participating in a day long Spiritual Gardening Workshop later this summer or early fall.
Practicing Karma Yoga in the garden at Kurukshetra
Atma Center's Spiritual Gardening Workshop
By participants Jeff Erdie & Jerry Howard
Applying yoga to gardening.
JEFF: The yoga concept that applied mostly to me was being aware of what was happening in the present and focusing on that only – not thinking about the work as a task that needed to get done, but rather as just something I was doing. It was a way to pay attention to myself and the things around me, without wanting anything to be different or expecting anything else – and it was great!
JERRY: The gardening aspect gave me an opportunity to practice applying the Karma Yoga principles we learned in the workshop. Karma Yoga focuses on performing tasks with meditative awareness. While performing such tasks as weeding and pruning, I had the opportunity to meditate on some of the attributes of Karma Yoga including efficiency, equanimity, absence of expectation, and eqolessness.
Gardening as spiritual.
JEFF: It was spiritual in that the work itself wasn’t important, but how you approached it was everything. By staying in the present and being aware of what you were doing and thinking, it was like a meditation. Everything seemed so much more vivid and alive. It really made me feel connected to the others around me, to the garden, and to the whole day.
JERRY: Being able to participate in the workshop and contemplate the attributes of Karma Yoga while gardening on such a lovely day provided me the opportunity to commune with nature in a way that I was very grateful not to have missed.
Workshop highlights.
JEFF: The best thing about the workshop was that it was so easy to just let go of your ego – that part of you that wants to do things “right," or to compete with the others by getting more done or doing it better. No one was judging your work or comparing it with others’ work. That was amazingly freeing. It really allowed you to enjoy the experience for its own sake.
JERRY: My favorite part of the workshop was the lectures. I am always extremely grateful for the effort the instructors go through to help us understand the yogic principles.
Something surprising.
JEFF: I was surprised by how connected I felt to the others. Just by sharing that experience, by dropping the ego and competition and the right and wrong way of doing things, I felt more connected to others than I would have been just by talking with them.
JERRY: I was pleasantly surprised by how well the workshop participants got along and were open to the tasks the day presented to learn, contribute, and grow from the experience.
Lessons learned.
JEFF: I learned that the more I can let go of judgments and competition and the things associated with ego, the happier I will be. By the end of the day, I realized I actually got a lot done, though I really wasn’t trying to be productive, and I was nowhere near as tired as I would have been if I had attacked the work in my usual way. Just paying attention to where I was in the moment helped me do better work and enjoy it much more.
JERRY: I learned that even though a task may at first appear unattractive to me, if I work on some of the principles I use along the way to accomplish it, I provide myself with ways to strengthen my resolve. This not only helps me perform better on that task, but is something I can carry over to all my tasks.
Gardening: A New Attitude
By Ellen Brown, Workshop Participant
For years, I’ve heard people say that gardening could be a meditative process. But that meditative state has always eluded me when I’ve ventured into our garden with trowel in hand. More often than not, my attitude has been one of indignation. I find myself thinking, “Didn’t I just weed that flower bed?” At times, I’ve even sworn at the poor plants. So, when the Atma Center announced a class on spiritual gardening, I was eager to see if I could make the process more meditative and less laborious.
Over the past few years, I’ve been working on being more in the moment and letting go of expectations with the help of teachers at the Atma Center. So as my husband, Jeff, and I set out for the gardening workshop, I did my best not to be attached to any outcomes. But the fact is, I still DO have expectations. My one hope was that this class would help me weed some of the more tangled thoughts from my mind. I wrestled with this expectation for awhile, finally settling on an intention instead: to be as present as possible. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to weed my mind completely. But at least I could be the witness to those weedy thoughts as they emerged.
With the support of our wonderful instructors, I was able to observe my wild thoughts as they appeared. At one point, when Atmarupa stopped by as I was weeding a section of the garden, she asked me where my mind was, and I admitted that I was worried I wasn’t weeding the garden “right.” "I mean, what if you don’t like the way I’m weeding the garden?" I asked. “And what if I pull out some plant you wanted to keep?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Atmarupa said. “Whatever you do is fine. It’ll either grow back or it won’t. Either way it’ll be okay.”
After she moved onto the next gardener to find out what he was thinking about, I felt myself relax into the process. Whatever I did would be okay? What a concept! The rest of the day, I allowed my inner gardener to come forth and do whatever felt right, whether it was cutting back a section of ground cover or allowing another to spill over onto a stepping stone. And you know what? When I stopped second-guessing myself, the process became more meditative, and joyful! The workshop taught me that when I can stop striving to be perfect and worrying about “doing it right,” life can truly be a joy.
This newsletter is provided to you by the Atma Center, 2319 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio. [216-371-9760 www.atmacenter.com] The Atma Center is one of three places authorized worldwide to offer advanced training in Satyananda Yoga through Yogic Studies and Teacher Training courses.