Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

place themselves with perfect spacing—each bird allowing the personal space to spread wings and fly. This observation offers a valuable lesson about each person’s need for space and freedom. Yogis have long emphasized the value of taking some personal, alone time to recharge, center, and reconnect with our own essence. Solitude includes personal, silent time. Some lessons are only learned in silence and silence is a lesson in itself. Solitudeis balanced by s
atsanga
, or gathering with the wise, which implies spending time, and cross-pollinating, in community with other yogis to trade ideas, opinions, and insights.
Relationship
    Meditation is usually viewed as a solitary practice, a movement within. A yogi I met said, “You know, we’re all saints when we’re alone. It is much easier to be saintly when you’re by yourself, when there is no one to rub up against. We need relationship to discover our true selves and to see how we’re doing.” We cannot see all of ourselves without a mirror, a reflection. Relationship and daily life offer that reflection. The mirror of relationship reflects and reveals parts of us to ourselves. Relationship is the dance of control and surrender in the balance and discovery of love, cooperation, creation, and mutual reflection. Our relationships define us in context—with family, friends, loved ones, society, the world, with the planet, and with all things. When more of us learn to see and operate from this perception, we will create a different, better world.
The Spirituality of Nature
    Look deep, deep into nature and then you’ll understand everything better.
    ALBERT EINSTEIN
    Any definition of meditation, any spiritual perspective, that does not hold within it the importance of communion, attunement, and learning from nature seriously lacks perspective. Nature is the ultimate healer and the powerful balancer of energy. Communion with nature is a key part of enlightened living—the essence of the wholeness of living. Sitting by a waterfall, by a river or the sea, by a tree, under the stars or the moon, facing the sunrise or sunset—all these are as much a part of meditation as anything else. A solitary walk in a beautiful, naturalplace (an opportunity becoming tragically limited) is the perfect ingredient for wellness, joy, and insight. We cannot say where or how deep insights or revelations might occur. They are as likely to take place in nature as on the meditation cushion.
    Practitioners who spend far too many hours in temples and darkened rooms practicing control or mental repetition frequently neglect nature meditation. This is not meant to demean the inner journey and experience. Inner visionary experience can be divinely magical, immeasurably beautiful, enrapturing and mystical. The inner visionary experience allows us to see into many dimensions, through biochemical and mystical doorways penetrating into the many layers of consciousness. These perceptions can take us to the place where the line between physical and nonphysical, even between this dimension and another, between life and death, cannot be drawn with certainty. But the outer world of nature and the cosmos are of the same infinite, intricate order and offer the same level of perceptual experience.
    We too often move through life without tuning into the world of natural beauty and power all around us. Are we in tune with the cycles of the moon, tides, wind, and weather? We spend so much time in environments where we control the temperature, the light, the sounds, even thought. Nature is too easily framed as another source of entertainment. People often go to forests and rivers in the same way they go to amusement parks. They look at the trees, have some fun, take a few photos—but have they learned how to commune deeply?
    We cannot exist without nature—in fact, we
are
nature. We breathe in the oxygen that the trees and plants exhale. We exhale carbon dioxide and the world of plants breathes it in. We eat the gifts of the plant kingdom and give back fertilizer. In fact, the magic of photosynthesis from matter, light, and cosmic energy
is
the source of all life. The light of the sun feeds and illuminates the earth, and helps form the clouds that travel the planet bringing the rains, creating the lakes and rivers. The water we drink is made of cloud and sun. Therefore, the body is madeup of earth, sun, clouds, and rivers. In our solar system, the Sun and planet Earth are smoldering stardust, still hot at