Reclaiming Our Roots

At the end of a recent workshop, a student raised questions I myself have been asking: Given the direness of these times, can yoga really help? How do we take our practices beyond an individual pursuit to contribute to the healing of our world?

For me, individual, collective, and planetary healing aren’t separate. They arise together. And at the root of all of them is reclaiming the sacred as who we are.

Across centuries and traditions, the sacred has often been understood as something beyond ourselves—located in churches, temples, mosques, works of art, set apart from ordinary life. When the sacred is imagined as somewhere "out there," it becomes easier to experience the earth, our bodies, and other species as separate from it.

The most essential shift of our era is to withdraw this projection, to recognize that sacredness isn't somewhere else. It is within us, within the earth, and within all life.

This is where yoga comes in. At the heart of yoga is the recognition that within each of us lies a thread of unbroken connection to the sacredness that underlies all of life. If we follow this thread, our practices can move us from transcendence to immanence, from separateness toward belonging.

And yet, yoga has not always regarded embodied life as sacred. Some classical traditions sought to transcend our physicality and the temporal world, seeing the body as an instrument for the soul’s liberation or a temple housing the indwelling divinity.

The nondual tantric traditions, Kashmir Shaivism among them, went further, recognizing body, mind, and spirit as expressions of one intelligent, self-organizing consciousness. Our thoughts, feelings, and desires are threads in one tapestry, woven by supreme consciousness in time and space. Self-realization, these traditions affirmed, happens in the body, with the body, and through the body. The body is still the temple, but the temple and the deity are made of the same stuff.

The mythologist Michael Meade poses a provocative question: What if there were a healing power of life that was always moving toward wholeness, and that could only act through the souls alive at this time? Then it would be up to each of us to discover and nurture that thread of connection to our inherent sacredness, through which life's healing power can express itself.

In its truest spirit, yoga makes this connection something you live rather than merely believe. In the body, the elemental forces of nature come alive in Mountain pose when you feel the steadiness of earth in your legs and the spaciousness of sky in your chest. In the breath, you honor spirit moving through you as prana. Your sense of separateness softens as you recognize yourself as an expression of the greater consciousness that you are.

Joanna Macy said, "We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts." When we experience the world as sacred, we no longer have to manufacture a reason to care for it. Our actions arise from relationship, from our love for the world as our larger body.

This is the crucial shift yoga offers us and the answer to my student's questions: practice not to transcend the world, but to embody our belonging to it.

  These are some of the questions we'll be exploring together in Rise Up, Rooted, my retreat weaving heart-centered yoga with the Work That Reconnects at Kripalu Center, October 9-12. We'll explore how reconnecting with our own sacredness can deepen our sense of belonging—to ourselves, to one another, and to the living Earth—and how that belonging can become a source of creativity, courage, and meaningful action. Join me in the Berkshires amid the spectacular fall landscape. Learn more and register here.