Out in the Elements

Towards a yoga of the More Than Human

Greeting dear reader,

Today's piece is a mix of practical update, personal reflection and cosmic contemplation... the usual Nick fare, in other words.

For the past while, I've been following seasonal themes in my classes based on the metaphorical quartet of Earth, Moon, Sun and Fire. I adapted this progression from my teacher Rod Stryker, who presented it as a summary of teachings from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and Gheranda Samahita¹. The basic message is developmental: the body must be strong (earth) and the mind steady (moon) before engaging with practices that amplify our energies (sun) or ignite processes of spiritual transformation (fire). If one intends to "scale the heights of spiritual awakening", I think it remains sound advice.

Photo by MAX LIBERTINE on Unsplash

This framework has allowed me to regularly dust off and share the many ideas and practices that I’ve collected over the years: deep dives into foot physiology, Vedantic psychology, pranic winds, models of awakening. The yoga tradition contains such riches, and it has been satisfying to give each gem the attention it merits.

But, as I have written previously, my whole conception of the purpose of yoga is shifting from a "vertical" model of ascent to something more "horizontal", a creative exploration of the rhizomatic self. Yoga class as a ritual of entering liminal spaces of mystery, tending relationships and making discoveries, rather than a muscular act of self-betterment and progress. Or perhaps: progress is a real - though often fleeting - motif in a larger tapestry of experiences.

Richard Giblett Recent work : 2006-2009 Represented by Galerie Dusseldorf 21. Mycelium Rhizome, 2009 Pencil on paper 120 x 240

As I follow this new trail - around the mountain rather than up to the peak - I have decided to align with a different but related set of themes, that of the Elements: Earth, Water, Fire and Air/Wind and Space. Spring will be the season of Wind, which is gusting boisterously as I write this. Then: Fire in Summer, Earth in Fall and Water in Winter. Space will - what else? - pervade and contain all the others.

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The human urge to divide up the Oneness has deep roots - perhaps as old as cell walls studded with receptors, discerning food from poison, kin from predator. It turns out even fungus uses language. There's a long and fascinating history of different elemental typologies, often featuring 4 elements but sometimes 5, and with varying ideas about their exact attributes. Our drive to figure out what we're made of it eventually flowered into the scientific revolution, which eventually diced the world into a hundred some atoms and a handful of forces. The notion of the Four Elements was dismissed as outdated, the ignorance of an earlier age.

https://sciencenotes.org/hd-periodic-table-wallpaper-muted-colors-2015/

Knowledge of the atomic elements has certainly allowed us to create many marvelous machines and medicines, but with unreckoned costs. The relentless decomposition of the world into small parts leaves us with the impression that what we encounter at the human scale is less "real" than what science tells is "really" happening at the atomic level. Our mental life is reduced to MRI shadows. Our loves are explained away as epiphenomena of neurotransmitters and genetic imperatives. But do we really need to know that oxytocin is involved with deepening pair bonds and is induced by touch to justify giving our kids more hugs?

So I am interested in engaging with the Elements not as literal particles of reality but as primal modes of encounter, the red/yellow/blue of our sensual palette. They are palpable and intimately known, shaping us even before we are born. I have much stronger feelings for Earth than I have for carbon and hydrogen. Knowing the details of covalent electron bonds tells me little about the satisfaction of hefting a stone in my palm.

Developing fluency with the Elements makes it possible to feel and articulate the ways that outside and inside intertwine, correlating brusk spring winds to surges of inspiration, frozen winter ponds with quiescent ambitions². This better fits a yoga that traverses the horizontal network of inner and outer relationships. The Elements are not hierarchical in value (though perhaps in origin), and they blur together when examined closely, so there is more poetry than precise science here - which is exactly why they’re useful.

But!

Viewed from a certain angle, rather than discrediting the Elements, modern science can add exquisite embroidery to the classical notions. We are indeed born from and sustained by the ongoing activities of Earth, Water, Fire and Air - and the specifics provided by physics, chemistry, geology and biology are remarkable. We can now trace the path that energy takes from fusing solar hydrogen and helium to Earthbound photons which photosynthesize into carbohydrates, digest in animal guts, become ATP through glucose metabolism which then fuels neural firing, that supports your awareness of these very words. We are literally sentient star fire, animate space dust. How wild and strange!

Western alchemy is sometimes summarized with the phrase solve et coagula. Dissolve then coagulate. Take apart the world into smaller parts, purify them, then recombine into new forms. Modern science has done a damn fine job dissolving our folk conceptions of how the world works and distilling the world into material essences, but it has generally failed to reassemble anything spiritually or ethically useful for humans. We need more than randomized control trials and particle accelerators to reweave ourselves back into the cosmos. Art and philosophy can help, but most fundamentally I think we need to rebuild our relationship with our More Than Human brethren. We need to re-cognize our place in the livingworld.

It is my hope that tuning my yearly teaching cycle to the Elements can help this happen by providing weekly "meet and greets" for the Elements as they show up in our bodyminds and the world around us. We will still choose from the same stable of yoga postures, but ride them in new directions. My literary inspiration for this new direction includes David Key Chapples recent book Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Five Elements in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain Yogas and John O'Donahue's Four Elements: Reflections on Nature.

I am also preparing to launch a new outdoors branch of my teaching. On Friday, I will travel to the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health to begin training in Mindful Outdoor Leadership. The training was created by a Kripalu yoga teacher and wilderness guide named Micah Mortali, who has developed a set of practices for deepening connection with the living world: mindful forest walking, open-eyed meditation, fire building and other primal skills. When I first read about this training it had the ring of destiny, a way to bring together disparate threads that I have long been following in my heartmind. Here's the crux of it, for me:

When we meditate on our cushion indoors, we confront the fears that live within us, the contents of our minds and bodies. Out in the field, immersed in the web of life, we encounter fears and challenges outside us, and we receive gifts and lessons in relationship with our extended self -- the living, breathing, very dynamic universe. Both paths are important and complementary.

Micah Mortali, Rewilding: Meditations, Practices and Skills for Awakening in Nature

I have spent 17 years walking inwards and guiding others to do the same. Vast inner territories remain to be explored, but the funny thing is, the inner realm seems to carry the indelible imprint of what lies beyond me - the extended self that I hinted at in my first essay. All signs point back outwards.

As David Abram puts it:

The enveloping Earth — this richly variant world alive with the swaying limbs of trees and the raucous honking of geese — is, of course, the very context in which the human body and nervous system took their current form. Our senses, that is, have coevolved with the diverse textures, shapes, and sounds of the earthly sensuous: our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, and our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the thrumming of crickets. Whether floating, for eons, as the single-celled entities that were our earliest biotic ancestors, or swimming in huge schools through the depths of the oceans, whether crawling upon the land as amphibians, or racing beneath the grasses as small mammals, or swinging from branch to branch as primates, our bodies have continually formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold forms of the animate Earth. Our nervous systems are thoroughly informed by the particular gravity of this sphere, by the way the sun’s light filters down through the sky, and by the cyclical tug of Earth’s moon.

Earth in Eclipse an Essay on the Philosophy of Science and Ethics

Thus, if we want to learn who we really are, we must go outwards at least as much as inwards! And I mean actually going out - “into the elements”, as we say. There, we can put our mat-grown mindfulness and embodiment skills to good use, in service to our communion with the Others. In turn, our rich encounters with the outer Elements can then fertilize (and reality-check) our inner work of healing and growth.

This training marks the commencement of a new phase of my teaching and practice life, with an aim to spend at least equal time in the "outer field" of practice as the inner. Practically, alongside my weekly indoor classes, I plan to offer regular single-day workshops held in local forest and lakeside preserves, and eventually residential retreats in the Great Lakes region. Stay tuned for a first event towards the end of May!

My classes while I’m away

• Sat, April 23, 12:15p - no class, try Lela’s 10a instead

• Mon, April 25 - Eliza Hofman subs

• Sat, April 30, 12:15p - Jane Alexander subs

• Mon, May 2 - Eliza Hofman subs

1. Read a fellow ParaYogi's blog for further exposition: https://banannika.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/when-the-moon-is-made-steady-the-sun-can-rise/

2. The healing arts of Ayurveda and Chinese medicine employ elaborate systems of such poetic correspondences. Raised largely a secular materialist, it used to frustrate me that Chinese medicine uses such different elements than Ayurveda: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. What happened to air? Isn't wood made of the others? If these systems are effective, shouldn't they both agree on something so basic as the Elements? But that assumes they are both akin to science, naming what is objectively true. As I now appreciate, they are better considered different languages, each describing correlation between different inner and outer experiences. What matters is not the words themselves, but what they points us towards.