The coming of Spring is Nature’s miraculous awakening expressed by a warmer sun, evidence of green, and birds building nests ‘from coast to coast’. Like elementary schoolchildren, list signs of spring in your neighbourhood – are the red winged blackbirds back in their summer home along the railway tracks? Have you spotted red tailed hawks, floating on the updrafts? Plangent bird cries are a universal wake up call in song and story, dispelling darkness and despair and signalling the arrival of hope and illumination.
As if in perpetual winter, much of the time we are oblivious, we’re in slumber, we’re hibernating, we’re numb. Hatha yoga, with its emphasis on spinal release, lengthening and articulation, encourages alertness to reality. Meditation, which centres on the mind, demands it. As we become aware of our consciousness, our aliveness, we begin to ask the most basic questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Are we really real?
‘The power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate selves, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion’s roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.’
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Certain traditions say we all have a lion’s roar, a rising tide, a powerful force for positive change dormant inside, waiting for the opportunity to awaken and act. In yoga, it’s considered the responsibility of adult humans to stir up all creative energies for the common good, scrutinize behaviour and consequences, and study social precepts, the environment, and everyone’s access to happiness and autonomy.
How to wake up to such suffering in the world and at the same time practise compassionate self-care, cognizant of our personal needs for internal stability? Use the advent of Spring to open the eyes, stretch the body, grow roots and slough off lethargy, powerlessness and the bewildering fear that threatens to engulf everything.
‘It is now the moment to wake from sleep.’ (Romans, 13:11) Let’s make a new start, rise up, begin afresh and strengthen, now, together.