International Mother Earth Day
International Mother Earth Day
As Earth Day approaches I know I’m not alone in an overwhelming feeling of helplessness. Rather than a day of celebration, it feels necessary and appropriate to honor the grief that arises when I acknowledge the continued degradation of our living breathing earth.
It’s not a lack of information that keeps us so deeply addicted to the ways of consumerism that are destroying our mother. In this digital age we are overwhelmed by terrifying statistics, shocking images, and guilt inducing documentaries, and yet as a society we make no or little changes in our destructive habits.
Environmental scare tactics are not working, in fact destruction continues to escalate. It seems as though our species doesn’t have the motivation to make the necessary changes to save the beloved amazon, the vital marine populations, and the precious glaciers. We are told again and again that our house is on fire and yet we don’t seem to care. Why?
If fear cannot induce the transformation we desperately need for survival on Earth, what would incite change? Do we need even more graphic or even violent images of what’s to come? Or is it time to try a different approach that awakens the goodness of our human hearts?
It is difficult for people thousands of miles from the melting glaciers to feel the appropriate devastation of their loss. For many of us, the sorrow of disappearing lands and species seem both far away and overwhelmingly inexorable. We all, however, know the aching pain of losing what’s personal. We care deeply for what we ourselves have touched with our own two hands, for what we have known and loved intimately. This difficulty in creating lasting change is a true lack of intimacy and love with our living, breathing earth.
The natural world is a healing balm and refuge for us in an increasingly difficult world. The more we turn to her for care and tenderness the more we deepen our intimacy and love for the natural world. As we receive her love we in turn are shaped, transformed, nurtured into wholeness.
As the great poet Wendell Berry writes:
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
………For a time
I rest in the grace of the world and am free.”
Interbeing is a word coined by the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh to describe the way that all life coexists. “The whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis,” he writes. When we have the experiential knowing of this truth that we inter-are, we understand deeply that our personal healing is dependent on a fully alive and thriving Earth. From an embodied and irrefutable understanding of this truth our actions easily align with restoring the vitality of our natural world. To me, this embodied experience of interbeing feels simply like love. It’s from the felt sense of wholeness, love and intimacy for the Earth that transformative action arises.
Our survival as a species now depends on our willingness to come back into full relationship with the larger organism of life. Not from guilt, fear or shame, but from acknowledging the source of our grief which is only love. When we love we listen. Not only with our minds but with our whole body with the same kind of listening presence that we would offer a beloved. It is a desperate time for us to lie ourselves down on the body of the earth and ask from our aching hearts, what do you need? It is time to grieve with and for the earth because from the depth of that grief we remember the immensity of our love. It is time to allow ourselves to weep so that from our tears seeds of hope can be planted.
About the author:
Anisha fell in love with yoga in 2006, when she took her first class and understood this was an intimate language of movement that her body understood. Yoga became her personal medicine and practice of coming home to herself and her body. She took her first Yoga Teacher Training in 2015 and has been sharing the gift of Yoga throughout Asia since.
Her teachings draw on her background in Classical Hatha Yoga, Yoga Therapy, Somatic Vinyasa, Biodynamic Yin, Yoga Nidra and Meditation, and Self-Inquiry. She compassionately encourages students to remember who they are and experience the bliss of awakening and falling in Love with oneself.
Originally born in Canada, but fascinated with the wisdom traditions of the Eastern world, her travels eventually landed her in Bali, which she now calls home. You can contact anisha in here: anisha.rajguru@gmail.com .
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