IINTERBEING, INTERTREEING, INTERFREEING
When breathing life into our new website, the Yoga Fellowship logo suddenly and subtly shapeshifted. From a lotus of hand-holding humans, it re-emerged as a tree - a tree with many branches, fed by light, caressed by air and anchored through a deep, nascent, intertwined system of roots and soil into a whole underground mycelium network. Breathing through the fullness of its trunk to the tiniest twig, leaf and bud stretching skyward and beyond to each human lung, this tree, like each of us in our asana practice, roots to rise - connected and resourced from above, below and, vitally, among. In what is being increasingly recognised and spoken of as a wood-wide web, this tree joins in an ever-changing, entangled, ecological, breathing system of life, growth, death and rebirth. It stands alone and as a forest. It is one and it is many.
At so many levels, the energy of a tree, like all other natural phenomena, gives us profound insights into what yoga teaches us. Think of all the different shapes and angles, twists, knots, gnarls, turns and textures as this energy dances towards the heavens. The idea that we are leaves of one tree or waves of one sea is both ancient and emergent. This didn’t tumble down the millennia to appear on the Yoga Fellowship website for nothing. It speaks to our vision of renewal and growth, continuity in change, still and still moving - together.
The idea of underlying unity is voiced repeatedly in all major faith traditions, This same mantra increasingly underpins secular learning, too, as we relearn the universe as system rather than machine. The Buddhist concept of oneness, is articulated beautifully by Thich Naht Hahn as ‘interbeing.’ In Christianity, Christ’s prayer for unity ‘May they all be one…as you and I are one links to his teaching that ‘what you do to the least of these little ones, you do to me’’ The unimaginable seamlessness of our connectivity finds roots, too, in emergent scientific understandings - from the entanglement of quantum physics to Dan Siegel’s conceptualisation of mind as ‘neither enskinned or enskulled,’ but instead emerging relationally, co-created and refined anew in each new moment. Polyvagal theory highlights the evolutionary connections of the autonomic nervous system with feelings of safety in the body, leading to co-regulation. In the consilience science of interpersonal neurobiology, Dan Siegel’s idea of ‘Mwe’ is perhaps the only pronoun really needed.
We will explore these learnings, concepts and metaphors more fully in future issues of the journal. For now they hold an invitation to reflect and meditate more deeply on the nature of our connectedness, and how it can be resourced and strengthened by yogic practice.
Mary O’Rawe
