On a warm, summer morning, while pruning my tomato plants, I casually mentioned to my husband how gardening is a lot like therapy. I immediately recalled so many of my own personal therapy sessions over the years. My thoughts then turned to my yoga practice and teaching. It was in that moment that I realized how similar tending to a garden is to tending to ourselves in our yoga practice.
If you have ever taken care of a garden or even one house plant, you know how much time and care they require. Is it getting enough sun? Shade? Water? Nutrients? Love? (yes, plants need love too) When you tend to it daily, the work is relatively easy, but when you neglect it for any extended period of time, it’s much harder to get it back to its baseline. From the outside, our tomatoes looked great. There were lots of tomatoes growing and many new buds forming, but deep inside the plants were a lot of dead pieces that needed to be trimmed.
Often, we show up to our yoga practices and move, breathe, pack up and go. We tend to the surface of ourselves, but what about the stuff deep inside? The place where we hold onto old wounds, troubling thoughts, anxiety, fear, and so much more. Those are the pieces, that when we allow ourselves, can be trimmed away. They all take some level of energy to hold onto and can take away from all of the wonderful things in life. Just like dead stems and leaves that continue to take nutrients away from the healthy parts of the plant.
Pigeon pose, a deep outer hip stretch, is a posture that digs deeply into the emotional body for many students. I personally have cried into my mat in that pose countless times. When we tend to the surface only, we may think of how pleasant or intense the stretch is, but there’s always a chance to dig deeper. Students will often ask me why they suddenly felt like crying or yelling in that pose. It always brings a little smile to my face knowing that their emotional body was speaking to them. I invite them to explore the sensation instead of running away from it. Maybe it’s frustration from the day trying to find a way out or something bigger that’s been stuck for years.
Allowing ourselves to go to that mental and emotional place during practice can leave us feeling exposed. I remember looking back at my tomato plants after trimming them for an hour, thinking that they looked so bare and open. It’s from this exposure and new found openness though, that we allow more room for ourselves to grow and thrive- to continue to feed and nourish all of the good stuff in our lives. This kind of awareness and willingness to explore those deeper, more challenging parts of our practice take time and effort. Little by little, we will start to see ourselves flourish and grow.
