AQMY Community Letter -Summer 2023

Summer 2023

Dear community,

Yoga is a path of healing and liberation!

However, it is not yoga that heals us. Nature heals itself.

Yoga liberates our awareness from false identifications so that we may experience peace with nature. Peace is most conducive to healing.

“Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. Then the seer can abide in its true nature.”

- Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

When attaining enlightenment under the bodhi tree, the Buddha touched the Earth in bhumisparsha mudra showing that nature is the ground of liberated awareness. The environment, the heart of nature, is essential to our yoga practice and all yogic attainments.

While yoga practice does provide us with knowledge of individual self-care and mind-body therapeutics, this is not all.

The ethics and observances of traditional yoga philosophy (yama and niyama) also provide us with knowledge for collective care and ecological therapeutics.

As yoga practitioners, we have the power to re-center and expand the healing power of yoga to more fully embrace the well-being of the environment. In so doing, we can contribute proactively and preemptively to the global goals of sustainable development while helping to slow down and stop the current acceleration of global ecological crises.

The development of a sustainable relationship with the natural world is an integral, if neglected, part of yoga practice and it’s time to bring more attention where it’s needed. In 2023, I founded Aquamarine Yoga for just this reason.

I look forward to learning more about sustainability and regeneration together in the pursuit of a real yoga lifestyle that cultivates peace and harmony with nature - even and especially - at times of great conflict.

May we embody our bliss and love nature! Om Shri Gurubhyo Namaha.

Sandi H.