Perhaps the universe is a body. An organism. A network of - somehow - intellect, resilience, perfectly orchestrated rhythms and apparently spontaneous phenomena. Within that universe the planet Earth can also be seen as a body - a living breathing thing. If we can’t quite call it sentient - though many would - we can still marvel at its intricacies. The body has power, has micro and macro systems that function far beyond anything our brains could manufacture or comprehend. To study the world is to be both humbled and soothed. Terrified and aesthetically pleased. Nature’s forms are harmony, crash, deadly, crushing, and in the end vulnerable. It rights us to see and to feel this. Awe is a kind of medicine. Perhaps the original one.
I am not a scientist, and much of this goes over my head, but I understand that the Earth is unique because it has water. Indeed, it is more water than it is the earth of rock and dirt and salt and soil. The planet is a bubble of liquid with an oceanic heart. It has glaciers and cloud forests that function much like organs, absorbing, distilling, and releasing in an alchemic homeostasis. It involves delicate sighs of glassy ice and susurrations of gasses into mist. Earth has arterial rivers, veins of springs, capillaries of moss and lichen. In fact these rivers and cloud formations and tides do functionally serve as a heartbeat, a circulatory system of the planet. It all pulses and squeezes, pours and circulates.
Biological life was born in the ocean as each individual was born in a waterlike womb. Consciousness - whatever that is - evolved in a watered environment. Each of our cells swim between a watery environment outside the cell membrane and a delicate fluid enviornment interior to the cell membrane.
Life is both a surge and a tidewater. Flow and ebb and stream are part of both social and individual being ness. Water is both terrifying and soothing, elemental and existential. We know more about the surface of the moon than we do of the ocean’s floor. We’re prone to know and think more about our own surfaces then we are to plumb the depths of our hearts.
A human being is mostly water. In fact our composition is strikingly similar to the planet’s, more than 70% some form of liquidity. We tend to think of ourselves as solids, and as permanent, but both are illusions. We are water.
“There is a mystery about rivers that draws us to them, for they rise from hidden places and travel by routes that are not always tomorrow where they might be today,” Olivia Laing wrote in her stunning meditation on life, loss, and the meaning of rivers (To The River: A Journey Beneath the Surface). Change, impermanence, and time are strangely embroiled in water’s curls; alluded to, a metaphor of sorts, but understood in a more-than-intellectual way. Felt.
To open ourselves to the experience of water - to listen to the water’s teachings, if you’ll go there - has something to do with the river of life, our tumbledness, our sources, and the rites of letting go. It has everything to do with power, rejuvenation, supplication, and baptism. Water is emotive. Or emotions are water like. And there is some kind of relationship between water and the moon (one teacher told me our fascination with the moon comes from the way it changes, as we do. We are mirrors).
I introduced Yoga Darsana students to ancient, ancient Indian history in recent weeks. I told them the story of the Indus River Valley Civilization and the Saraswati River. Once upon a time, the story goes, there was a vital and flourishing culture on the banks of the rivers of Northern India. We know very little about these people - a ghost culture - other than that they existed. They seem to have had a highly developed ascetic, ritual, and cultural sense; very little evidence of war or weaponry. We know they danced and carved sculpture in bronze and clay. But we do not know the language, the meaning, the stories out of which the art came. Like the ghosted handprints in the caves of Lascaux, the cities of the Saraswati are elusively haunting.
Then the environment changed, tectonic plates shifted, and the great river disappeared. The entire area became more like a desert than an alluvial plane. The culture vanished.
But not entirely. Somehow, rumor and stories of the place and the time remained. Later Vedic culture referred to that earlier time. The ‘mythic’ river Saraswati became symbolic of higher purposes, knowledge, arts and language, music. Eventually the river personified as a goddess: mother of song, great nurturer of culture, birth and source of wisdom teachings, singer and harmonizer. Saraswati became the Milky Way, dropping to the Himalayas on the winter solstice, seeping a kind of knowing into the Indian subcontinent. It’s a knowing both humbling and gratifying, water knowing is.
Ayurvedically speaking, water is the fourth element, more dense than air or space or fire but slightly less dense than earth. It precedes earth. It births it. It contains those more subtle elements within it; it is source and the coming to be of materiality, abundance, potential. Although its qualities of ‘flow’ and transformation are most obvious - now dew and now mist, now ripple than riptide - water is also cohesive, strong, and form making. It eats through stone, after all. The power of steam can crack through the earth’s surface. Water is a liquid structure, a fluid matrix, a building block that somehow changes shape. It has sweetness. It has bonding. It underlies and it soothes. Water is the protector of the body. Water protects against the dissolution of ether, the roughness and motion of air, the heat of fire. Water soothes all pain and inflammation in the body and provides the body with its most basic nourishmnet.
The origin of the water element is taste, rasa. Rasa provides the potential for the experience of taste to occur, not any particular taste itself. Take this literally, and let it expand: without water, sophistication and pleasure are impossible. Growth is impossible. Individuation never begins.
The tongue is the sense organ of water. Through the tongue we taste the world around us. The taste buds only work when water or saliva is present. No water, no taste. Water - as saliva - lubricates the mouth against the actions of chewing and against the burn of the enzymes that begin the process of digestion (salivary amylase). The mucous of the lips, cheeks, and pharynx protect and give right direction to our digestive processes. Different muscuosal substances protect the stomach against digestive acids. Water substances protect and lubricate the joints - the liquid crystals of the fascial network of the body are both the form and the changing of all movement. The synovial fluids and bursae that allow tendons to glide smoothly are waterlike. And there is a water form that stabilizes the flow of neurological impulses and protects the nerves of the brain and peripheral nervous system. The lungs are mostly water: that water base protects lung tissues from the movement (drying) of breath, the mucous membranes of the bronchi and lungs also provides the fluids that support the pleura and pericardium. And shall we speak of blood?
Water is cool, stable, heavy, moist, smooth, actual (as opposed to abstract) flowing, cloudy, and soft. Hence it is the antidote to symptoms that have any of the opposite qualities in the body mind. Water is medicine when you are too warm, ungrounded, emaciated, dehydrated, rough, lacking in self esteem, obstructed and immobile, irritable with a sharp tongue and judgey mind, transparent or vulnerable. Water helps when your heart has become hard or your scars have ossified.
I encouraged the students to spend time considering water: to listen to water sounds, sit near rivers or oceans. Few things can so directly hook your body mind back into something larger than yourself, counter the effects of stress and technology, remind us of tears and oceans and ultimate things. I think this is both abstract and physiological: our biorhythms respond, or could. If they don’t, we’ve at least gathered some useful information about our biorhythms. Water is sacred and reminds us of the ordinary sacred: there is a reason for babtism and holy water and you can touch it, you can bathe, you can actually drink.
I asked them to reflect on culture’s relationship to water, the way we rise and fall on it. Our dependence and our blindness to that dependence. If the delicate alchemy of the earth’s waters shifts in small degrees, life on earth will end. Before that happens, of course, drought will kill millions, pollution will poison our children, cities will fall off of the continents and superstorms will eat away our coasts. Species will die. Our greed and our ignorance has destruction in it. Water is politic, just as land and bodies are: 80% of the world’s natural resources are protected by indigenous peoples. Raping their land, their autonomy, or their influence directly threatens the eco-system. Think of the pipelines in North America. Think of Flint.
None of this, that is to say, is mere mythology. Or perhaps myths are more important than we think. To study yoga - in depth, over a long course of time - should start to hit home not so much in the accomplishment of asana but in a depth perception, glinting on the surface and dark at the center.
WORKING WITH WATER:
Saraswati by raja rami Varma
Goddess of higher learning and the fine arts, Saraswati is related to holy waters, music, and considered speech. She is often depicted with the Vahana - a syntagmatic creature - of either a swan or a peacock, both related to splendor, beauty, and grace. Saraswati dresses in white as a symbol of purity, and the song of water and the power of flowing speech and time are hers.
simply be in the presence of water. Regardless of where you are in the world, local bodies of water can’t be far. And they play significant roles in the way towns are built, traffic flows, weather moves. Get intimate with local bodies of water. Live on water’s time for a few minutes every day. A very traditional Ayurvedic remedy for anxiety is to spend time near a body of water. Another is to bathe before sleep (preferably with an oil massage).
awe is a medicine
Listen to water: get a sound machine or an app and try different tracks as you prepare for or go to sleep.
Relate to the earth’s water: give money, time, or some of your platform to environmental issues. Clean a beach. Come to understand what plastics are doing to the oceans in more than a theoretical way. Look at what desertification does to countries and economies. Save a glacier. Protect a cloud forest.
Move like water: I’m cautious of ‘flow’ classes and their vinyasas these days, but there is something to flowing movements, gliding movements, rolling and sliding movements. Invite a mind of water, a gratitude for water, a remembrance of water into your movement practices. Swim. Few things teach ‘flow’ like martial arts and yogic movements: channel Bruce Lee and Be Water my Friend.
Study the flow and the stream of the breath, the mind, and the course of a lifetime. Any meditation on impermanence does the trick.
Invite Saraswati into your practice. Respect her. Honor the sources of your knowledge and come to appreciate the ways in which you relate to bodies of knowledge. Take care of your learning, your books, your instruments. Reflect on how lived reality - experience- influences our frame of reference, becomes an abstraction or an ideal and flows back into creativity. Saraswati is the Milky Way, she rolls out of the Himalayas, she sings in the waters of poetry, music, and art. Protect and invest in humanity’s cultural wealth. Mother Saraswati is heralded as Vag or Vac Devi (goddess of speech), and there is allusion to both the power of words and the harmony of good speech- as opposed to harmful, uncaring, brutal speech or repressed speech. She is said to be seated in the tongue of/consort or feminine aspect of Brahma, who is the master of all universal knowledge and wisdom.
Source: begin to understand origins and where things come from, whether that be your groceries, the practices you use, the stories you tell, or your own experiences.
Release: begin to study and appreciate the way all things change and leave. The long hard study of letting go and un-ownership is both culturally and psychologically urgent. It is hard. And it is urgent.
Boundaries and transformation. It’s all about boundaries, really. Money is just money. Time is just time. And people are just people. It isn’t a question of those things, but of your relationship to them. Where are you leaky? Where are you frozen? Where are you resistant? Yoga Sutra 4.3 teaches that it - transformation - happens when natural forces overflow. That is, it’s all about the efficacy of our actions and the removal of obstacles. Our main work is to lay the ground and prepare the field. What appears as a breakthrough - if not inexplicable miracle - is really just a long previous subterranean process of removing the obstacles which made a thing hard. If we do our work, transformation is nigh inevitable. Of course this is tricky; our tendency will be to make things happen, control outcomes, favor a particular kind of transformation while avoiding some other. Transformation isn’t like that. Transformation is not something you do and its form is not a thing you choose. It’s bigger than you are. But if you take care of your boundaries (cue Yama Niyama teachings), it just happens.
To build on this boundaries thing: one of the poems Yoga Darsana students are using is from Sheng-Yen, a Chinese Buddhist Monk who founded the Dharma Drum School in Taiwan: Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go on its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you there.
Or this one, from Ganga White:
What if our religion was each other
if our practice was our life
if prayer, our words.
What if the temple was the earth
if forests were our church
if holy water the rivers, lakes, and oceans.
What if meditation was our relationships
If the Teacher was life
If wisdom was self-knowledge
If love was the center of our being.