The breath is the boat carrying us the passengers, so Ashutosh Sharma said in his engaging talk on the relation between Hatha Yoga and meditation in the Fall 21 TTP.
The next day the boat was a wheelbarrow carrying me about as I gathered fallen leaves from the oak tree in my garden. Practically, to leave a light scattering of leaves is no problem, but a thick mass of decaying leaves left over winter will kill grass, harbour pests, smother plants and get in the way in spring. So I set to work gathering into the wheelbarrow and wheeling it to where the leaves could be left for a year or more to produce enriching leafmould.
The gardener’s activity, like all activity, is rajasic. Nature’s too: turning the seasons, leaves sprouting along the branches, opening, breathing, dying, falling, decaying. The gardener’s systematic activity aligns with Nature but is in opposition too to Nature’s ways and wildness. The gardener creates order and directs the processes of Nature preferring plants over weeds. Nature left to itself would spread acorns over the ground and in some years the garden would be a forest. But it is difficult to know where to make the line between the activity of Nature and human activity. The recent COP26 meeting in Glasgow makes it very clear that the line is not drawn in the right place.
The gardener gathering the leaves aligns with tamas. Not the lazy, ill-informed state of tamas, but keeping, holding, making use of gravity, piling the leaves in a quiet, dark place to decay into fragile leafmould. The leafmould is used to assist nature, to cover the ground and thus retain moisture around roots and to feed the smaller parts of life that enrich and enliven the soil.
Thus, the gardener finds balance with rajas and tamas by concentration on the task with no other thought, cultivating the breath and body awareness together in quiet efficiency. His is a sattvic state.
It was a windless day so the leaves could be raked into heaps and stay put until the wheelbarrow came round to carry them off. Bending forwards, conscious of the back’s extension, the hips’ flexion, in prasaritapadottanasana, mind centred on the lower abdomen, thus breath and body centred.
Working away the gardener is not separate from his tools. That is in the nature of tools. The breath and body are not centred in just itself but with what is around, be it the ground, the air, the tools, all of it, in one simple awareness. The body is not separate from the rake and the wheelbarrow but allied to it in the consciousness of breath. The sattvic consciousness flows as the wheel of the barrow squeaks and turns. The gunas of the gardener’s mind and the gunas of nature are equivalent. If there were different gunas in Nature than there are in one’s being then it is unlikely we would know the world or through the world know ourselves.
Once the leaves were in one big heap, the barrow and I stood in samashithi. I accepted the greater depth of breath the work had given me. And I was with the circle of growth, decay and growth again, the leaves falling, rustling, whispering to each other, see you next year.
