Think like a Tree

Reading from Tuesday, December 22, 2015 yoga class

From an article on Elephant Journal entitled "A guide to becoming a tree: what we can learn from Nature"

"Today I tried to become a tree.  I mean, I was standing in tree pose while listening to Ram Dass as he turns people into trees.  Physically, maybe not exactly a tree.  But there are ways we can think like a tree by simply not thinking at all.

Ram Dass, or Richard Alpert, is a spiritual teacher who makes a connection between the nature of nature and the nature within us. We live in an ego-centric society that is in constant competition.  Just look to the way we treat each other.  We are graded in school, ranked at work and stereotyped by our peers.  What about the way we criticize ourselves!  Our weight, our clothes, our intelligence, our things--everything is under microscopic scrutiny all the time.

BUT THERE IS AN ESCAPE!  Just look to the trees.

Walking through any fresh and woody area seems to suck out our stressed out CO2 and return it to us as oxygen on happy pills.  We prance through the forest, light on our toes, because the weight has been lifted off our shoulders.  Our eyes widen like the smile in our hearts.  What we do not do is pass judgment on the trees.  We do not snicker at their awkward stances, nor point and laugh at their bare branches.  We do not whisper to our friends about the funny color of the bark or the weird growths protruding on their sides.  We do not judge the tree because it is a birch or a pine.

WE SIMPLY ACCEPT THEM AS THEY ARE.  WE APPRECIATE THEM.

So, why don't we do this with each other?  What don't we do this with ourselves?

Standing on the edge of a hill looking out over the canopies of color and the stillness of nature's phenomena, we are simply observers filled with appreciation.  No whispers, no judgment, no too this or too that.  The trees are trees and the flowers are flowers no matter their smell, color or form.

Yoga teaches us to become trees.  Letting go of the super-ego means letting go of perfection, and there is no perfection in yoga, there is only practice.  Practicing to become a tree does not happen overnight, but a good place to start is on the edge of a forest or the tip of your yoga mat.  Practice makes practice and hopefully that practice will spread and turn us all into trees.