At Sadhana, we’re dedicated to all aspects of yoga
asana
Bringing asana (postures), chanting, meditation, and breath awareness together offers a clear path for enhancing health, well-being, and spiritual growth. Sadhana Yoga Hudson shares the rich history, philosophy, and teachings of the yoga tradition to students and teachers alike.
Focus of the Month
Bird Medicine
I had an encounter with a Great Blue Heron recently. It was intense; earthquake-y and heartbreaking. I had been ruminating/meditating that morning on what to teach, something that I wrestle with often, while looking back at my notes from a retreat with Bill Plotkin and Ganeen Haugen. These two led me through a wilderness experience in Wyoming that changed me forever. I continued to think about offerings and other-than-human intelligence, the earth, and how we mediate between ground and sky, light and dark, hard and soft. Anyway, now I’m thinking about the idea of thresholds, crossing over, how to gather enough intensity to get a reaction, to get something to come into effect. Like my life, our lives, and how to steer them in any kind of skillful way.
A bit late to teach, I crossed the ‘threshold’ out of my driveway, and saw what looked like a grey hoodie on the side of the road. I slowed; it was not a hoodie, but a Great Blue Heron, exquisitely dead on the side of the road. I stopped and with the car running, jumped out to see – and what I’m surprised not to see are any marks of injury on the bird. It’s just as if this heron has fallen from the sky and we’re each in our separate/together world, frozen in a moment of time. Shaking awake, with my heart in my mouth, I think, “this bird cannot be left at the side of the road, no frickin’ way.” I stepped toward the bird, scooped them up, and feeling the weight of this magnificent being in my arms, carried them back to my house. “I’ll come back after class and take care of you, I promise.”
Somehow this confirmed that the intelligence of this world, this earth, these beings that are other-than-human, is mysterious, confounding, bigger than me. Undoubtedly. Yet, with my meant-to-be-here self, I do what I can to show up, to notice, to respond.
It seemed easy what to focus on this month: bird poses, which hold interesting and endless ideas for practice. Crow pose, crane pose, heron pose, peacock pose, pigeon pose, eagle pose, each with their own gift to offer. And I think, from studying the medicine of these poses, their beauty and what they represent, and then preparing ourselves physically, progressively, for some of the challenges we’ll face, it’ll happen. We’ll fly.
