Spring is always announced with great fanfare on my property in Boyland. I have a pair of peregrine falcons who arrive at the start of Spring to reclaim their straggly nest, much to the dismay and anger of the local birds and the local chooks. Gorgeous, aloof, disinterested in anything but their own cyclical drive to nest and reproduce, I am always delighted to hear of their arrival. And to add to the excitement of the season, a young koala at the Daisy Hill Mountain Biking circuit, climbed down one of the trees and gravely observed the humans who were speeding past. Very special.

When you spend a lot of time outdoors observing things like weather patterns, wind direction, plant growth and seasonal birdsong, you start to tune into the cycles of life. And when you collate these many little pieces into a bigger picture over a season, a year and a decade, you can learn so much about how the natural world around us copes with change. As living, breathing creatures of nature, we are no less connected to the seasons than the flowering gums and the migrating birds. It just takes slowing and listening to notice the subtleties and tuning into the changing energy around us.

In the world of yoga and Ayurveda, Spring is the season of detoxing, lightening the load, decluttering and cleaning up from the legacy of Winter. We don’t just focus on our external environment and our bodies; we also consider our internal worlds. Paying attention to any heavy emotions in the heart and deciding on how to learn from them or release them.

Our yoga practice tunes into this rising energy of change around us and we consider the balance of Yin (feminine, Ida energy) and Yang (masculine, Pingala energy) in our bodies. In this instance the Yang is keeping you strong, that bamboo strength in the body. And the Yin is giving you that suppleness and pliability of the bamboo nature, internally. As you observe these two different qualities you realise that strength and flexibility are really the same thing. If you are imbalanced in the Yang: strong, rigid, stiff and resistant to change, metaphorically, you’ll snap when life gets challenging and as those Springtime winds blow. If you are imbalanced in the Yin: flexible but with no core strength and perhaps internally, indecisive, susceptible to others’ opinions with no strong convictions of your own, you’ll fold into anxiety and stress under the challenges of life and in the season of change. So, our yoga practice physically focusses on the harmony and the balance between staying strong and yet supple and emotionally finding our internal moral codes without becoming rigid, judgemental and small minded. 

Spring then becomes our seasonal opportunity to detox, organise, balance and transform. 

Margot Wagner
Yoga Under the Bodhi Tree

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