On the 10th day of the 10th month of this millennium’s 10th year, Middlebury celebrated 350.org’s Global Work Party with a morning yoga session at the Mahaney Center for the Arts.
As an ongoing project to reduce the carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere to under 350 parts per million — the safe upper limit of CO2 for the environment — activists around the world built solar panels, planted trees and erected windmills on this day of change and action. However, an eclectic group of community, faculty and students (with their visiting parents) found that environmental change first comes from our understanding of the relationship between body and earth.
On the relevance of yoga, Kathleen and William F. Truscott Professor of Dance Andrea Olsen stated, “[It is] not just about world energy conservation […] but about our own body’s energy.” Olsen teaches Body and Earth, a course designed to highlight the importance of the body as a medium to understand our surroundings. This past Sunday morning, she hosted and participated in the Global Work Party yoga event while Russell Comstock, co-Director of Metta Earth Institute, led the room of 29 through various meditative postures and exercises.
With mats strewn around in a large circle, Comstock began the event with a brief introduction about reclaiming the connection between nature and yoga as well as about how we can make a change in this world by first reaffirming the link between ourselves and the environment. After a few breathing exercises and the Sun Salutation, he also explained, “Creativity is maximized at the borders of chaos.” Currently, we are at a point of environmental chaos, and it’s quite amazing to see all the initiatives and creative actions that the people around the world have taken and are still taking.
Compared with planting trees or launching local gardens, this yoga session had no tangible outcome, but actions without real belief lack integrity. So, as an event meant to spark subsequent action, it highlighted the importance of awareness, as well as our intimate connection to the earth. Only by first understanding this can we truly embrace our duties to the environment and to the world.
Awareness arrives through yoga
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