Yoga is Nature and Nature is Yoga
By George Zarnowski, founder of Wind of Prana, an international Yoga movement.

Yoga is oneness, and that oneness manifests itself on different levels, from physical to spiritual. Nature is oneness too, and we are one with it. We see nature as a compendium of different pieces, the trees, the animals, the plants, the soil, the air, the clouds, the water, etc. But there are no pieces of nature that are separate from each other, as all of them are nature, so are we, the humans. Perhaps if we could see nature on her different levels, we would not see any separateness. Neither we would see a hierarchy we are so fond of, with ourselves on top of it.

We consider ourselves as the rulers of nature. I am not sure who gave us this role and the power associated with it, but we took it. We did not just take it, we brought it to a level where we made the other parts of nature work for us, to help us to fulfill our personal goals as directed by our ego. We enslaved nature and by doing so we became a part of this slavery, while being completely ignorant of it.

Some of us who are more in tune with nature would like to call ourselves the guardians of nature, with a supreme role to protect it from being destroyed, overused, disrespected, by no other than ourselves. Some may say that to protect nature, the one and the same as the one we are, we must assume that role, as most humans are acting against it, some deliberately but most unintentionally. But the only way to eradicate the disease is to eradicate the root cause of it which is the human’s ignorance of its own nature. Once we do that, we can leave the role of a guardian and become who we have always been, nature itself.

So, let’s take the first step and stop polluting our environment. To do that we must realize that the root cause of it is our ignorance. I see our ignorance as a pollutant of our true nature, and for as long as we continue being ‘polluted’, we will keep polluting everything else we touch. Like with a rotten apple, when placed with other apples, it will eventually cause all of them to rot.

I can see our ‘polluted’ nature as more than just affecting our actions, visible to all of us. There is an unseen level of it affecting our collective consciousness, which in turn affects our own actions, and the actions of all beings in the collective too. So, we need to remove our ignorance starting on that level, by purifying the ‘soiled’ consciousness levels of our mind.

Yoga principles show us how to do it and I can see clearer now how the awareness of our ignorance prompted the first Yogi to realize that we are one with nature, and that to be an equal member of it, we must remove our ignorance which pollutes that oneness. He/she found that by meditating we could eventually accomplish a complete realization of our true nature, so we can follow the principles of existence in oneness. Someone called it Yoga. I can see now that Yoga and Nature are one and the same, and when we follow the principles of Yoga, we follow the principles of nature.

Yoga shows us how to do it, and so does nature. To follow Yoga, we must follow nature and to follow nature we must follow Yoga. We must follow the wholeness of each, to become one.