Learnings from a little bee.
A bee is just a bee
Yoga is about slowing down enough to be aware of what passes through the field of awareness. It is like being the watcher of a movie of your own life.
If you use your superpower of observation, through the practice of yoga and meditation, you will see that peace and calm lie in the non-reacting to what comes into your awareness: the non-identification with where the thought and where it leads itself.
Imagine you are sitting in a lovely, calm forest. A bee buzzes by, minding its own business. “Oh,” you think. “That’s a bee. I might get stung. If I get stung it will hurt. If I get stung it might cause an allergic reaction and I will swell up. If I swell up around my neck area I could stop breathing. If I stop breathing, I could die, or have brain damage and have to be fed baby food...”
Meanwhile, the little buzzy bee has gone on its black and yellow merry way. It had no interest in you at all. Your experience of the world now has nothing to do with the bee.
We can’t stop the initial thought of seeing and hearing the bee. Through your senses of sight and sound, your mind translates what it seeds and hears. Your mind’s job is to keep you safe it does a really good job most of the time. But it is a total over achiever, and it is not always right. It is only aware of itself and not aware of the impact it has on you.
We can bring the power of observation to just noticing the initial thought as it arises. A thought is a thought is a thought. If we are calm enough, with enough space in the present moment, the thinking can stop there. We see if for what it is - the nature of the mind and not the nature of our Self. It is a bee who has a place in world (just like you), and it is looking for something to eat.
Another course that we could take is that the thought comes in about the bee because you saw it and heard it, and your nervous system follows this initial identification through and you jump up and swat the bee and get stung!
Yoga shows us that meditation is the practice of sitting in stillness and silence, to watch our thoughts without identification and reaction. By doing this we can create distances between thoughts and disrupt action so that we can feel calmer and more peaceful. And not get stung. The key is meditation.
The profound calming buzz of a bee
The Bharmari Breath (or bumblebee breath) can bring transformation to your nervous system. Sit comfortably with your spine lengthened and your head neutral (not forward or back). Put your thumbs over the flaps of your ears and gentle push your thumbs into your ears, so you can hear yourself from the inside. Rest the fingers on your forehead. Put your tongue against the top of your teeth by your soft palette and close your mouth. Take a deep breath in through your nose into your belly, and with a closed mouth, buzz out like a bumblebee… mmmmmmmm until you run out of breath (don’t strain). Repeat 10 times. Let your arms go and rest them on your legs. Dissolve into the feeling that is present in your muscles, nerves and cells.
I am allergic to bees!
Our neighbours used to keep bees. These little bees would fly over and drink from the water than pooled in the brick path in our forest. At first, I wanted the little bees gone. But the girl living next door loved those bees. She was worried that they wouldn’t have anything to drink if we stopped the pooling of water. So, we left it alone. If we let the bees be, they had no interest in us humans at all. Leaving things be also led me to a new love of other life within the forest: fungi growing from rotting logs; the mimic of korimako from tui; and when I was really unwell and could only listen, the spontaneous orchestral sounds of a forest.
Bumblebee image: Will Parson