OUR DAILY PRACTICE

As I sat early this morning on my back patio, studying Ayurveda, I noticed our neighbor across the fence hanging out her laundry. What makes this unusual, is that my homeowners association has banned clotheslines. 

My neighbor is in another association and can hang out her clothes to dry. She lives in a very large home and can easily afford a dryer. However, she chooses to dry her clothes outside. 

Question! Have you ever slept in sheets on a bed that were dried on a clothes line? It is glorious! I am jealous of my neighbor! It brings memories of my mother hanging clothes and my sleeping in clean sheets from outside.

Today, we use an electronic dryer with a motherboard that cost $1000. How have we become so disconnected to mother Earth? For the sake of convenience, we are losing our connection to this present moment.

The earth is a macrocosm and we are a microcosm made up of the same components. Those are earth, water, fire, air, and space. The food we eat is composed of those five elements. The plants we raise use these five elements in various degrees. I have a shamrock plant in a pot that sat on the patio. The daily wind was stressing it. It was getting too much of ‘air’ from the five components. So we moved it to the bathroom near a window. In one week it bloomed and blossomed beautiful white flowers! The five components were back in balance.

Like the plants we raise and the food we eat, we also require a certain balance for our Constitution. Our bodies are also made up of these five elements. And through our relationship with the earth we can find healing.

We need to realize that health is a state of living in harmony with nature as a whole and with our own basic natures. We resonate with the world because we were formed from nature. And it will be nature that heals us when we become ill.

And the only way to live in harmony with the cosmos is to do what is to be done in the present. Or so explains Maja Tiwari in her book THE PATH OF PRACTICE.

So as I watched my neighbor this morning hang up her clothes to dry with the fire of the sun and the air of the wind, I knew I was watching someone connecting with nature and this moment in time.

“By finding spiritual accord in our daily routines, we can find this peace elsewhere and everywhere. If we cannot find the harmony in our everyday actions, we will not find it anywhere else.”             Maja Tiwari