Recently I taught an outdoor yoga class in a small green park in Victoria a past home, on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Esquimalt Nations) People beside the Salish Sea. All which I name as influences that long shaped my practice of yoga and mindfulness in “bringing my belly to the earth” where I “take my seat”. Practicing yoga “outside” is so powerful, where it seems so much easier to remember and understand one’s relationship of ‘interbeing’, when wind and sun touches the skin. One feels the unevenness of earth below one’s feet, and is witnessed by trees all around. As we practiced together this time, I invited all to draw meaning from the hidden flow of a creek beneath the ground of the park as we brought our “bellies to the earth”.
Feeling the buried presence, and infinitesimal movements of Rock Bay Creek aching to move along the path that it once moved so easily from the modern neighbourhood of Fernwood to the ocean at Rock Bay, a traditional fishing spot for herring and Coho salmon for the local lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples. A creek that was once a habitat for many species, then buried and channelized, and made invisible like many creeks that flowed through cities like Victoria, suspect because of the capacity of water to carry the diseases of the industrialized age. Buried beneath the ashphalt and concrete of roadways, buildings and neighbourhood homes of all kinds for our specie, yet left open in places in small channels, or parks too wet to build upon, especially during time of seasonal rain. Yet creeks like nearby Bowker Creek are being ‘daylighted’, restored, even seeded again with salmon, in a movement to revivify the buried, hidden or abused creeks in our cities. A growing understanding that flow is useful to cityscapes as means of purification, inspiration to wellness in nature, and along with providing more habitat for all species. Forshadowing a time when this Rock Bay Creek might also be revivified even further than the mapping, and signage, art and celebrations as small acts of transformation that so many have worked to create to this point today.
As we brought belly to earth on that vibrant bit of green surface of grass and clover we integrated the understanding of how our own cultural stories and early experiences of life can create “concretized patterns” that bury, obstruct or limit our internal healthy flows of prana and chi, and manifesting the brightness of ourselves in the world, similarly in the way urban creeks have been hidden by roadway and building. Take in as well how our yoga might act as one way to ‘daylight’ the buried flows within us and ‘renature’ our world by cracking open, purifying, and transforming those long held concretized patterns fuelled by the daily stresses of our lives.