Bhū

Yoga is often appealing because it’s spirituality celebrates nature and we live in a world that has very nearly destroyed the planet. Rather than creating a duality between the secular and the divine, in which ‘the world’, ‘the body’, and the experience of being human are rendered taboo, yoga validates earth, and water, fire, and the flesh.

The Bhū Süktam or hymn to Mother Earth of the Taitirriya Saṃhita, Kriṣṇa Yajur Veda is one of the oldest songs of humanity. It brilliantly speaks to this reverence for the planet as divine. It’s also one of the first Vedic mantraḥ-s a student should learn, as it lays out a narrative of the entire spiritual journey while providing the literal bricks and tools for our own unfoldment.

More, this song does what all Vedic mantra does, what I’d argue all yogic techniques do: it has a surface or superficial meaning, but if we are given this mantra through lineaged oral tradition we are also re-enacting, incorpoating, or discovering within ourselves a truth that goes down so deep the superficial meaning blanches. There is a process involved in studentship, in other words, that takes you from one kind of understanding to something completely other. This process is lost if folks google their way to enlightenment.

This set of mantraḥ-s is practical. They are also initiatory: their beauty and promise calls us in. Past being practical and pretty, they create a context of learning; like a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, or a brilliant teacher can provide examples, stories, and experiences in which a student can do the thing themselves (discovering in the end not just the thing but themselves), the Bhū Sūktam gives us the seeds of yoga, enlightenment, transformation, spirituality, Vedanta, sacred ecology, rest and comfort, support, promise, and Truth. The mantraḥ-s are also exquisite, revelatory, emotive and refined: this isn’t simply a poem, and the poet is not just any poet: the rishi is a brahmarishi and the mantras are the earth herself, singing. All of this cycles and churns and develops in us until we ‘get it’. I haven’t time or patience here to go into what that means, other than to say it’s important. Come to study the Bhū Sūktam and I’ll tell you all about it.

All Vedic Mantra teaching happens on our social network, Yoga Club. This involves an extra step on your part, you have to click and agree to some basic humanistic respect. It’s worth it. It takes us past the googling toward enlightenment stage of our practice.