22/04/2026
How do we care for the earth, our home, and not lose our heart while doing so?
I sit with this after reading a few articles about our dear earth on earth day.
There is a teaching in yoga, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 2.46, *sthira sukham asanam*. My teachers translate it as our connection to the earth should be steady and joyful.
Sthira like to stand, to have foundation. Sukha not exactly happiness, more like interior spaciousness, a wheel with a good axle that can turn freely even on difficult terrain. And asana our seat, our connection. The earth here isn’t only the ground beneath us, it’s every being we share this earth with.
So the question becomes how do we hold our relationship to all of life and all the suffering that comes with it?
Because the more you practice the more you feel. The heart opens and stays open. You become sensitive to it all, the grief, the loss, the scale of what’s happening. That tenderness is what it means to be awake.
But there is something else the practice teaches. That open, receptive, trembling heart, the one that really feels it, arises within something boundless. Awareness itself is like sky. The clouds move through it. The sky is not damaged by the clouds.
So we don’t protect our hearts by armoring up, or by turning away, or numbing out. We remember that the heart capable of feeling everything, the grief, the love, the uncertainty, lives inside something that cannot be broken.
You are not only the feeling. You are also the space in which the feeling moves.
A seat boundless enough to hold it all and remain.
This is what the practice is for. It’s not to escape the world but to become the kind of being who can be in right relation to it, who can act from love instead of fear, who can be moved fully and still find the ground.
Steady and joyful.
