About underlying structure, stability and body sustainability
At this point in May, around the May long weekend, a lot of the heavier garden work begins. Moving planters, shifting pots, lifting and carrying things that have sat all winter. Earlier this week, I was preparing some of the larger planters around the garden for the season ahead. Emptying old soil, refreshing them, moving them back into place.
This time of year, a lot of gardeners begin to feel it physically. Sometimes it is the shoulders. Sometimes the lower back. Sometimes numbness in the arms or stiffness in the hips. Gardening is physical work, often repetitive work, and over time small imbalances accumulate.
For me, part of preparing for the gardening season is returning to my yoga practice. Years ago, I began with simple sun salutations as a warm-up. At first, even that felt difficult. Over time, I slowly added more postures and movements. A little more one year. A little more the next.
What interested me was not flexibility, but awareness. Each posture taught me something about how my body worked together. At one point I realized I had been standing mostly toward the outsides of my feet. Learning to ground more evenly through my heels completely changed my forward bend. Later, I began to understand the relationship running through the second toe, through the knee, through the hip. Small adjustments changed everything.
Over time, the practice expanded into a longer warm-up before gardening work. Not because I was trying to become advanced at yoga, but because the movements helped me notice things before they became problems.
Eventually, after years of adding more and more postures, I found myself returning again to the simplest thing: standing.
Equal standing.
Not frozen standing, but balanced standing. Weight distributed evenly across the feet. Toes relaxed. Knees soft. Hips neither tucked nor pushed back. The spine lengthening upward while the feet continue downward into the ground.
Breathing there.
What surprised me was how much work was hidden inside what looked like almost nothing.
The shoulders settle. The ribs soften. The neck releases upward. The head balances more easily. The body begins stacking itself instead of fighting itself.
And once I began to understand that standing position more clearly, I started seeing it everywhere else. In bending. In lifting. In carrying soil. In pruning. In reaching forward into a shrub. Every movement depended on what came before it.
Many systems approach this differently. Yoga is only one approach among many. But the underlying experience seems broadly shared: understanding the structure underneath the movement allows the movement itself to become easier, steadier, more sustainable over time.
Around this same time every year, the Niagara Escarpment disappears beneath green growth. Through winter, you can clearly see the structure underneath: trunks, branches, the shape of the land itself. But by late May, the canopy fills in and the underlying structure becomes almost invisible.
Still, the canopy depends on it completely.
Lately I have been thinking that much of gardening work is like that. The visible motions: lifting, planting, pruning, carrying, depend on quieter structures underneath them. Often invisible ones.
Every morning, before gardening work, I now return to simple sun salutations again. Not because they are complicated, but because they remind me of the underlying relationships carrying everything else.
The summer canopy rests on winter structure. Movement rests on standing.