When Yoga finds the Earth

By Maya Bernardes

For a long time, I believed I had two lives. One belonged to the mind, structured, analytical, committed to environmental management. The other belonged to the body, fluid, intuitive, unfolding on a yoga mat. I treated them as separate. I ranked them. One was “serious,” the other was “pleasure.” So I lived like that, working in sustainability during the day, teaching yoga at night, holding both worlds without letting them touch, as if thinking and sensing were not already part of the same human. But life has its own ways.

Years passed. I moved countries, became a mother, stopped everything, went through depression. And slowly, without asking permission, these two lives began to regenerate, not as something I chose, but as something life was already doing through me. Now, returning to both, studying Sustainability Science and teaching yoga again, I can no longer practice or view them as separated.

We often think environmental awareness begins with knowledge, facts, data, policies. But what if it begins with practice? With repetition, with touch, with breath. Scholars have shown that people do not become environmental subjects simply by learning about nature, but by engaging with it daily. Planting, harvesting, collecting, observing, participating. Through doing, something shifts. Environmental awareness is not only political, it is cultural, emotional, embodied. It reshapes how we feel, how we relate, how we understand ourselves in the world. And perhaps this is where regeneration begins, not as a state of mind only, but as practices quietly cultivated through consistent inner and outer living perception.

In some yogic traditions, especially Tantra, there is no separation between you and the world. Not metaphorically, but literally. The same force that moves your breath moves the wind. The same intelligence organizing your cells organizes forests, rivers, soil. Separation is not truth, it is a perception, and from that perception much harm emerges, domination, control, extraction. But when that perception shifts, when unity is not an idea but a felt experience, our actions begin to change. Regeneration, then, is not something we learn, it is something we allow. Our bodies know how to regenerate, because they’re nature, what we need to do is find the proper conditions for regeneration. This is why embodied practices have always been political, even when they appear personal. Movements like the Chipko movement, where women hugged trees, were not simply strategic protests, they were expressions of relationality. The philosophy of Satyagraha or Gandhism was not an abstract moral stance, but something lived through the body, through restraint, presence, and nonviolence. These were not theoretical ideas, they were practices shaping how people breathed, walked, resisted, and cared.

Something subtle happens when we practice yoga consistently. We begin to feel more. Not just muscles work or openness, but the internal landscape. The movement of breath, the quiet work of organs, the rhythms of expansion and contraction. This is interoception, the sensing of inner life. And as this sensitivity grows, something else opens, we begin to feel the environment not as a backdrop, but as part of us. The humidity in the air, the weight of gravity, the texture of the ground. All of it becomes perceptible in a new way. The body stops being an isolated unit and becomes something else, something more relational, a kind of body-territory. A place where the environment is not outside, but continuously happening within. When we breathe, we are not just taking in air, we are participating in the atmosphere. When we stand, we are not just holding ourselves, we are in constant dialogue with the Earth’s pull. And in this dialogue, the body reveals itself as a site of regeneration, constantly adjusting, restoring, responding, just like forests, just like rivers, just like soil.

Climate change, in this sense, is not only a scientific crisis. It is an emotional and embodied one. We know this, even if we do not always say it. Fear, grief, guilt, overwhelm. They accumulate in ways that are difficult to process. So often, people turn away, not because they do not care, but because it is too much to hold. Yoga, in its deeper sense, trains us for this. Not to escape discomfort, but to stay with it. To breathe inside it, to feel without collapsing, to regulate the nervous system so that we can remain present in the face of what hurts. In a world organized around avoidance, this becomes a radical capacity. It allows us to metabolize the emotional weight of ecological crisis instead of numbing it. And in that staying, something begins to regenerate, not necessarily the world immediately, but our capacity to remain in relationship with it without turning away.

And yet, there is a tension here. In many contemporary contexts, yoga has been absorbed into a culture of self-optimization. Stretch more, perform better, recover faster. So you can return more efficiently to systems that exhaust both people and the planet. When practiced this way, yoga risks reinforcing the very separation it has the potential to dissolve. The shift happens when the question changes. Not “how can I feel better?” but “how can I feel myself as part of everything else?” This is where yoga begins to move beyond the individual and into the relational. And it is within this relational space that regeneration becomes possible, not as performance, but as participation in life's natural ongoing processes.

The relationship goes both ways. Just as yoga shapes how we relate to the environment, environmental understanding reshapes how we inhabit the body. When we study systems thinking, we learn that balance is not static but dynamic, constantly maintained through feedback loops. And suddenly, the body becomes legible in a new way. Fatigue becomes information. Tension becomes signal. Emotion becomes feedback. We begin to notice how often we override these signals, pushing through discomfort, extracting from ourselves in the same way we extract from the Earth. The parallel is not metaphorical, it is structural. And when we begin to see this, something softens. Practice becomes less about achievement and more about listening. Less about control and more about allowing life to reorganize itself in more relational ways.

Across cultures, this connection between body and environment has always existed. Yoga postures inspired by animals are not symbolic gestures, but observations translated into movement. In other parts of the world, ecological knowledge shapes how bodies work, rest, and relate, through seasonal rhythms, collective labor, and reciprocity with land. In these contexts, knowledge is not something abstract, it is lived, practiced, embodied. The environment teaches, and the body remembers. And in remembering, something regenerates, not by returning to what was, but by continuously adapting in relationship with what is.

Once again, it is important to highlight that not all forms of yoga practiced today cultivate this awareness. In many Western contexts, yoga has been commodified, individualized, and disconnected from its philosophical roots, sometimes reinforcing overconsumerism, stereotyping, and the separation it once aimed to dissolve. This does not mean the practice has lost its potential, but it does mean that intention matters. How we practice shapes what the practice becomes, and whether it contributes to regeneration or to further disconnection.

If there is a quiet thread running through all of this, it is that regeneration is not only something we design, it is something we embody. It lives in how we breathe, how we move, how we respond, how we relate. Attitude. It lives in whether we treat ourselves and the world as resources to be used, or as relationships to be honored. Science is essential, policy is essential, but they are not enough. We also need practices that help us feel, practices that dissolve the illusion of separation not as an idea, but as an experience. Yoga, when approached as embodied, relational, and ethical, offers one fair option. It does not simply teach us about interdependence; it allows us to feel it, to live it, to remember. Slowly, quietly, gently, yoga reminds us that we were never separate, and that regeneration has been happening all along.