Little Yoga Lesson: Bhumi Sparsha Mudra
Connect yourself to the earth’s circuitry and your own
Wherever we place ourselves is home.
This is an important lesson to remember daily, but an especially significant one to assimilate when life gets topsy-turvy or when you’re constantly running from point A to point B, or feeling caught between demands.
Before chanting Om at the start of a yoga class or meditation session, try placing your hands into a very simple mudra called “Bhumi Sparsha” which translates to “Earth Witness” or “Touch the Earth”:
Left hand placed on the leg
Right hand touching the floor/ground
In this simple gesture, one hand connects you to the circuitry of the earth, while the other completes the loop with yourself. Sometimes in mind-body practices, we get so caught up in lofty themes and Big Ideas and Consciousness (huh?) and The Universal (whatever that means) that we often forget that the Doing is really not that complicated. Yoga and meditation are as simple as sitting and bringing awareness to your breath and your place in space, in time. This feeling of being at home can be accessed no matter where you are because home doesn’t exist outside of yourself.
Wherever we place our ourselves is home.
Putting the mudra in motion
Wherever you place your hands is an experience of home.
On the yoga mat, when you finesse how you distribute energy into your hands—spread evenly along the length of the fingers, radiating through the palms while maintaining a tiny half-orb of space in the carpal tunnel area—you can feel changes happening in other parts of your body. By bringing more clarity to the extremities, you create more stability in the center of weight-bearing poses, and you also free the shoulders and neck, in downward-facing dog for example. The ease of this approach is that every yoga pose and every meditation seat are an opportunity to feel supported by the earth, to feel at home where you are, by using the very placement of your hands as an agent of alignment and opening.
Off the mat, Bhumi Sparsha has to be practiced with some modifications. A sidewalk is not something you want to touch 😜 and you certainly wouldn’t want to when attempting to find a sense of support! Instead, touch something that feels solid. On a crowded bus, adapt the mudra by bringing awareness to the contact between your right hand and the railing, and keeping your left hand close to your body. Focus on your breath, slow it down and let that rhythm wash over you. It’s quite possible that the annoying passenger next to you won’t feel so annoying or as annoying as before.