Shiitake: The Art of Turning Shit to Gold
It seems strange that as one of the most nutritionally-prized living things on earth, the shiitake mushroom comes from a kingdom that feeds solely on death and decay.
Growing quite literally on shit, rot, mulch, or canker, the cute little mushroom spreads its tender mycelial net, feeling, exploring, holding, categorising, and thereby understanding its sickening substrate, painstakingly logging each molecule, and calculating the precise chemical response required to transform the crap or chunder into top-drawer material. Quite literally, the mycelium of mushrooms is like gold leaf, its fine filigrees spread out to mine shite of all its hidden goodness, eventually fetching rather golden prices when prettily packaged on the shelves of Fortnum’s or Globus. This is nature’s kintsugi.
Like little mushroom spores waiting to sprout, our minds also live in a substrate of psychological excrement. Most of the time we’re surrounded by a swirling storm of thoughts we don’t want to have: trashy, grabby, anxious, rotten thoughts that stick to us like mouldering glue; heavy, thudding, jealous, regretful thoughts that weigh us down like so much muck. Our shoulders hunch, our throats stick, and stones appear in our stomachs: we make ourselves sick. But like a rotting log or a broken pot, we have the raw materials for transformation right before us, waiting to be transformed.
Through yoga, we too can cast the fine tendrils of awareness out into the mire, gradually feeling into these hot, dark, and mouldering places, probing them at first with gentle curiosity, before piercing them with clear understanding. As we observe our thoughts and feelings, our self-knowledge bifurcates like mycelial roots, moving slowly but surely as we explore the value of our negative experiences, revolving them in the brightness of our intellect until we can extract their true, nutritive, healing value. The best part is that this isn’t even an evolution.
In fact, the power of recombination is the essential nature of every human mind. Once we discover that nourishment and love can be found in everything, it’s just a matter of giving oneself the time and the tools to digest, and to begin feeding on the darkness to produce lightness. Like energy, life’s shit cannot all be transformed at once, at least not without producing an atomic explosion. It’s the mushroom we need to emulate, not the mushroom cloud. But armed correctly — with dedication, gentleness, and patience — the webs of our understanding can be cast to make some remarkable transformations, from shit to gold.
This is why we practice.