Do yoga for healing, not as mere exercise

There is a tendency to ask what benefits a particular asana or pranayama would give in terms of treating an ailment. Not unnatural, considering our way of looking at our body and our health. We have been conditioned into thinking that different body organs do some particular functions - that some structural or physiological defect in them leads to diseases, that if we treat that particular defect [which we recognise by symptoms or diagnostic tests], we will bring the entire body back to health.

There is hardly any stress given to preventive maintenance of the body, or to heal the body when an ailment takes place. We treat, rather than heal; that is perhaps one big reason we are often ill, and we seldom recover full health after getting treated for a serious illness.

Yoga, as it developed over centuries, taught its practitioners to service the body engine, and service it in totality. Totality not only included different organs of the body and different ways of keeping them in good health, it included the spirit and mind also. Only millennia later did we scientifically conclude that mind and spirit indeed play a very important role in our overall health.

So, if we are serious about complete health [and if we already are not suffering from very serious organic ailments], talk about health, not whether asana A is good for heart, or mudra B is good for liver. Do adjust yoga procedures according to your lifestyle, time available, age and sex, body type and such other factors, but in trying to do so, do not miss the spirit of yoga.

Another thing to keep in mind. We often use our knowledge of modern medicine to interpret why a particular asana will be useful to us or not. While theoretically that is OK, we need to keep in mind that yogic procedures are not just standalone physical exercises, but part of a full regimen. I am saying so also because detailed scientific studies on yoga are still in their nascent stage, and till a significant research goes into yoga, let's not draw half-baked and wrong conclusions. Didn't we pooh-poohed acupressure, acupuncture and various alternative systems of medicine till the other day? Haven't the medical authorities changed medical advice over the years, sometimes significantly?

Healing takes us to a plane different from that of treating. It involves one's faith in the machine that the body is. Also - when one is sick - faith on the doctor and the medicine. [Why do placebos work wonders in some cases?] It involves arousing the body's vital forces and redundancy. [Don't we have by-pass mechanisms in our body, which keep healing the body without our knowing it? Don't we have paired organs so that even if one fails, we have the other to fall back on? Don't we see extra-ordinary capabilities of sense organs of handicapped people?] It involves being in harmony with the internal and external environments. 

I have personally seen faith healing working wonders in remote Himalayan villages. In six years of my stay there, I must have seen a few hundred people with various pains visiting the village grandma, an illiterate woman in her seventies or eighties, and returning in five minutes with a smile on their lips. What the grandma would do was to rub the paining part with a bit of ash, chant a mantra or something [which she would not part with!] and tap the body thrice. In healing, the purity of the instrument and your faith in it are even more important than the treatment. It is not like giving paracetamol and trusting it to reduce fever whatever the cause; paracetamol does treat fever much better than grandma's taps and has the seal of modern pharmacology, but it seldom heals the way grandma's tap does.

The blabbering could go on, but I must conclude. After all, it is a blog post. Do yoga for your complete health. Learn it from a selfless teacher [need not be in person; a genuine website or book would do] in whom you can rest your faith. This will help you get the magic healing touches of yoga, instead of the plain benefits of physical exercises. If your objective is 'body building' or getting 'six abs', you will find many excellent exercising regimens, teachers and machines; yoga is not for that. I assure you, yoga is a very poor exercise regimen and is not a system of medicine for treatment against diseases [going by the mainstream science] - diseases sometimes do get cured, but that is more of a by-product. So, if you have got attracted to yoga as you could not get rid of one of your diseases through allopathy and other medicines, yoga might help but not to the extent it would if you adopted it as a way of life.