Oneness & Wellness: The Yogic Way

Jul 12, 2004, 12.00am IST

The word 'health' comes from the root word 'whole'. When we say we're "feeling healthy", we're saying that we have a sense of wholeness within us.



A person can be said to be of good health only if he feels complete in body, mind and spirit. Mere medical fitness does not indicate complete wellness in the true sense.

In order to experience this sense of wholeness and oneness, it's important that in body, mind, and energy functions, there is a certain level of intensity.

Physically, one may be healthy, but energies may be lethargic. For every physical or psychological situation that you go through in life, there is an energy basis, which in turn has a chemical basis.

In a way, modern allopathic medicines have been reduced to mere chemistry.

For every problem that arises in your body, you are just trying to take in some medicine, a chemical, and come to some kind of balance.

If you use one chemical to bring down one aspect, or enhance another, there is also a side-effect to this.

For this side-effect, there is an antidote; for the antidote there is another side-effect and antidote - it's an endless chain.

Whatever is happening on the chemistry level in your body is only controlled by the way your energies function. If a man has got excess acids within him, you introduce some alkaline medicine into him.


But why does he have excessive acids? Because of the way his mind, his body, and above all, his energy, functions.

In yoga, neither the body nor the mind is looked at in isolation - the focus is on energy. If your energy body is in proper balance and full flow, your physical body and mental body will be in perfect health.

For this, you have to go to the foundations of your energy system and activate it in a proper way, building a foundational yogic practice that establishes your energy in a manner that your body and mind are naturally fine.

No one gets to live in perfect conditions. The pressures of life, the food that we eat, the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, can affect us variously.

The more our activities, the greater our exposure to things that can throw our chemistry asunder, creating health problems. But if the energy in our system is properly cultivated and kept active, these things will not have an effect.

When something great happens and you don't understand the process, you think it is a miracle. On the other hand, if something bad happens and you have no idea how it happened, you might turn superstitious.

Let's say you know nothing about electricity. It is dark. Someone comes along and flicks on a switch, and the room gets flooded with light. It's like magic. So too, in life, many things happen in many different ways.

You have limited yourself to just the physical, the logical - physical in experience, logical in thinking.

Right now, medical sciences are limited to just knowing the physical body. If anything happens beyond that, you think it's a miracle. I just call it another kind of science, that's all, because life functions in so many ways.

You have confined yourself to certain limitations.

This life energy in you created your whole body - bones, flesh, heart, kidney, everything. Do you think it can create health? If your energies are kept in full flow and proper balance, they are capable of much more than just health.
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev