"Yoga" by Hellogreenway - Own work. Licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/
September is National Yoga Month and up and down the country, fans of yoga will be enthusiastically twisting and stretching at free coordinated events in studios, gyms and other venues . All this to draw attention to the health and well-being benefits of the practice of yoga. As well as the fact that our health is ultimately our own responsibility.
How
much responsibility is something that may be lost on many of us. If
you're impatiently stuck in traffic and another driver cuts out in front
of you and you react angrily then that's you: 0; blood pressure: 2 .
If you tend to be cynical about a lot of things in life then that's you:
0 ; possible future dementia: 3 .
So
our temperament, moods and lifestyle has a big bearing on our health.
Something that is perhaps not fully acknowledged by the conventional
medical understanding of why the body gets sick. With a mission of
changing this understanding, is a non-profit organisation called
Meta-Health, who are the sponsors of the Yoga Health Foundation which is
the organiser of the National Yoga Month.
According
to Johannes R. Fisslinger , the founder of the Meta-Health University,
knowing what "..emotion, stress-trigger, belief or thought , social and
lifestyle connection" underlies illness and disease is the key to the
body's self-healing.
For
anyone with a passing familiarity of traditional chinese medicine or
Ayurveda(traditional Indian medicine), the Meta-Health diagnostic model
sounds very much like the holistic approach which is the basis of those
two ancient traditions as well as much of complementary and alternative
medicine(CAMs).
But
the validity and acceptance of CAMs by mainstream healthcare has met
with only very limited success. If you're lucky you might be able to get
some acupuncture done on the NHS. It is this barrier that Meta-Health
University is trying to overcome by seeking to train conventional
medical practitioners and alternative therapists in a method which they
claim marries CAM to science.
Some
indication that the tide of medical understanding may be turning in
their favour, comes in the form of recent research led by Anna-Malia
Tolppanen, PhD, of the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio, and
published in the journal Neurology. It shows that if you usually
believe that others are motivated by selfish interest then you are more
likely to develop dementia later in life than other people who are more
trusting. This it seems is what being cynical about a lot of things in
life will do for you.
However,
merely establishing a link between cynicism and dementia is not the
same as explaining exactly how a negative temperament will cause
illness. And this where Sahaja Yoga can provide some insights.
In
the field of yoga, the concept of an energetic system consisting of
'chakras'(spinning wheels of energy) and 'nadis'(energy channels) is
well known. This system(see below) is similar but not identical to the energy
meridian system of acupuncture. The chakras have been linked to the
endocrine gland system, so, for example, the photo-sensitive pineal
gland in mid-brain is linked to the agnya chakra, which is sometimes
referred to as the 'third eye'. The three main nadis, left , right and
centre are linked to the left and right sympathetic nervous system and
the para-sympathetic nervous system respectively.
According
to Sahaja Yoga, it is these chakras which catch and carry the imprint
of patterns of thought, emotions and temperament and then transmit them
as effects, via combination and permutation onto the endocrine system.
The endocrine system, along with a stress-induced imbalance on the left
and right channel in turn transmit this as causes into the physiology,
from which illness then directly arises.
Research
conducted Dr. Katya Rubia, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at
King's College, London as well other research, has shown the beneficial
effect of the practice of sahaja yoga meditation in the treatment of a
range of mind-body (psycho-somatic) illnesses such anxiety, depression,
attention-deficit disorder and drug abuse.
In
this perhaps lies the clue to the discriminating orginal purpose of
yoga that may have been lost in the way it is currently practised: it
was to correct a specific presenting condition in a student-patient by
using a specific yoga asana(posture) to bring about a balance in a
chakra and effect a cure. If a patient came with a heart condition, then
the teacher-doctor would be unlikely to urge the student to run the
gamut of asanas all the way from those that help eye problems to those
designed to correct mis-alignment of the spine.
This could be a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
So,
while enjoying your twisting and stretching this month make sure that
your yoga teacher understands the purpose and effect of an asana and why
you in particular should or should not be doing them. We are
responsible for our own health.
References:
Sahaja Yoga Research
