We reproduce this very interesting article by one of the most accredited specialists in Yoga therapy: Víctor Morera. Its original title: Yoga and Health. You can read more articles by this author in pranamanasyoga.es
The essence of the practice of yoga is that it helps you recover the spiritual dimension of Life, to be in the Unity code. From the perspective of yoga, health is a movement of the organism in search of balance, it is an effective and energy-efficient response to external and internal stimuli.
Health is the adaptive capacity of the organism and the person to change. In yoga that ability depends largely on the integrity of the person, and a person is integral when there is coherence between their thinking, feeling and acting. That coherence greatly restores health. In this sense, yoga is a practical education that provides tools for:
- Generate harmonic and lucid thoughts; Thoughts are powerful medications.
- Create states of calm and peace. A relaxation response as a basis for restoring health.
- A space to live and qualify emotions, giving them a constructive sense; Most of our diseases are of emotional origin.
- An experience from the body and with the body that helps to inhabit it with tenderness and vitality. Sedentary lifestyle, eating habits, impoverished breathing, etc., are the cause of many problems at the level of the spine and the joint and muscular system in general.
And the first step is for everyone to be an active participant in their own health, to assume their responsibilities and to put their energy into motion. Responsibility without guilt, without victimhood, just as the ability to respond in a learning attitude. Yoga implies an attitude of apprentice, apprentices of Life, of the events that each one has to face. With this attitude the disease is a great teacher.
The second step proposed by yoga is that you stop. A stop so you can see where you are, what you think of yourself and what image you have of yourself and the world. What do you think of the disease, the prognosis. All these implicit thoughts are important because one converts and acts according to one's own ideas. And yoga gives you a framework where you can return to a deeper sense of the human, where it helps us to make sense of what is happening to us and develop essential values with you and others. These values are: not to harm, honesty, generosity, equanimity, refrain from the non-essential.
The third step is to change habits, introducing new actions. Once they explained to me in a very simple way what was a habit: "If you put in a large casserole with water and open a frog, and put on a very low heat to heat the water, the frog does not jump and ends up cooking." We really cook in our own habits, in our own sauce. 70% of our illnesses come from inappropriate habits, if we change our habits we restore our balance and therefore help us recover our health.
This is the sense of practice. The introduction of a time of yoga in your daily life allows you to introduce a new element that will change the rhythm of how and from where you live the everyday. In the body the rhythm is expressed by the breath and the heart.
Breathing is the center of the different methods proposed in yoga to restore health. Since on the one hand it brings vitality, Prana, helps calm the mental and produce a relaxation response, which is essential for the proper functioning of the entire neurovegetative system, improves energy and organic circulation and helps to cleanse the body.
The teachings of yoga pass through the heart, since the most powerful of the medicines is Love. Whatever you do do it with love, breathe with gratitude, do an exercise with strength and with the sensitivity of tenderness, smile, not by commitment, but because you listen to the heart. Every practice is born in you in your center and ends in you, in your center.
Health in yoga is the art of entering oneself and harmonizing thoughts, emotions and body in a stream of Life and Love. To do this, it has numerous tools that have an impact on these three levels: meditation, visualizations, seed thoughts, sounds, breaths, physical exercises ...
All these tools will be developed in future articles, when we talk about more specific topics, concerning the most common symptoms of students who attend yoga classes.
Victor Morera Siscar
More information: http://www.pranamanasyoga.es
How yoga relates to health
