Gain Strength and Fight disease

“For things to reveal themselves to us,
we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.”
(Thich Nhat Hanh)

This title is of course a bit of a provocation. If you know me you will have a smile on your face reading it. In a time where - in the western worlds - we don’t have a war with weapons and could live in peace we started a war on a virus. Not only in yoga philosophy we know that every action has an effect and a reaction of some sort, but also in my first pharmacology session the professor said that “there is no effect without side effects (plural)” . Well, just food for thought. Fighting disease to gain strength or health is not quite the whole picture, as the meaning of health is a limited one if you look at it as the absence of “disease”; which means if you have fought disease it doesn’t mean you are healthy, does it? A seed can only grow when the soil it is planted into has the specific nutrients this particual seed needs to grow. I learnt this lesson through my chickens. Yes, please read on: I had two chickens that lived happily together. I gave them good food, fresh water… everything was fine. One day the white chicken seemed clucky. She sat in the laying box and I had to put her outside every day. I even put her in cold (not freezing) water as I had been told that helps with the cluckyness as they need to lower their body temperature. Possibly one week into all this I realised that the white chicken had mites - actually she was infested with mites that started crawling onto my arms when I picked her up. When I got her to the vet she was beyond help. BUT the other chicken that was close with her every day and that slept wing on wing with the white one did not have mites at all - not ONE (that I saw). She is still happily alive one year later and has new friends now with her. She just didn’t attract the mites. The mites didn’t want to infest her.
Maybe a better heading would have been “Gain strength and focus on health”. In this physical world of duality, of good and bad we can always focus on fighting the bad while we tell children not to fight with each other but to be “good”. That is of course another trap ; “being good” without having questioned anything. It is easy to create an image of an enemy and thus feel good in comparison to that enemy.

Back to Yoga that shows us a way to be in this three dimensional world well knowing not to identify with it. The most effective way to gain strength is through meditation. Swami Sivananda Saraswati, one of the great yoga masters who was a medical doctor said: “If you want to get rid of the pains and afflictions of this worldly life, you must practice meditation. Regular meditation opens up the avenues of intuitional knowledge and makes the mind calm and steady. The meditator develops pure and strong thoughts. Meditation is a powerful tonic. The vibrations penetrate all the cells of the body and cure its diseases.” Good to know that modern science is talking about the healing effects of vibrational medicine, as we always need “modern” science to back up ancient knowledge. ;-)