Spirituality/Eastern: The True Nature of Health - by B.K.S. Iyengar

Most people ask only from their body that it does not trouble them. Most people feel that they are healthy if they are not suffering from illness or pain, not aware of the imbalances that exist in their bodies and minds that ultimately will lead to disease. Yoga has a threefold impact on health. It keeps healthy people healthy, it inhibits the development of diseases, and it aids recovery from ill health.

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But diseases are not just a physical phenomenon. Anything that disturbs your spiritual life and practice is a disease and will manifest eventually in illness. Because most modern people have separated their minds from their bodies and their souls have been banished from their ordinary lives, they forget that the well-being of all three (body, mind, and spirit) are intimately entwined like the fibers of our muscles.

Health begins with firmness in body, deepens to emotional stability, then leads to intellectual clarity, wisdom, and finally the unveiling of the soul. Indeed health can be categorized in many ways. There is physical health, which we are all familiar with, but there is also moral health, mental health, intellectual health, and even the health of our consciousness, health of our conscience, and ultimately divine health. These are relative to and depend upon the stage of consciousness we are at, which will be dealt with in chapter 5.

But a yogi never forgets that health must begin with the body. Your body is the child of the soul. You must nourish and train your child. Physical health is not a commodity to be bargained for. Nor can it be swallowed in the form of drugs and pills. It has to be earned through sweat. It is something that we must build up. You have to create within yourself the experience of beauty, liberation, and infinity. This is health. Healthy plants and trees yield abundant flowers and fruits. Similarly, from a healthy person, smiles and happiness shine forth like the rays of the sun.

The practice of yogasana for the sake of health, to keep fit, or to maintain flexibility is the external practice of yoga. While this is a legitimate place to begin, it is not the end. As one penetrates the inner body more deeply, one's mind becomes immersed in the asana. The first external practice remains dry and peripheral, while the second more intense practice literally soaks the practitioner with sweat, making him wet enough to pursue the deeper effects of the asana.

Do not underestimate the value of asana. Even in simple asanas, one is experiencing the three levels of the quest: the external quest, which brings firmness of the body; the internal quest, which brings steadiness of intelligence; and the innermost quest, which brings benevolence of spirit. While a beginner is not generally aware of these aspects while performing the asana, they are there. Often, we hear people saying that they remain active and light when they do just a little bit of asana practice. When a raw beginner experiences this state of well-being, it is not merely the external or anatomical effects of yoga. It is also about the internal physiological and psychological effects of the practice.

As long as the body is not in perfect health, you are caught in body consciousness alone. This distracts you from healing and culturing the mind. We need sound bodies so we can develop sound minds.

Body will prove to be an obstacle unless we transcend its limitations and remove its compulsions. Hence, we have to learn how to explore beyond our known frontiers, that is to expand and interpenetrate our awareness and how to master ourselves. Asana is ideal for this.

The keys to unlocking our potential are the qualities of purity and sensitivity. The point about purity, or simply cleanliness as it is often called in yoga texts, is not primarily a moral one. It is that purity permits sensitivity. Sensitivity is not weakness or vulnerability. It is clarity of perception and allows judicious, precise action.

On the other hand, rigidity comes from impurity, from accumulated toxins, whether in the physical sense or the mental, when we call it prejudice or narrow-mindedness. Rigidity is insensitivity. The sweat of exertion and the insight of penetration bring us, through a process of elimination and self-cultivation, both purity and sensitivity.

Purity and sensitivity benefit us not only in relation to the inward journey but in relation to our outer environment, the external world. The effects of impurity are highly undesirable. They cause us to develop a hard shell around us. If we construct a stiff shell between ourselves and the world outside our skin, we rob ourselves of most of life's possibilities. We are cut off from the free flow of cosmic energy. It becomes difficult in every sense to let nourishment in or to let toxic waste out. We live in a capsule, what a poet called a "vain citadel."

As mammals, we are homeostatic. That means we maintain certain constant balances within our bodies, temperature for example, by adapting to change and challenge in the environment. Strength and flexibility allow us to keep an inner balance, but man is trying more and more to dominate the environment rather than control himself. Central heating, air conditioning, cars that we take out to drive three hundred yards, towns that stay lit up all night, and food imported from around the world out of season are all examples of how we try to circumvent our duty to adapt to nature and instead force nature to adapt to us. In the process, we become both weak and brittle. Even many of my Indian students who all now sit on chairs in their homes are becoming too stiff to sit in lotus position easily.

Suppose you lose your job. That is an external challenge with attendant worries such as how to pay the mortgage and feed and clothe the family. It is an emotional upheaval too. But if you are in balance, if there is an energetic osmosis between you and the outer world, you will adapt and survive by finding another job. Purity and sensitivity mean that we receive a cosmic paycheck each day of our lives. When harmony and integration begin through practice in our inner layers of being, there is immediately a beginning to harmony and integration with the world we live in.

A great boon of yoga, even for relative beginners, is the happiness it brings, a state of self-reliant contentment. Happiness is good in itself and a basis for progress. An unquiet mind cannot meditate. A happy and serene mind allows us to pursue our quest as well as live with artistry and skill. Does not the American Declaration of Independence talk of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? If a yogi had written that, he would have said Life, Happiness, and the Pursuit of Liberty. Sometimes happiness may bring stagnation, but if freedom comes from disciplined happiness, there is the possibility of true liberation.

As I have said, the body should be neither neglected nor pampered, for it is the only instrument and the only resource we are provided with which to embark on the Pursuit of Liberty. At times it is fashionable to despise the body as something non-spiritual. Yet none can afford to neglect it. At other times it is fashionable to indulge the body and to despise what is not physical. Yet none can deny that there is more to life than mere physical pleasure and pain. If we abandon or indulge our bodies, sickness comes, and attachment to it increases. Your body no longer can serve as the vehicle for the inward journey and weighs like a millstone around your neck on the right royal road to the soul. If you say you are your body, you are wrong. If you say you are not your body, you are also wrong. The truth is that although body is born, lives, and dies, you cannot catch a glimpse of the divine except through the body.

Yoga sees the body quite differently than Western sports, which treats the body like a racehorse, trying to push it faster and faster and competing with all other bodies in speed and strength. There are today in India yoga "Olympics" where yoga practitioners can compete with one another. I do not decry this. In my life, I have given many demonstrations around the world in an attempt to popularize yoga. While this was yoga as an exhibition of art, the essence of yoga is not about external display but internal cultivation. Yoga is beautiful as well as Divine. Ultimately, the yogi searches for the inner light as well as inner beauty, infinity, and liberation. Once I was called "Iron Iyengar" by a journalist, and I had to correct him that I am not hard like iron, but hard like a diamond. The hardness of a diamond is part of its usefulness, but its true value is in the light that shines through it.