You, Yoga, Meta-Health & Sahaja Yoga
"Yoga" by Hellogreenway - Own work. Licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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 favor, 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 Neurosciences 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 original purpose of yoga that may have been lost in the way it is currently practiced: 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.
