Yoga!!!

Just by living life everyday to the best of our ability will affect the way most of us behave. We will probably adapt (if we are slightly intelligent) to live a life that is optimally healthy for us as we grow older.

It is said that as we grow older we grow wiser. This implies that life itself somehow teaches us lessons that we adapt to or rebel against, that we are somehow genetically hard wired to evolve, and that ultimately we will find whats best for us in terms of life choices in the end.

While this may be true for some, it is clearly not true for all of us. We find people getting sick and dying from different causes for no apparent reason. We find all sorts of injustices when it comes to health issues. Some people may smoke and drink to their hearts content and live well into old age. Others who appear to live a well balanced life get sick.

Nevertheless it has to be said that you have more of a chance of a longer and 'healthier' life if you live in a 'healthy' way than not, but as usual there are always exceptions to the rule.

So thats one thing. The other of course is if you pick up the mantle of some kind of conscious change techniques, such as yoga etc.

When you do this you are saying something to yourself along the lines of 'I can do something to make my life better, and I don't really want to wait for fate to decree what happens to me'. Something like that, wouldn't you say?

So then we look at the evidence for this particular way (yoga) in terms of health benefits. It is said to lower blood pressure by helping us to relax, improves sleeping patterns, helps us to relax even more, makes us more intelligent by improving oxygen supply to the brain and therefore helps us to form a 'better' way of life, etc. Helps us to keep joint mobility and muscle tone, aiding proper postural alignment and therefore again enabling us to see from a better perspective which is our optimal life choices.

'Structure governs function' A.T Still (founder of osteopathy).

So this is all good, we feel better even though we do find that the 'doing' of the practise is sometimes very challenging. It can be (for some of us) a bit like a visit to the dentist. We know it will be good for us but we don't particularly enjoy it. Maybe the tendency towards a bit of masochism is useful after all in this case.

This is all good so far. But then we read some of the more informed yoga books. We may come across the 'yoga sutra's' or the 'hatha yoga pradipika', in fact I think we must come across these books eventually. It is then that we start to see that there is much more to this than we first thought. Hmmmm. We read words we don't understand. We start to come to terms with the fact that yoga wasn't something that was invented in the 60's, but has a long history stretching back at least 2000 years and more.

Then it get more interesting!

Om om om