This section explains how over a period of ten or so years I came to believe in the intimate connection between our mind and body, and how we can take responsibility for our health, give up our dependence on pills and stay healthy.
HEALTH
I have fortunately never had any serious health issue apart from cancer, just as well really! However, like many people (should I say most?) I used to get lots of colds, at least 4 times a year, umpteen coughs and sore throats, the odd headache, constant period pains and regular stomach upsets when I travelled. And I thought this was NORMAL, inevitable. Like most people I used to take aspirin and pain killers, cold remedies and cough mixture. Then I started yoga and got into alternative therapies in 2001 and a whole new world opened up.
COLDS AND COUGHS
I became aware of how when I didn't speak my mind, when I repressed thoughts and feelings, my throat would close up, my breathing would alter and I would come down with a cold. I began to see how I (and many people) will cough when they disagree with somebody or something but we do not want to say so. In fact, once I had a chronic dry cough soI went to the doctor who was unable to find any source of irritation whatsoever in my throat, but the irritation WAS there - in my mind, and I knew who I was irritated with, and the thoughts produced the very real cough!
STOMACH UPSETS, FAINTING AND TWITCHING
I began to see that when I travelled and I had some kind of culture shock I would get an upset stomach (what I would previously have put down to dodgy food or the air conditioning on the plane) or if there was an unpleasant event that I couldn't stomach (there are linguistic clues in our language that show us how previous generations were clued up to the mind-body relationship, much more so than we are) I would suddenly feel sick and faint. Indeed, as a child I fainted a lot: in supermarkets, on crowded buses or standing up for long periods of time - it's the body's escape mechanism, sometimes it's the only way we can get out of a situation we don't want to be in. Talking of escape mechanisms, just watch somebody on public transport who has one of those twitching legs - their nervous system wants to run a mile. Which also reminds me, I did an exercise once in a seminar - where you allowed your imagination to let that twictching leg run away to wherever it wanted to go, and guess what? the real physical twitching stopped immediately! The brain and the nervous syetm don't know the difference between what is real and what is imaginary, which is why visualization techniques are so powerful. Jader Tolja in his articles / book Bodythinking explains this mind-body connection very well.
TENSION
I noticed how certain parts of the body could tense, or how you could effortlessly pull a muscle when there is a conflict or dilemma of some sort, yet you could have a spectacular fall and not hurt a bone in your body. It would all depend on the tension that was ALREADY PRESENT in that area of the body. I saw how tension would accumulate in my ovaries throughout the month and then with menstruation this tension would be released. The examples are endless.
ENERGY
Another way of looking at the subject is that we have withdrawn our energy from the part of the body in question and that's why this area (organ, limb, tissue) gets sick. CHAKRAS
The important thing is that once you become aware of this, you can make changes and actually avoid these minor ailments COMPLETELY. It took me several years, a certain amount of therapy and lots of yoga to begin to let the body express itself whenever it needed to. I very rarely get a cold now, in fact for three whole years after the yoga teacher training course I didn't get a single cold, not one. I stopped having period pain, I stopped taking pills of any sort, perhaps one aspirin a year at most. I no longer have any tension in my back, neck or arms. I no longer get cramp in my calves. In recent years if I felt I was coming down with something, I would do some yoga and breathing exercises, change the energy, and not get ill, basically.
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