Yoga Is A Lifestyle Practice, Lifestyle Is The New Medicine

Ruchi Phool Jul 02, 2019

NCD’s or Non-Communicable Disorders nowadays are ruling the roost. also called Lifestyle Disorders, Psychosomatic Disorders, Chronic Disorders, Stress-related Disorders. These are usually not passed on from one affected person to others but as a direct result of lifestyle and environmental factors. Some disorders that fall in this category are Cardiovascular Diseases, Stroke, Alzhiemer’s, Cancer, Diabetes, Thyroid, Chronic Respiratory Disease, Depression, Bipolar, Obesity, Kidney and Lung Diseases. Here are some WHO Facts on NCD’s:

NCD’s claim equivalent to 71% of all deaths globally.
Each year, 15 million people die from a NCD between the ages of 30 and 69 years; over 85% of these "premature" deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.
Detection, screening and treatment of NCDs, as well as palliative care, are key components of the response to NCDs.
NCDs are not only a health problem but a development challenge as well. (These cause lower productivity and higher healthcare costs)
NCDs are largely preventable.
Eliminating major risks could prevent most NCDs.

In a nutshell, this means we have laboured through the last few decades to create an environment and a social structure to land these many of us into unnatural, premature deaths. For those of us who survive it, the quality of life is seriously compromised.

Let’s look at some top causes of NCD’s:

1. Lifestyle

Lack of adequate physical movement. A poor and unbalanced diet mostly due to over consumption of processed, unnaturally grown, over cooked food and lack of intake of natural foods. Use of alcohol and tobacco for which our bodies no longer have the capacity to tolerate. Added to that unnatural sleep patterns which rob the only leftover chance the body and mind have to detoxify and fix itself. These are but a few.

2. Environment

Unsustainable practices in the name of development and vested commercial interests have landed us into a serious deficit of natural resources. We have reached a stage that the soothsayers had prophesied seeing trends back in the seventies:

“Your country operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”

We stand at a turning point in the history of the planet when this prophecy has come true.

Many of us are left stupefied to see the still rampant destruction. One wonders what will concrete structures do when we won’t have air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat. As with everything in nature we too are made of the Panch Mahabhutas - Akash (Ether),Vayu (Air), Agni (Fire), Jala (water) and Prithvi (earth). Holistic sciences use the natural elements to fix imbalances in our body-mind dynamics to cure disorders, to heal us. The deficit of these can not only cause external havoc but total chaos within our systems.

3. Social Structure

From childhood, we are taught to compete and better the other, to keep our own selfish interests above the betterment of the community. At the least, such values go against the very core of our being, of who we really are. This core demands a harmonious, inter-connected living where love is supreme in our actions.

It does not require much thought to know how much the learning of math, chemistry or history can benefit us when we don’t know what life really is about or how our human system, our energy system, our minds and hearts really work. It is far beyond the study of anatomy and physiology. Resultantly, the majority of the population is internally so frail that we drop at the first instance of any so-called ‘failure’, be it in our profession, relationship or any other. Most of us lead our lives in fear, trying to escape any sort of such a failure rather than be able to live out the very purpose for which we were born. We become antagonistic at the drop of a hat but take a lifetime to forgive, causing ourselves great pain in the process. Our work is based on purely commercial benefits. The leading, most sought after companies investing millions of dollars of research and study in technologies that are making our children sick at ages as young as 2 and 3 years old. And societies then discarding these children on the sidelines because they are no longer fit to be in the ‘mainstream’. Such is the stark reality of the day. Our education, healthcare, banking and investment, industry, corporate, media, entertainment, research and development sectors are all commerce driven, with little or no scope for empathy, inclusion or in other words the humanity within us to thrive. That being left to the individual to follow at his own cost.

Is it then a surprise that we are now suffering at a mass scale? What other consequence can we expect for not allowing life to thrive within and outside of us?

So what has Yoga to do with all this? Yoga is a science, art and discipline of knowing how life really works – inside of us, as well as in communion with all of life that surrounds us. Yoga has methods for all kinds of individuals to be fit in all dimensions of our being – physical, social, emotional, occupational, financial, spiritual, intellectual or environmental. When delved deeper into, we find that something such as a ‘self-interest’ does not exist because we are all so closely interconnected. When we grow and thrive everyone and everything around us does. When the world around us thrives, so do we.