Swami Krishnananda Shashtyabdapurti Mahotsava Commemoration Volume
A Souvenir released on Swami Krishnananda's 60th Birthday
From Yoga to Holistic Health
by Mellisa Schnirring
Yoga has swept through the West like a hurricane, leaving some faithful converts in its wake and also some damage to its reputation. Like so many other innovative ideas in the West, it has been treated like a commodity by charlatans and shysters, both Eastern and Western. It has been commercialised, exploited, then left in a corner by those who had used it and were done with it.
As a popular movement Yoga has waned somewhat in the States, at least on the Eastern seaboard, as I observe it. But the tide pulling out left a few bright pebbles on the beach. Many were touched, converted for life. These faithful keep on quietly teaching, practising, running ashrams and centres. Teachers who picked up enough momentum when the Yoga movement was at its zenith are still drawing numbers of students. Other yoga students have taken yoga inward and practise it quietly in their hearts and minds while doing other work outwardly.
Those fortunate yoga teachers and practitioners have managed to integrate the Yoga philosophy of life into a mode of work that is related, into which the teachings of Asanas and meditation seem to flow. This work is in the newly popular field of holistic health. “Holistic”, or wholistic, has become another catchword to that segment of the American public who seem to have some spiritual awareness, who want to better themselves, row and evolve. Holistic health means an integrated “wholeness” of health in body, mind and spirit. The holistic approach deals with all three of the levels at once, not neglecting any of them. Healing and ministering therefore call for an understanding of, and an ability to deal with, as many layers of a person's being as possible. The emphasis is on the natural: natural foods, food supplements and herbs rather than drugs, the avoidance of surgery if possible. Holistic sciences which derive from Ayurvedic medicine, like Polarity Therapy, a contact healing technique, and homeopathic medicine, are popular.
Americans are increasingly health and body conscious, and some never penetrate beyond the body layer in their quest for nothing more than prolonged youth, better body tone and weight loss. They patronize health food stores because it is the fashionable thing to do, by the health and natural food magazines, frequent gyms and spas, and pump themselves full of vitamin pills.
But others find their way into the mind and even spirit layers, binding in their search that the body is indeed only the final dumping ground for an imbalance that starts out as an abstract concept on the causal plane, is blue print it on the astral, and finally manifests as effect rather than cause on the physical.
From this profound and agent understanding, pronounced “new” by some of our culture, come such practices as the aforementioned Polarity Therapy, formulated by an Austrian doctor, Randolph Stone, who spent forty years studying in the Far East and based much of his method on Indian Ayurveda; the Reiki method of natural healing, a 2500-year-old Zen Buddhist technique we discovered in the 1940s; hypnotherapy in its various forms, strikingly similar in its technique to the “total relaxation with auto-suggestion” of Hatha Yoga; so-called “psychic healing”, involving the use of extra-sensory or intuitive faculties in meditation. The therapist diagnoses and treats by reading the patient's energy. Other exercise forms such as Bio-Energetics, the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais method work with the physical layer to resolve deeper blocks and problems through the body movement and alignment. Herbology involves the study of Native American herbs used by Red Indians; with it goes a return to natural home-grown foods, eschewing processed foods, chemicals, and pesticides. After all, American forefathers were living in the natural, holistic life a mere ago.
Perhaps the most interesting outgrowth of the holistic movement, or the practitioner who is sincere and does not exploited commercially – or in a subtler power sense, for personal gain – is the growing awareness of the real divine power that flows through healing. The human being is seen more and more as a body of energy and light, whose many-layered depth and complexity must be wholy one, integrated within himself and with the universe, before he can be truly whole. As he practices as healer and is practised on as patient, he discovers the divine power within himself and others. He has a wonderful opportunity to learn what it is to be truly a channel for healing and help to others. He learns true humility as he expresses that this power flows only when healer and healee, therapist and patient, are both open to giving and receiving respectively.
So, the search for the light is taking different forms, from yoga to holistic health. But there was nowhere to go, really, for holistic health not contained within the great science of yoga which declares that mind, body, and spirit are one.