Is Yoga a necessity in today’s life?
I am a practitioner of yoga for the past couple of years. I feel refreshed when ever I engage in this practise. If I have a headache, I do not take any medicine, rather do a couple of asanas and I will be out of it. But this refreshment was short-lived. I do yoga everyday and If I skip it for a month or two, my body goes back to where it was when I first started and I had to start from scratch again. As I noticed this pattern repeatedly, I was curious to understand why it was necessary to do yoga repeatedly everyday in the first place. why can’t we do it only when we need it? What is the necessity to do it everyday if a short break from it is going to take you all the way back? Is yoga really connected to healthy living?? All the articles online said, it is healthy, it takes care of your heart, lungs and various organs with no science backing it up. This lead me to really think because I want everything to be reasoned to my satisfaction. None of the yoga masters could really answer my queries. So I wanted to delve deep into this myself.
This is when I explored more on these interesting communities across the world where people lived for 100+ years on an average. They are called centenarians. There were a lot of scientists doing research on these communities. One of the common pattern they noticed among these centenarians are they lived a simple life, had simple food, were physically active and were happy. Being physically active does not mean they did exercises, yoga or any other activities intentionally. All they did was doing their chores everyday and walk to every where. They rejoiced everyday of their life and did what they are passionate about. They did things slowly with no expectations. Today, we turn to yoga for healthy living. But the stats shows clearly that you don’t need any of this to live healthily. You can still lead a functioning and happy life even after 100 if we followed what centenarians did.
Now It was time to understand why did we invent Yoga in the first place. Development of yoga traced back to at-least 5000 to 10000 years ago. It will be complicated to cover everything related to yoga here. But the foremost thing which I understood from the history of yoga is the way it helps you to control your mind. Why should we control our mind? What is the need?
Most of the problems we face today in life is due to the inability for our mind to be in control. It keeps wandering and control us from the time we wake up till we go to sleep. Let me give some samples to give you some perspective.
- In researches conducted across the world, they noticed something called a placebo effect in many cases where the patients who are suffering from a disease actually were cured of the diseases by just saying that they were administered medicines even though they weren’t.
- In snake bites, the spread of poison across your body can be controlled just by controlling your mind and making it believe that you are going to be fine.
- You yourself would have felt how your mind takes little things and feels so badly many times while it can handle bigger situations with ease.
All these points to the fact that, the mind can be trained to trick your body to believe everything is just fine. When the body receives the signal being just fine, the chemical reactions happening in the body is in line with keeping the body and mind happy. So it becomes important to keep your mind balanced and happy in order to lead a healthy life.
Centenarians did not have a need to control their mind. Because they were having a peaceful simple life with no worries. But in today’s world, we are worried about everything. Right from eating good food, to wearing nice cloths, having a modern house, getting more clients, earning more money, settling our kids, fighting for our rights etc and this never stops till we die. This vicious cycle keeps our mind in a stressful situation all the time which in turn leads to many diseases and impacts the quality of life.
If you are one of those who are stuck in this cycle, then yoga will definitely make a lot more sense to you. If not, there is no need for you to take up this practice if you are naturally living a happy life. I would like to quote one science backed research on yoga which fascinated me.
This research states that when ever you do pranayama, it increases the saliva secretion. When these cells in the saliva glands are seen through a microscope, the cells show a healthy growth compared to the cell from a person who was not engaged in this yoga practice. Likewise, when they saw the cells of a person who was continuously watching some disturbing images from google, his cells were dying and sick. This is a beginner level research which definitely shows some promise on how yoga can help your life scientifically.
I conclude that yoga is not a necessity if your life is simple and happy. If you feel that you mind is not at ease or is messed up and you are having some ailments, yoga may definitely do wonders for you body. Again every body and mind is different and it is important for us to keep exploring what works best for us.
