What is meant by being healthy? Healthy is being physically strong, mentally calm and steady, and emotionally soft inside. You are not healthy when you feel rough inside. You feel that you are not healthy or are sick, when you feel rough in the body. In the same way when the mind is stiff or the mind is in judgement, it is not in good health. When the emotions are rough, you are not emotionally healthy. Being healthy is that flow from the innermost to the outer, and visa-versa, from the outer to the inner.
Life has four characteristics: It exists, evolves, expresses and extinguishes. And for life to exist, evolve, express and extinguish, it depends on the five elements: earth, water, air, ether and fire. According to Ayurveda, life does not consist of rigid compartments. It is a harmonious flow. Even these five elements of which the whole universe is made up of are not tight compartments of defined objects. They flow into one another.
Ayurveda is the study of life. Veda means knowledge, Ved to know and Ayur is life. The holistic approach of Ayurveda includes exercise, diet, breathing and meditation.
How do you attain good health? First, by attending to the ether element, that is the mind element. If your mind is bogged with too many impressions and thoughts and it is draining you of your resistance power, then where it is preparing your body for some illness. If the mind is clear, calm, meditative and pleasant, the body’s resistance will increase and it will not allow an illness to come into it. The first remedy is calming down the mind – coming from the subtlest aspect of creation, the ether.
Next is the air element. Breathing, aromatherapy, etc, can be done for this. And then light or colour therapy. Before an illness manifests in the body, by energising our system with prana, life energy, and breath, you can prevent the illness before it starts.
That is what yoga does. What does yoga mean? In the Yogasutras, Patanjali said that the purpose of yoga is stopping the sorrow before it arises. That is one of the most beautiful Sutras. In just one sentence he gives a formula. What is the purpose of this? To stop the sorrow before it arises, to burn the seed before it sprouts.
Next is the water element. Fasting and purifying the system with water, can bring a lot of balance in the system. And the final recourse, of course, are different herbs, medicinal herbs, medicines and surgery. All this comes in the final stage when everything else fails or when you neglect the other steps and the illness becomes inevitable. Our breath has a lot of secrets to offer us, because for every emotion in the mind, there is corresponding rhythm in the breath. And each rhythm affects certain parts of the body, physically. You only need to observe it and you can feel it. The great correlation between sensations, the level of body and moods of the mind is meditation. Attending to this and learning this, is meditation.
And then there is eating proper food. Proper food in the sense you eat only as much as is essential and that should be well-digested so that you don’t feel too heavy, even when you go to bed or when you wake up in the morning or come for meditation. The right amount of food—sweet, fresh and gently spiced.
What I would finally suggest is to take one week off every year for yourself. During that time, align yourself with nature. Wake up with the sunrise, eat proper food—just as much is necessary—do some exercises: Yoga and breathing exercises, a few minutes of singing, keeping silence and enjoying the creation. By aligning yourself with nature, your whole system gets recharged and you will feel vibrant and enthusiastic for a long time to come.