A Picture of Vitality: B.K.S. Iyengar

The Cure is Prevention, and The Remedy is a Journey

There’s a saying in Traditional Chinese Medicine which translates as “The saint cures the patient before he gets sick”, and the ‘saint’, or warrior, or hero(ine) is a high frequency vibration within the individual, as opposed to the low vibration which is an apathetic ogre focused only on obtaining objects of pleasure, or destroying any obstacles to that stand in its way.
We haven’t been taught about the prevention of disease and we’ve been lead to believe in the quick fix for the disease.

The prevention of disease lies in “letting vitality be your sovereignty”. Living in harmony with the law of life (yes, there is a law of life) and respecting our bodies is the prevention aspect.

If you’ve received a diagnosis, the first obstacle is in the acceptance of this, and then the next step is to commit the ultimate audacity, and change your fate. Improvement is always possible, and one needs to be open-minded to a multi-dimensional approach (giving anything a try), and a decent try. Patience, persistence, and positivity are the keys.
It is NOT easy, but nothing worth doing is, as they say. You have to have the courage to veer away from the beaten track and try things, like a scientist who can only test on herself, knowing that the result could even be undesirable.

Western doctors diagnose, and treat symptoms. They can also perform surgery, if the problem is that severe, but so often the problem can reoccur (as can happen with cancerous tumours) or a different set of problems can arise. The Pharmaceutical treatments always come with “side-effects”, and you won’t know exactly which side effects until you’ve tried them, as they affect everyone a little differently. These options may be unavoidable, and very helpful as a crutch, a step, or even a leap on the journey.

The problem itself, whatever it is, is a message from the body/mind saying “I don’t like this, stop this!”, and so you have to rise above the traditional, conformist, accepted lifestyles and opinions to live in accord with what the body/mind wants. If you don’t, you can’t expect improvement, and for most who don’t, things gradually get worse, and the person feels that life has treated him/her badly, when it’s really the other way around.

Western science is based on a “pull it apart and look at things separately” philosophy, whereas, Eastern science is based on a holistic approach: “everything is part of the whole”. History has shown there is value in both approaches, but Eastern medical science is steeped in over two thousand years of history, whereas Western medical science, relatively speaking, is in its infancy.

The first step on the journey to vitality is often diet, and when it comes to diet, I quite like the Macro-biotic diet, as it balances Western and Eastern sciences well, but the individual will always need to do their own research and experimentation to find out what works best for them, and that’s the fun of it.

A Picture of Vitality

I’ll be posting some examples of people who clearly manifest vitality in their everyday lives. I just came across 66 year old Annette Larkins, and find her journey into the raw food diet very interesting: