What is so great about being a human being?
What is it that the man can do better than the other creatures?
The answer is simple.
The man has the ability to understand the secrets of his life
and to overcome all his problems
Friday, January 19, 2007
Foreword
In the first half of our lives, we run after wealth sacrificing health. In the second half of our lives, we run after health sacrificing wealth !
Most of us go for education only with a focus on employment. We generally get so busy chasing money and status that we spend our early lives without any health consciousness. Our priority in these early days of our lives is not “well being”, but “wealth being”.
As we spend our days without giving any quality attention to our body, one day we are suddenly awakened by the emergence of blood pressure or a diabetes or a heart attack. Once taken ill, we run to medical practitioners and chemists and become dependent on them for our health. No wonder, there are lots of people in and around consulting rooms of doctors and hospitals.
In fact, none of our illnesses are ‘sudden’. We acquire illnesses over a long period through our wrong life style, viz. junk food, over eating, parties, lack of exercise, smoking, drinking, stressful living, etc.
Health is natural and sickness requires lot of efforts !
Our body does not relish our abuses and backfires by giving us a disease. By this, our body only tries to sensitize us. Instead of getting sensitized, we simply opt for some medicines. The medicines just desensitize our body for sometime. And once the effect of the tablets vanishes, the body again wakes up to re-sensitize us, this little time more severely.
This cycle of our trying to de-sensitize our body with medicines and the body trying to re-sensitize us with illnesses, continues throughout our lives without ourselves getting any real cure.
The sane and correct thing to do would be to listen to the message of our body and sensitize ourselves and change our life style. And this is what our body wants. This is what the nature wants you to do. The day we do it, we get in harmony with our body’s desire and from that day we can hope to lead a healthy life.
There is thus an urgent need for us to change ourselves from being passive consumers of medicines to becoming informed human beings. We need to take responsibility to our health and feel in charge of our well being.
This book is meant to make you just that.
It tries to gives you the total inside information on your health. And because till you modify yourself, you could fall ill from time to time, this book also tells you in part II as to how to make your own medicines with what has been provided by nature in and around your house.
This is a book that you would never finish reading. You would be reading it over and over again and again. You would be referring to it for guidance whenever you have a problem. And every time you refer to it, you would have a new sense of life !
Most of us go for education only with a focus on employment. We generally get so busy chasing money and status that we spend our early lives without any health consciousness. Our priority in these early days of our lives is not “well being”, but “wealth being”.
As we spend our days without giving any quality attention to our body, one day we are suddenly awakened by the emergence of blood pressure or a diabetes or a heart attack. Once taken ill, we run to medical practitioners and chemists and become dependent on them for our health. No wonder, there are lots of people in and around consulting rooms of doctors and hospitals.
In fact, none of our illnesses are ‘sudden’. We acquire illnesses over a long period through our wrong life style, viz. junk food, over eating, parties, lack of exercise, smoking, drinking, stressful living, etc.
Health is natural and sickness requires lot of efforts !
Our body does not relish our abuses and backfires by giving us a disease. By this, our body only tries to sensitize us. Instead of getting sensitized, we simply opt for some medicines. The medicines just desensitize our body for sometime. And once the effect of the tablets vanishes, the body again wakes up to re-sensitize us, this little time more severely.
This cycle of our trying to de-sensitize our body with medicines and the body trying to re-sensitize us with illnesses, continues throughout our lives without ourselves getting any real cure.
The sane and correct thing to do would be to listen to the message of our body and sensitize ourselves and change our life style. And this is what our body wants. This is what the nature wants you to do. The day we do it, we get in harmony with our body’s desire and from that day we can hope to lead a healthy life.
There is thus an urgent need for us to change ourselves from being passive consumers of medicines to becoming informed human beings. We need to take responsibility to our health and feel in charge of our well being.
This book is meant to make you just that.
It tries to gives you the total inside information on your health. And because till you modify yourself, you could fall ill from time to time, this book also tells you in part II as to how to make your own medicines with what has been provided by nature in and around your house.
This is a book that you would never finish reading. You would be reading it over and over again and again. You would be referring to it for guidance whenever you have a problem. And every time you refer to it, you would have a new sense of life !
Why do we fall ill?
In general most people carry the belief that our becoming ill is part of human life. That is not so.
We need to know that falling ill is not part of the designed system by nature. It is not necessary that people should develop stone in bladder, kidney failure, blood pressure etc. We need know that it is within one’s own power to live without diseases.
What is a disease?
For every part of our body to function well what is of basic need is blood. This blood reaches each cell of our body through the roads built inside our bodies, i.e. our blood vessels. It is this transport system which helps the blood to take strengths into our body cells and weaknesses outside the body cells. Unless this transport system functions well, our cells may not get the inputs they need and may not be able to send out their wastes. But unfortunately, most men eat and drink indiscriminately that this transport system gets choked with various wastes. This naturally affects our cells. For example
· Over eating gets you indigestion
· Smoking creates breathing problems
· Drinking creates liver related problems like cirrhosis
The second vital system is our body’s communication system. Our body’s communication system comprises our nervous network. It is through the nerves that the brain delivers commands and messages to various parts our body to act in a particular manner. When this communication network is affected, messages do not reach the concerned cells and this affects their functioning as desired. People very often become victims of impulses of irritation, discontentment, unhappiness, complain, hate, selfishness, greed, lust, dissatisfaction etc. which create a tense state in our nervous system. In a tense state, the nerves shrink affecting free flow of communication inside our body. Thus those who cannot control their temper develop diseases like rheumatic arthritis, gall stones, etc. For example
· Fear and anxiety get you blood pressure and insomnia
· Anger and jealousy land you in heart attack and paralysis.
· Greed and possessiveness become the cause for obesity and diabetes
Thus inside our bodies there are two important networks. They are the transport and communication networks, attended by blood vessels and nervous system. Imagine what would happen to our country if our transport and communication networks breakdown. Precisely the same thing happens within our bodies when these two systems get affected through wrongful eating and wrongful thinking.
So diseases occur when we do not live properly. It follows that the responsibility for your disease as well as cure lies within yourself. Thus all your diseases whether it is blood pressure, insomnia, diabetes, paralysis, heart attack, cancer or whatever, are your life style disorders. These can be controlled and prevented by the way you eat and think.
The affected people go to doctors for treatment. But even while under treatment, people continue with their habits, emotions and vices and end up with more serious diseases.
So let us realise that man makes his own diseases and he is the one who can bring back his health. Medical science recognises the fact that if we are in perfect equilibrium we do not catch illness.
Someone said, ‘people don’t need medication but they need only education’. How true! The cause of all our problems is “Agyaan” or lack of knowledge. It is like the fog that settles over our car windshield and you have to wipe it off to look ahead clearly.
Human desires
Human desires are of two kinds. One, the desires he creates for himself and the second,. the desires that arise in him
The first category desires are the ones which the man creates in himself. They arise from his mind. These are the desires that make him set his goals and pursue till achievement. They are the creative desires.
The second category desires are those which arise in us. They emanate from our organs like the tongue and the genitals. And they turn to be bad. The desire of our brain to prove ourselves as superior and others as wrong, is one such. It is this second category desire that accounts for all our problems, both physical and mental.
Those who can control these organ-based desires and be able to give the due priority to their minds, will become very healthy and successful.
Understanding the disease
When we suffer from any disease, we need only know that our body is working to rid of the problems, i.e the wastes [toxins] accumulated in the blood vessels and the shrinkages caused in our nervous sytem. Thus the so called diseases are nothing but elimination effort taking place within us. Symptoms such as the pain and the discomfort we feel only indicate that we are living haphazardly, physically or mentally.
The Diagnosis
When we feel any discomfort or pain, we run to doctors and they try to diagnose the specific disease we are suffering from. All doctors first try to find out which organ is affected. Depending upon the organ affected, it is named as ulcer, gallstone, migraine, constipation etc. By whatever name we may call a disease, Rheumatism, sinus, headache, gastritis, etc. they are all nothing but effects of our wrong living. The cure would come the day we find the cause and eliminate the same. Not when we take medicines.
Development of diseases
Our diseases fall into three levels.
At level one, diseases like fever, cold, sore throat, etc. fall. These are temporary diseases which come to remove the blocks in our body and go on their own after completing their job, all due to body’s self healing powers.
In majority of the cases, when level one problems come, the patients do not support the body’s self healing processes. They try to interfere with the body processes by taking medicines to control fever, cold, sore throat etc. and desensitize our body. Because of this desensitization, they stop feeling the discomfort of fever, cold etc. and they believe they have become OK. But in reality what happens is that the body had been desensitized and is no more able to battle with the bacteria. Since the battle had stopped, we feel at ease. But the bacterias thrive inside our body because there is no attack on them. And these bacteria thrive and create level two problems inside our bodies.
Thus at level two, diseases like diabetes, blood pressure, arthritis, asthma, etc. affect the people. These diseases are permanent diseases which once afflict a person, do not go off easily. These level two diseases come to those persons who have not onoy disturbed their self healing powers as above said, but also accumulate further wastes / toxins both through the intake of synthetic medicines but also through continued wrong living.. Their internal healing power would return when they make life style reform and avoid toxin accumulation and help toxin elimination. It means reform in food habits and thinking habits should come first before they get their cure.
We all know that those who suffer from diabetes, blood pressure, etc. do not make life style reforms but continue to desensitize their bodies through medicines. Thus a patient post graduates himself to level three, when he takes no effort to reform himself at level two. It is only level two diseases get converted into tuberculosis, tumor, cancer, parkinsons disease, etc where the patient gets completely immobilised. Thus level three diseases are immobilizing diseases.
Thus, all major diseases are the culmination of years of abuse and years of accumulation of toxins without any life style reform.
Diseases are nothing but our wake up calls. Diseases convey a message to us. They tell us that we are doing something wrong and there is need to change our life style.
Let us realise that diseases are not meant to give us trouble. They are meant to actually save our lives because they prompt life style reform in us.
What do doctors say? Apart from giving medicines, they all tell a patient to make changes in his eating and living habits. Same things as the body communicates. If the patient can listen to what his own body tells him, he need not go to a doctor at all.
Most of us do change our life style after we experience a heart attack, or a blood pressure or a diabetes. It would be great if we could make life changes even before we get the above.
Let us understand this message from the diseases. Let us reiterate that diseases come to us for our good. They are our wake up calls to make changes in our lives.
We can’t make the past unhappen. But we can change ourselves from today by opting for new habits.
We need to know that falling ill is not part of the designed system by nature. It is not necessary that people should develop stone in bladder, kidney failure, blood pressure etc. We need know that it is within one’s own power to live without diseases.
What is a disease?
For every part of our body to function well what is of basic need is blood. This blood reaches each cell of our body through the roads built inside our bodies, i.e. our blood vessels. It is this transport system which helps the blood to take strengths into our body cells and weaknesses outside the body cells. Unless this transport system functions well, our cells may not get the inputs they need and may not be able to send out their wastes. But unfortunately, most men eat and drink indiscriminately that this transport system gets choked with various wastes. This naturally affects our cells. For example
· Over eating gets you indigestion
· Smoking creates breathing problems
· Drinking creates liver related problems like cirrhosis
The second vital system is our body’s communication system. Our body’s communication system comprises our nervous network. It is through the nerves that the brain delivers commands and messages to various parts our body to act in a particular manner. When this communication network is affected, messages do not reach the concerned cells and this affects their functioning as desired. People very often become victims of impulses of irritation, discontentment, unhappiness, complain, hate, selfishness, greed, lust, dissatisfaction etc. which create a tense state in our nervous system. In a tense state, the nerves shrink affecting free flow of communication inside our body. Thus those who cannot control their temper develop diseases like rheumatic arthritis, gall stones, etc. For example
· Fear and anxiety get you blood pressure and insomnia
· Anger and jealousy land you in heart attack and paralysis.
· Greed and possessiveness become the cause for obesity and diabetes
Thus inside our bodies there are two important networks. They are the transport and communication networks, attended by blood vessels and nervous system. Imagine what would happen to our country if our transport and communication networks breakdown. Precisely the same thing happens within our bodies when these two systems get affected through wrongful eating and wrongful thinking.
So diseases occur when we do not live properly. It follows that the responsibility for your disease as well as cure lies within yourself. Thus all your diseases whether it is blood pressure, insomnia, diabetes, paralysis, heart attack, cancer or whatever, are your life style disorders. These can be controlled and prevented by the way you eat and think.
The affected people go to doctors for treatment. But even while under treatment, people continue with their habits, emotions and vices and end up with more serious diseases.
So let us realise that man makes his own diseases and he is the one who can bring back his health. Medical science recognises the fact that if we are in perfect equilibrium we do not catch illness.
Someone said, ‘people don’t need medication but they need only education’. How true! The cause of all our problems is “Agyaan” or lack of knowledge. It is like the fog that settles over our car windshield and you have to wipe it off to look ahead clearly.
Human desires
Human desires are of two kinds. One, the desires he creates for himself and the second,. the desires that arise in him
The first category desires are the ones which the man creates in himself. They arise from his mind. These are the desires that make him set his goals and pursue till achievement. They are the creative desires.
The second category desires are those which arise in us. They emanate from our organs like the tongue and the genitals. And they turn to be bad. The desire of our brain to prove ourselves as superior and others as wrong, is one such. It is this second category desire that accounts for all our problems, both physical and mental.
Those who can control these organ-based desires and be able to give the due priority to their minds, will become very healthy and successful.
Understanding the disease
When we suffer from any disease, we need only know that our body is working to rid of the problems, i.e the wastes [toxins] accumulated in the blood vessels and the shrinkages caused in our nervous sytem. Thus the so called diseases are nothing but elimination effort taking place within us. Symptoms such as the pain and the discomfort we feel only indicate that we are living haphazardly, physically or mentally.
The Diagnosis
When we feel any discomfort or pain, we run to doctors and they try to diagnose the specific disease we are suffering from. All doctors first try to find out which organ is affected. Depending upon the organ affected, it is named as ulcer, gallstone, migraine, constipation etc. By whatever name we may call a disease, Rheumatism, sinus, headache, gastritis, etc. they are all nothing but effects of our wrong living. The cure would come the day we find the cause and eliminate the same. Not when we take medicines.
Development of diseases
Our diseases fall into three levels.
At level one, diseases like fever, cold, sore throat, etc. fall. These are temporary diseases which come to remove the blocks in our body and go on their own after completing their job, all due to body’s self healing powers.
In majority of the cases, when level one problems come, the patients do not support the body’s self healing processes. They try to interfere with the body processes by taking medicines to control fever, cold, sore throat etc. and desensitize our body. Because of this desensitization, they stop feeling the discomfort of fever, cold etc. and they believe they have become OK. But in reality what happens is that the body had been desensitized and is no more able to battle with the bacteria. Since the battle had stopped, we feel at ease. But the bacterias thrive inside our body because there is no attack on them. And these bacteria thrive and create level two problems inside our bodies.
Thus at level two, diseases like diabetes, blood pressure, arthritis, asthma, etc. affect the people. These diseases are permanent diseases which once afflict a person, do not go off easily. These level two diseases come to those persons who have not onoy disturbed their self healing powers as above said, but also accumulate further wastes / toxins both through the intake of synthetic medicines but also through continued wrong living.. Their internal healing power would return when they make life style reform and avoid toxin accumulation and help toxin elimination. It means reform in food habits and thinking habits should come first before they get their cure.
We all know that those who suffer from diabetes, blood pressure, etc. do not make life style reforms but continue to desensitize their bodies through medicines. Thus a patient post graduates himself to level three, when he takes no effort to reform himself at level two. It is only level two diseases get converted into tuberculosis, tumor, cancer, parkinsons disease, etc where the patient gets completely immobilised. Thus level three diseases are immobilizing diseases.
Thus, all major diseases are the culmination of years of abuse and years of accumulation of toxins without any life style reform.
Diseases are nothing but our wake up calls. Diseases convey a message to us. They tell us that we are doing something wrong and there is need to change our life style.
Let us realise that diseases are not meant to give us trouble. They are meant to actually save our lives because they prompt life style reform in us.
What do doctors say? Apart from giving medicines, they all tell a patient to make changes in his eating and living habits. Same things as the body communicates. If the patient can listen to what his own body tells him, he need not go to a doctor at all.
Most of us do change our life style after we experience a heart attack, or a blood pressure or a diabetes. It would be great if we could make life changes even before we get the above.
Let us understand this message from the diseases. Let us reiterate that diseases come to us for our good. They are our wake up calls to make changes in our lives.
We can’t make the past unhappen. But we can change ourselves from today by opting for new habits.
The Mind-Body connection
Brain Vs. Mind
Health is not the mere absence of disease. It is the state of physical, mental, social and spiritual well being. The western philosophy is generally in favour of emergency attendance to our problems while the eastern approach is towards holistic health maintenance.
Well, we know about the western approach totally as we are already submerged into it. Whenever we pick up some disease, we immediately rush to medical professionals, undergo the needed tests and opt for medication and surgery to immediately restore our health. Thus we in a way have lost touch with eastern approaches.
According to eastern philosophy, every human being is composed of four elements. They are brain, body, mind and soul. Of these four, people concentrate on the first two, the brain and the body.
Parents send their children to schools and colleges to develop their brain. Children in their younger days lend their brain for learning.
But once they attain puberty, their attention gets diverted to their body. Human body consists of many organs, both external and internal. Of the external organs, the most important ones are the sensory organs. The source of our problems is our sensory organs. In any human activity, their sensory organs and their needs appear to dominate. People everywhere are seen stuck to the needs of their sensory organs. Our sensory organs always focus on what is not necessary for us. And that is where the source of human problems lie. In attendance to their body, many people even tend to neglect their brain development.
Thus the brain and body appear to dominate people’s lives these days. This priority given to meeting the needs of brain and body, have eclipsed the importance of our mind and soul. With the prominence given to these, there is no mention of mind and soul in the modern education system. With focus only on two out of four, people have remained only half human beings. This has accounted for loss of balance in human beings.
We all have four sides to look at, viz. outward, inward, downward and upward. Brain looks outward. Sensory organs look downward. Mind is meant to look inward. And our soul is meant to help us look upward. With little awareness on mind and soul, people have difficulty in looking either inward or upward. Unless we are able to look inward and upward, there is no scope for human development. Hence there is need for mind and soul education. Even if we leave aside looking upward, looking inward is very crucial for our leading purposeful and happy life.
All human desires first arise inside our minds. When the mind comes up with a desire, the brain starts thinking as to how to attain it. The brain plans as to how to achieve, when to achieve, where to achieve and what to do for the same. Thus brain is our organ for planning the strategies.. After due planning, it gives orders to the body for executing the plans.
Thus in the system, our mind is the starting point. Where the mind does not desire anything, the brain and the body remain inactive. Unless the mind comes out with a desire, there is no effort from our brain or the body.
The Mind King
Human structuring has been conceived on the lines of a kingdom. Between mind, brain and the body organs, mind is the king, the brain is the minister and the organs are the army. The king conceives, the minister plans and the army executes. But in many people, the army had staged a coup and taken over the kingdom. They have arrested the king and the minister and made them work for them.
There are so many forces of energy in this world such as wind, heat, electricity, gravitation, etc. What is common in these energy sources is that they are all invisible. God has kept all the energy sources as invisible. Human mind is one such energy source and it is also invisible. To understand what is invisible, we need special education.
The mind being the king and the conceiver, everything that happens to us first starts from our minds. And then it is taken over by our brain and passed on to our body to behave in a directed manner. Thus any disturbance to the mind is also taken over by our brain and passed on to our body. No minister can remain unaffected by the disturbance caused to the king. Thus it can be said that any disturbance to the mind also affects the Body as mind and body are inseparable. Thus all disturbances to our mind get translated into our body symptoms. For example
Role of Mind in your health
Habitual anger = Ulcer
Emotional frustrations = Digestion disorders
Over sensitivity = Higher blood pressure
Tension = Migraine
Feelings of insecurity = Sleeplessness, Constipation
Chronic unhappiness = Multiple aches, Indigestion
Meaning of illness
Thus all the visible aspects of our illness correspond to our mental state. Diseases thus simply mean that we need to reintegrate our lives with the human spirit, i.e. with life of truth, patience and love.
Some of the illnesses and their meanings are given here under. They can help us to understand the illnesses and to take the needed corrective action.
Anemia
Lack of joy in your life. Approach life dynamically. Make use of your energy. Open up yourself
Appetite loss
You are only half alive. Increase your inner capacity to live with things as they come. Relax.
Arthritis
You are inwardly rigid and stubborn. You have bitterness, resentment. If only you turn loving, friendly and understanding you will feel free both internally and externally. If you do not change yourself, you will be promoted to arthrosis. Dance in life and your problems are gone.
Asthma
You long for love and recognition. Your anger presently prevent you from giving love. Give love, you will receive love. Breathe freely. Give love and get love and recognition.
Back complaint
You are overburdened. You feel you don’t get emotional support from people near and dear. So, you too hold back love and affection. You have possibly also have financial and other worries and fear of future.
Bad breath
Your breath corresponds to the thoughts you carry around. Something you think is unpleasant. Take a good look at the kind of thoughts you are preoccupied with. Let friendliness and honesty prevail within you.
BP - high
You are living under some conflict and pressure. You have not expressed your thoughts and emotions for a long time. Learn to let them go. Face problems with calmness.
BP - low
You are trying to avoid problems due to lack vital energy and stamina. You find it difficult to assert yourself. Be active and feel strong.
Chest pains
Something is clogging your chest. What is it? Separation? Striving for power? Some fear is lurking? Enjoy the beauty of life and feel close to people.
Constipation
You are holding on to things. It could be your money, property, materials or old ideas. Practise detachment. Leave outlived ideas. Do not repress feelings. Feel internally comfortable.
Cramps.
Presence of inner tension. Let life flow.
Diabetes
You have some longings. You are not able to be sweet and so you cannot take sweets. I mean, you are lacking in sweetness of life. Let go of the past. Love, fun and games are basic needs of life. Give them to others and they will give them to you.
Glaucoma
You have much to cry but you are avoiding. The unreleased tears are creating pressure inside your eye.
Head ache
Indication of tension and conflict. Existence of ambitions and external demands. You are living your head too much. Sexual problems could also be a cause. Do not suppress emotions. Relax and create space for peace, love and joy.
Heart problems
Are you a heartless person? Hard hearted? Half hearted? Do you believe life is a fight for survival? Do you believe that life is not worth living? Then you had it. Learn to live with your heart and shed emotional problems. Believe in joyful living.
Heart attack
Only a hard heart can break. You are one who attacks the heart of others. Your anger and annoyance have now turned back on you with full force. Open up your heart. Love people.
Insomnia
You have not ended your day properly. You are carrying over your unfinished tasks to your bed. You feel incomplete. You have anxieties and worry. Feel at peace. End your day well. Have peace of mind. Do not worry.
Pimples
You are suppressing something out of fear, insecurity or shame. Or you as teenager are suppressing your sexuality. They are breaking out and getting visible.
Ulcer Deodenal
Your aggressions, tension, fear, anxiety and pressure are longstanding. They are eating you up. Beware.
Ulcer gastric
You are unable to vent your feelings and aggression and allowing them to turn on yourself. You are engaging in self destruction. You are yearning for motherly warmth and protection and you desire to be loved and cared for. Consciously digest things you don’t like and avoid conflicts.
The lesson:
Emotionally ill, cannot be cured through pill
Our body is the largest pharmaceutical industry in the world and has the capacity to produce each and every drug we need. The raw material needed for production of these chemicals are right food and right thoughts. If your thought is peace and love, you produce positive chemicals and if your thought is anger, you produce negative chemicals. When you produce negative chemicals, you incur disease.
We generally strive to be healthy, in order to be happy;
But we should strive to be happy, in order to be healthy !!
Health is not the mere absence of disease. It is the state of physical, mental, social and spiritual well being. The western philosophy is generally in favour of emergency attendance to our problems while the eastern approach is towards holistic health maintenance.
Well, we know about the western approach totally as we are already submerged into it. Whenever we pick up some disease, we immediately rush to medical professionals, undergo the needed tests and opt for medication and surgery to immediately restore our health. Thus we in a way have lost touch with eastern approaches.
According to eastern philosophy, every human being is composed of four elements. They are brain, body, mind and soul. Of these four, people concentrate on the first two, the brain and the body.
Parents send their children to schools and colleges to develop their brain. Children in their younger days lend their brain for learning.
But once they attain puberty, their attention gets diverted to their body. Human body consists of many organs, both external and internal. Of the external organs, the most important ones are the sensory organs. The source of our problems is our sensory organs. In any human activity, their sensory organs and their needs appear to dominate. People everywhere are seen stuck to the needs of their sensory organs. Our sensory organs always focus on what is not necessary for us. And that is where the source of human problems lie. In attendance to their body, many people even tend to neglect their brain development.
Thus the brain and body appear to dominate people’s lives these days. This priority given to meeting the needs of brain and body, have eclipsed the importance of our mind and soul. With the prominence given to these, there is no mention of mind and soul in the modern education system. With focus only on two out of four, people have remained only half human beings. This has accounted for loss of balance in human beings.
We all have four sides to look at, viz. outward, inward, downward and upward. Brain looks outward. Sensory organs look downward. Mind is meant to look inward. And our soul is meant to help us look upward. With little awareness on mind and soul, people have difficulty in looking either inward or upward. Unless we are able to look inward and upward, there is no scope for human development. Hence there is need for mind and soul education. Even if we leave aside looking upward, looking inward is very crucial for our leading purposeful and happy life.
All human desires first arise inside our minds. When the mind comes up with a desire, the brain starts thinking as to how to attain it. The brain plans as to how to achieve, when to achieve, where to achieve and what to do for the same. Thus brain is our organ for planning the strategies.. After due planning, it gives orders to the body for executing the plans.
Thus in the system, our mind is the starting point. Where the mind does not desire anything, the brain and the body remain inactive. Unless the mind comes out with a desire, there is no effort from our brain or the body.
The Mind King
Human structuring has been conceived on the lines of a kingdom. Between mind, brain and the body organs, mind is the king, the brain is the minister and the organs are the army. The king conceives, the minister plans and the army executes. But in many people, the army had staged a coup and taken over the kingdom. They have arrested the king and the minister and made them work for them.
There are so many forces of energy in this world such as wind, heat, electricity, gravitation, etc. What is common in these energy sources is that they are all invisible. God has kept all the energy sources as invisible. Human mind is one such energy source and it is also invisible. To understand what is invisible, we need special education.
The mind being the king and the conceiver, everything that happens to us first starts from our minds. And then it is taken over by our brain and passed on to our body to behave in a directed manner. Thus any disturbance to the mind is also taken over by our brain and passed on to our body. No minister can remain unaffected by the disturbance caused to the king. Thus it can be said that any disturbance to the mind also affects the Body as mind and body are inseparable. Thus all disturbances to our mind get translated into our body symptoms. For example
Role of Mind in your health
Habitual anger = Ulcer
Emotional frustrations = Digestion disorders
Over sensitivity = Higher blood pressure
Tension = Migraine
Feelings of insecurity = Sleeplessness, Constipation
Chronic unhappiness = Multiple aches, Indigestion
Meaning of illness
Thus all the visible aspects of our illness correspond to our mental state. Diseases thus simply mean that we need to reintegrate our lives with the human spirit, i.e. with life of truth, patience and love.
Some of the illnesses and their meanings are given here under. They can help us to understand the illnesses and to take the needed corrective action.
Anemia
Lack of joy in your life. Approach life dynamically. Make use of your energy. Open up yourself
Appetite loss
You are only half alive. Increase your inner capacity to live with things as they come. Relax.
Arthritis
You are inwardly rigid and stubborn. You have bitterness, resentment. If only you turn loving, friendly and understanding you will feel free both internally and externally. If you do not change yourself, you will be promoted to arthrosis. Dance in life and your problems are gone.
Asthma
You long for love and recognition. Your anger presently prevent you from giving love. Give love, you will receive love. Breathe freely. Give love and get love and recognition.
Back complaint
You are overburdened. You feel you don’t get emotional support from people near and dear. So, you too hold back love and affection. You have possibly also have financial and other worries and fear of future.
Bad breath
Your breath corresponds to the thoughts you carry around. Something you think is unpleasant. Take a good look at the kind of thoughts you are preoccupied with. Let friendliness and honesty prevail within you.
BP - high
You are living under some conflict and pressure. You have not expressed your thoughts and emotions for a long time. Learn to let them go. Face problems with calmness.
BP - low
You are trying to avoid problems due to lack vital energy and stamina. You find it difficult to assert yourself. Be active and feel strong.
Chest pains
Something is clogging your chest. What is it? Separation? Striving for power? Some fear is lurking? Enjoy the beauty of life and feel close to people.
Constipation
You are holding on to things. It could be your money, property, materials or old ideas. Practise detachment. Leave outlived ideas. Do not repress feelings. Feel internally comfortable.
Cramps.
Presence of inner tension. Let life flow.
Diabetes
You have some longings. You are not able to be sweet and so you cannot take sweets. I mean, you are lacking in sweetness of life. Let go of the past. Love, fun and games are basic needs of life. Give them to others and they will give them to you.
Glaucoma
You have much to cry but you are avoiding. The unreleased tears are creating pressure inside your eye.
Head ache
Indication of tension and conflict. Existence of ambitions and external demands. You are living your head too much. Sexual problems could also be a cause. Do not suppress emotions. Relax and create space for peace, love and joy.
Heart problems
Are you a heartless person? Hard hearted? Half hearted? Do you believe life is a fight for survival? Do you believe that life is not worth living? Then you had it. Learn to live with your heart and shed emotional problems. Believe in joyful living.
Heart attack
Only a hard heart can break. You are one who attacks the heart of others. Your anger and annoyance have now turned back on you with full force. Open up your heart. Love people.
Insomnia
You have not ended your day properly. You are carrying over your unfinished tasks to your bed. You feel incomplete. You have anxieties and worry. Feel at peace. End your day well. Have peace of mind. Do not worry.
Pimples
You are suppressing something out of fear, insecurity or shame. Or you as teenager are suppressing your sexuality. They are breaking out and getting visible.
Ulcer Deodenal
Your aggressions, tension, fear, anxiety and pressure are longstanding. They are eating you up. Beware.
Ulcer gastric
You are unable to vent your feelings and aggression and allowing them to turn on yourself. You are engaging in self destruction. You are yearning for motherly warmth and protection and you desire to be loved and cared for. Consciously digest things you don’t like and avoid conflicts.
The lesson:
Emotionally ill, cannot be cured through pill
Our body is the largest pharmaceutical industry in the world and has the capacity to produce each and every drug we need. The raw material needed for production of these chemicals are right food and right thoughts. If your thought is peace and love, you produce positive chemicals and if your thought is anger, you produce negative chemicals. When you produce negative chemicals, you incur disease.
We generally strive to be healthy, in order to be happy;
But we should strive to be happy, in order to be healthy !!
Loudspeakers in our Body
A number of speakers have been fitted inside our bodies by our Creator. These speakers speak to you loud enough and give you realistic messages from time to time. What are these loud speakers?
Hair
Hair is one of the loudest speakers of your health. The amount of hair fall you notice every day from your head indicates the health level you enjoy. If your health is good, there is minimum hair fall. And if you suffer from more hair fall, it is a definite indication that you suffer from ill health.
Tongue
When you visit your doctor, he first asks you to open your mouth and show your tongue. Why? It is because, your tongue shows it all. For some their tongue is darkish, for some it is yellowish. For those suffering from serious diseases, it is whitish. If it shows a film over it, the doctor knows that you have accumulated lot of undigested food inside your body. Thus our tongue is another loud speaker inside ourselves. Only those who are trained to read its messages can benefit from it.
Eyes
Your eyes also function as diagnostic organs. They indicate what is wrong with which part of your body. Trained iridologists can tell you your health status just by seeing you. I still remember the day when I took my wife to a respected doctor for attendance to some ailment in her. The doctor, an old professional, refused any treatment to my wife even before she sat on the chair in front of the doctor’s table. Surprised at his refusal, I asked him the reason. He said ‘the eyes of your wife tell me she has just conceived a child and no medicine should be administered now and that I can bring her back after a month’. This surprised not only me, but even my wife since she did not know she was pregnant. But it came out to be true and our respect for that doctor rose sky high and we revere him even to date, long after his demise.
Iridology is the science which informs us about the eruption of any disease in our body. You know our iris is connected to every part of our body by the nervous system. This has helped the different regions of our iris reflecting the condition of every tissue, organ, limb and part of the body.
The left iris reflects the left side of our body and the right iris, the right side. The top of the iris reflects the head and the bottom, the legs. Our body is thus mapped around the circle. The surprising thing is an examination of the eye would reveal the status of your health much before the disease had actually set in.
There are four methods of diagnosing from the iris. They are:
When the threads of the iris are broken
When lacunae appears between threads in a particular zone
When the color of the iris has changed, faded or darkened
When there are plain spots or freckles
The right time to watch the iris is in the morning, using a simple hand lens to see from the side angle. One can, with practice tell the broken threads even without the lens. This is a non-intrusive diagnosis and you can gauge even the extent of recovery, which gets well reflected in the iris.
If you have elders at home, they would also tell you from time to time about your health just by observing your eyes.
If you have watery eyes, they would say you have cold.
If you have dark circles around your eye, you are anemic
If you have yellowish eyes, they would say you jaundice.
If you have blurred vision, you have high blood pressure or diabetes. And if you have itching or burning, you have deficiency of vital B-2.
Thus if your eyes have no problem, it means your health is fine and vice versa. Thus if your food habits are good, your eyes would be good. So take care.
Hands and Nails
There are some specialists who could diagnose your health status just by observing your nails, your hair or skin complexion. If your nails are curved over the ends of the fingers or where there is clubbing of fingers, it is possible your blood suffers from insufficiency of oxygen and you could be developing cancer.
If your nails are pale, you definitely suffer from anemia.
If your nails are white with bigger moon at the bottom or if there are red areas towards the edge of your palm, say below the base of your fingers, check the condition of your liver.
If your nails tend to come away from your fingers, may be you have an over active thyroid gland.
If there is tremor in your hands, you may be suffering from nervous weakness.
Palm
Your body tells you what is in store for you. And that is all written over your palm. Your palm contains a number of lines and the kind of line on a specific location has something to convey about your future. Well, palmistry is a great branch of science and we certainly don’t intend to go over it in this book.
Pulse
Another body status indicator is your pulse. Even the common man knows he has a pulse and that is checked by any doctor he visits. Only thing is he does not know how to diagnose himself with his pulse. But a trained doctor knows what the pulse indicates. It appears that there are more than 150 pulse descriptions, each one indicating one kind of disease present in a body.
Blood and Urine
You know Doctors find out about your health status from your blood and urine. Its color and sediments can reveal many facets of your body. For example, if contains excess of protein, it means your kidneys are in trouble. Sugar in urine suggests diabetes. When urine contains bile, liver needs to be tested. And when it contains pus, it is an indicator of infection in the urinary track. No narcotic can hide what he is from the urine test.
Another way to find out the state of your kidney is to compare the weight of urine to the weight of ordinary water.
Similarly useful indicators we know are your stools and phlegm. If your stool is very hard and in droplets, you suffer from constipation. To denote a healthy you, it needs to be semi liquid and need come out quite easy.
Dreams
Psychoanalysts say, “Tell us your dreams and we will diagnose your troubles”. It because, the contents of dreams have a scientific value. Dreams reveal our secret wishes, our fears, loves and hatreds. In dreams, our true self comes to the surface. So, if we know how to study our dreams, we can learn how to release our mental tensions and the consequent illnesses.
Intuition
You have something called an intuition. It is a little voice fixed by God inside yourself. It tells you what to do and what not to do. For example, it tells you not to over eat. While having diabetes, it tells you not to take sweets, even when you are tempted to take it. In general it gives you sane advice from time to time.
Thirst
When your body tells you to drink water, it tells you that the body’s water level has gone down. You know the body needs water to digest, to absorb nutrients and to get rid of wastes. Well, it is your air conditioning system inside your body.
Fatigue
Tiresome in your body means, you are shown a red light and asked to stop. Tiresome communicates that your body’s fuel has depleted. Through making you tired, your body helps you to stop killing yourself.
Sickness
As already stated in this book, all our sickness are a message to us. They all tell us to rethink about what we do and how we live. Those who can read these messages, can greatly benefit and lead a very healthy life.
The intention behind bringing out the topic of our internal loud speakers is that we have been gifted with a number of status indicators so that we try to make a self assessment of ourselves and modify our life style for the better.
Hair
Hair is one of the loudest speakers of your health. The amount of hair fall you notice every day from your head indicates the health level you enjoy. If your health is good, there is minimum hair fall. And if you suffer from more hair fall, it is a definite indication that you suffer from ill health.
Tongue
When you visit your doctor, he first asks you to open your mouth and show your tongue. Why? It is because, your tongue shows it all. For some their tongue is darkish, for some it is yellowish. For those suffering from serious diseases, it is whitish. If it shows a film over it, the doctor knows that you have accumulated lot of undigested food inside your body. Thus our tongue is another loud speaker inside ourselves. Only those who are trained to read its messages can benefit from it.
Eyes
Your eyes also function as diagnostic organs. They indicate what is wrong with which part of your body. Trained iridologists can tell you your health status just by seeing you. I still remember the day when I took my wife to a respected doctor for attendance to some ailment in her. The doctor, an old professional, refused any treatment to my wife even before she sat on the chair in front of the doctor’s table. Surprised at his refusal, I asked him the reason. He said ‘the eyes of your wife tell me she has just conceived a child and no medicine should be administered now and that I can bring her back after a month’. This surprised not only me, but even my wife since she did not know she was pregnant. But it came out to be true and our respect for that doctor rose sky high and we revere him even to date, long after his demise.
Iridology is the science which informs us about the eruption of any disease in our body. You know our iris is connected to every part of our body by the nervous system. This has helped the different regions of our iris reflecting the condition of every tissue, organ, limb and part of the body.
The left iris reflects the left side of our body and the right iris, the right side. The top of the iris reflects the head and the bottom, the legs. Our body is thus mapped around the circle. The surprising thing is an examination of the eye would reveal the status of your health much before the disease had actually set in.
There are four methods of diagnosing from the iris. They are:
When the threads of the iris are broken
When lacunae appears between threads in a particular zone
When the color of the iris has changed, faded or darkened
When there are plain spots or freckles
The right time to watch the iris is in the morning, using a simple hand lens to see from the side angle. One can, with practice tell the broken threads even without the lens. This is a non-intrusive diagnosis and you can gauge even the extent of recovery, which gets well reflected in the iris.
If you have elders at home, they would also tell you from time to time about your health just by observing your eyes.
If you have watery eyes, they would say you have cold.
If you have dark circles around your eye, you are anemic
If you have yellowish eyes, they would say you jaundice.
If you have blurred vision, you have high blood pressure or diabetes. And if you have itching or burning, you have deficiency of vital B-2.
Thus if your eyes have no problem, it means your health is fine and vice versa. Thus if your food habits are good, your eyes would be good. So take care.
Hands and Nails
There are some specialists who could diagnose your health status just by observing your nails, your hair or skin complexion. If your nails are curved over the ends of the fingers or where there is clubbing of fingers, it is possible your blood suffers from insufficiency of oxygen and you could be developing cancer.
If your nails are pale, you definitely suffer from anemia.
If your nails are white with bigger moon at the bottom or if there are red areas towards the edge of your palm, say below the base of your fingers, check the condition of your liver.
If your nails tend to come away from your fingers, may be you have an over active thyroid gland.
If there is tremor in your hands, you may be suffering from nervous weakness.
Palm
Your body tells you what is in store for you. And that is all written over your palm. Your palm contains a number of lines and the kind of line on a specific location has something to convey about your future. Well, palmistry is a great branch of science and we certainly don’t intend to go over it in this book.
Pulse
Another body status indicator is your pulse. Even the common man knows he has a pulse and that is checked by any doctor he visits. Only thing is he does not know how to diagnose himself with his pulse. But a trained doctor knows what the pulse indicates. It appears that there are more than 150 pulse descriptions, each one indicating one kind of disease present in a body.
Blood and Urine
You know Doctors find out about your health status from your blood and urine. Its color and sediments can reveal many facets of your body. For example, if contains excess of protein, it means your kidneys are in trouble. Sugar in urine suggests diabetes. When urine contains bile, liver needs to be tested. And when it contains pus, it is an indicator of infection in the urinary track. No narcotic can hide what he is from the urine test.
Another way to find out the state of your kidney is to compare the weight of urine to the weight of ordinary water.
Similarly useful indicators we know are your stools and phlegm. If your stool is very hard and in droplets, you suffer from constipation. To denote a healthy you, it needs to be semi liquid and need come out quite easy.
Dreams
Psychoanalysts say, “Tell us your dreams and we will diagnose your troubles”. It because, the contents of dreams have a scientific value. Dreams reveal our secret wishes, our fears, loves and hatreds. In dreams, our true self comes to the surface. So, if we know how to study our dreams, we can learn how to release our mental tensions and the consequent illnesses.
Intuition
You have something called an intuition. It is a little voice fixed by God inside yourself. It tells you what to do and what not to do. For example, it tells you not to over eat. While having diabetes, it tells you not to take sweets, even when you are tempted to take it. In general it gives you sane advice from time to time.
Thirst
When your body tells you to drink water, it tells you that the body’s water level has gone down. You know the body needs water to digest, to absorb nutrients and to get rid of wastes. Well, it is your air conditioning system inside your body.
Fatigue
Tiresome in your body means, you are shown a red light and asked to stop. Tiresome communicates that your body’s fuel has depleted. Through making you tired, your body helps you to stop killing yourself.
Sickness
As already stated in this book, all our sickness are a message to us. They all tell us to rethink about what we do and how we live. Those who can read these messages, can greatly benefit and lead a very healthy life.
The intention behind bringing out the topic of our internal loud speakers is that we have been gifted with a number of status indicators so that we try to make a self assessment of ourselves and modify our life style for the better.
Eating Habits
Rules for Eating
A Real Life case
One day in June 1822, a gun went off accidentally in a crowded store in Michigan, USA. The person who got wounded was Alexis St. Martin. He got wounded in his side. He was immediately rushed to a doctor and he ended up with a hole on his left side near the stomach. And this hole remained there till he died after fifty eight years. But this was no small event.
Through this hole, one could see his stomach functioning deep inside. And Dr. Beaumont, by employing St. Martin in his laboratory, observed through this window as to how the human stomach functions and published his “Experiments and observations on the gastric juice and the physiology of digestion”, the most acclaimed original classic in the field of medicine.
Dr. Beaumont found the stomach walls soft and velvet looking and found its color is pale and pink. He observed that as soon as we put into stomach something, hundreds of droplets trickle down the walls of the stomach. With the help of a rubber tube, he collected these droplets and put them on a small piece of boiled beef and heated it to the temperature of stomach and in ten hours it was completely digested. He then conducted very many varieties of tests with varieties of foods. . He found fatty foods are difficult to digest and that the stomach generally requires much less food than generally supplied to it. His findings were great guides to our eating habits.
Sometimes St. Martin was calm and sometimes angry and sometimes vexed. The doctor noticed that when St. Martin lost his temper during a meal, his digestion was very slow. In his anger, he took twice the normal time for digesting the given food. Dr. Beaumont came out with very interesting findings that emotions play a great role in digestion. The diner’s anxiety disturbs his digestive nerves and muscles and when he is frightened, his stomach lies still and that ulcer is associated with emotional stress.
Having known the above, it is now necessary for us to know in detail the relevant aspects of our eating. In this context, let us look into the following questions:
What - What should we eat?
Where - Where should we eat?
When - When should we eat?
Who - Who should all be with us when we eat?
How - How should we eat?
How - How much should we eat?
These questions are discussed in the succeeding pages.
What should we eat?
The Science
The job of our digestive system is to attend to the food that we take and ensure that the nutrients i.e. heat and energy contained in our food are reached to our various body cells, for they need food to function. Metabolism is a term used to denote conversion of food that we eat into heat and energy for use by our cells. The digestive and metabolic systems are said to transform the food we eat into blood, bones and cells.
The food that we consume contains carbohydrate, fat and protein on the one hand and vitamins, salt and water on the other.
The protein is needed for growth and repair of tissues in our body. Protein is made up of a large number of amino acids. This protein is broken into molecules. After wards, it enters into our duodenum and through that the small intestine.
The carbohydrate is a term used to denote starch and sugar that our body needs. The starch is converted into maltose and glucose. The sugar is converted into glucose, fructose, etc. Our brain cells predominantly use glucose as their food. Per 100 ml. of blood, the glucose level should be 60 to 100 mg.
Fats are useful for our body cells for heat and energy.
Any food that we take must therefore supply the needed proteins, carbohydrate, and fat to provide for the needed heat and energy.
General Discussion
It is said the man is what he eats. His mind, habits, character and performance depends on what the man eats.
Digestion is the most important activity in our body. In digestion, much of energy is spent. Our body is spending this energy only on the assumption that more energy would in flow for it to compensate the loss of energy in digestion.
Let us start with the life style of a normal person we see day to day. He is one who takes a range of cooked food every day using salt, maida, sugar, oil, milk and milk products, condiments, colorings, preservatives, etc. His two inch tongue is his guide for his eating habits. These take hours and days to get digested as they contain lot of toxic materials. This high effort to digestion means high energy spending which in effect means destruction of more cells than normal, especially those cells in our mouth, esophagus, stomach, intestine and the entire digestive track. Thus our cellular turnover goes up very high. In the normal course, red blood cells live for 60 days whereas in this pattern of eating, its life is reduced to 30 days. Thus our body is thus forced to wholesale replacement of cells on a continual basis making our body gradually lose its vitality. In addition, our body is stuffed with a lot of unwanted materials which get carried away by the flowing blood to different parts of the body.
From the above you should know that our present eating habits not only destroys our cells wholesale but also fail to facilitate generation fresh cells. This accounts for our loss of health and suffering from disease. Someone said, “If you want to be healthy, disconnect your oven”.
If we are cooked would we have prana? No. Same way, when the vegetables are cooked, they lose the prana. And that food cannot provide ‘life’ to our cells and organs. And when our cells and organs daily get life less food, how would they live and function well? And if they don’t function well, we get our illness.
So, please opt for Pranic food, i.e. the food which has prana in it. Consume more fresh fruits. Take more of raw, uncooked vegetables which are life giving. Avoid refined, processed, cooked, fried foods. Yes, you may take them to a limited quantity to fill your tongue need. But take care ti add more of pranic food to your meal than what the position currently is. We can ill afford to give full attention to our six inch tongue to the negligence of our six feet body.
Now what items could supply us the needed energy in the form of vitamins, minerals, etc?
Ask any doctor you like. He would say that you should take more vegetables and fruits. You consult any manufacturer or advertiser. He would say you should take biscuits, chocolates, tinned food, etc. It is for you to decide whether you should listen to the doctor or the manufacturer for your health. And if you value the advice of doctors, let us look into vegetables and fruits.
Do you know your body is made of five natural elements such as
Earth - Solid
Water - Liquid
Fire - Heat
Air - Air
Sky - Empty space
Who do you think fill the loss of these in your body? The filling elements are fruits and vegetables, because they are also made of the above five elements. They
Grow in earth and absorb the needed energy from earth
Grow using water but retains the distilled water for you
Grow in sun light absorbing much of energy contained in the sun light
Grow in open air, absorbing much of pure air you need for your body
Grow under the sky absorbing various nutrients coming from dews, rain, etc
Thus the vegetables and fruits carry for you all the nutrients you and your body cells look for.
They get digested easily
They provide us maximum nutrients
They add no toxins to our body
Vegetables
Washing
The first action we need to take before using vegetables is to wash them. You know in these days, they add many chemicals in growing vegetables. A proper wash before cutting them, ensures we wash away the chemicals. Wash them in water with some salt added. This is very much necessary for washing green leaves because they may carry some insects in them. And never wash them after cutting the vegetables because they would lose their nutrients.
Cutting
The next action is cutting the vegetables. We should cut them only when we are going to use them. If we keep the cut vegetables as it is for cooking after sometime, they lose much of their energy in the open condition. In many homes they have a practice of cutting the vegetables the previous night for morning cooking. This is a very wrong practice and allows the vegetables to lose the energy contained in them. Let us say we lose 10% energy in the process.
Further in cutting, you generally throw away the skin. The skins of vegetables carry the maximum protective energy. Can you tell where our military protection is most? It is in our borders. Similarly, the skins contain the maximum protective energy to ensure that the vegetables last for more days even after they are plucked from the plant. And the same protective energy when goes inside you, would also protect you. Look at the skin. There is a purpose behind everything that the God has designed. If the skin is thin, it means you can consume it. If the skin is thick, it has other external protective uses. For example, you can consume the skin of vegetable like Cucumber. Whereas the skin of say lemon, is created for your external use. Be aware of this principle.
Cooking
The next action we take is to cook the vegetables. Cooking could be in many forms such as steaming, boiling, frying or deep frying. In all these processes, the vegetables lose further energy. It has been estimated that the energy loss from vegetables is as under:
Steaming - 20% loss
Boiling - 40% loss
Frying - 70% loss also adds oil fat to us
Deep frying - 100% loss also adds carcinogens*
that cause cancer
*Any food that is blackened before consumption is a carcinogen. The fringes of dosa, the baked bread, etc. are the examples.
What and how would you like to do the cooking is up to you. By frying and deep frying, you not only loose much of its energy, you also loose your hard earned money in the form of additional inputs as oils, etc.
In bad cooking, our body does not get the energy it needs to sustain itself. You know it had spent much of its energy in digestion of your earlier meal in anticipation of fresh energy input. When you deny that input, the body starves.
Further the fat and carcinogens you had put in, need more energy for digestion. Where would your body go for it? You had already expended your energy in return for less energy. So decide to day how would you cook the vegetables henceforth.
Eating
Any cooked food must be taken immediately after cooking, i.e. at moderate heat in it, say at the level of body temperature present in it. Cooked food kept beyond say an hour, starts losing its energy because it starts perishing and decomposing. The more time you keep it only means you are eating decomposed food.
In metropolitan cities, a new eating culture is developing. They are so much hard pressed for time that they can’t find time to cook. They therefore pass up the traditional meals and grab a sandwich meals at work place. Thus snack food and fast food have replaced their Tiffin boxes. These quicky meals clearly indicate their stressed up states and such consumers are prone to stress related illnesses.
Be aware that families that eat together stay together.
Fruits
Fruits? Who takes it? Does anybody includes fruits in his regular diet? Nay. If at all we take fruits, it is very occasional, may be a plantain or two sometimes.
Fruits come in two varieties, sweet and sour. Both are good. But in case you are having bad digestion, do not go for the sour variety till you are alright. Sour fruit is likely to increase your problem.
Take only one kind of fruit at a time. Well you can take all kinds of fruits in rotation but not together. Do not make fruit salad and take.
As already stated under Vegetables, take fruits with their skin wherever it is possible. God has given thin skins to some fruits and the indication is you must take those fruits with the skin. Take for example the apples. Its peel contains phenolic compounds such as the antioxident qyuercetin which is said to have anti cancer powers.
Here again, do not cut them and keep them. Cut and immediately take them.
Another important thing in taking fruits is that you must take them only when your stomach is empty. However, avoid taking fruits like jack fruit, jamun, ber and mango in empty stomach. They can however follow other fruits.
Fruits are easily digestible and it should not get mixed up with other food which take hours for digestion. In that case the fruit element after early digestion would start decomposing in your stomach.
Juices
In the normal course, to get nutrients from fruits and vegetables, you need to consume a good amount of them. The roughage they provide, is very necessary for our waste elimination. Therefore taking whole fruit is advisable.
But if the roughage could cause problems to digestive system, in case of those who are ill and whose digestive system is already weak. Here comes the importance of fruit and vegetable juices which give the needed nourishment, without causing the burden of roughage disposal
In general, fruit juices help cleaning our body because they are all cleansers. They remove the toxins from our body and purify our blood. On the contrary, the vegetable juices help build our new cells and help us rejuvenate ourselves. Thus both the juices are very important to our health and vitality.
In these days of fast life, no one takes time to chew his food thoroughly to break cell walls of whatever they eat. Whether fruits or vegetables, they gobble down. In this context juicing out fruits and vegetables helps us to break their cell walls and extract all the nutrients available in them. The second advantage is you can also take more of vegetables or fruits in more quantity when you consume it in the form of juice. The third advantage is juice get assimilated readily in our body than the raw vegetables and fruits. So, those who have no time to sit and eat a chewed meal, they should opt for juices. But juices too must be taken sipped and taken slowly and not simply gulped.
There is a wonder vegetable which is both a vegetable and fruit. And that is carrot. Carrot is both a vegetable and a fruit. It means it is both a cleanser and builder of our body. It both purifies and revitalizes our blood. Carrots are a good source of
Beta carotene out of which liver synthesizes vitamin A
Potassium, sodium and calcium
All vitamins [especially B complex and vitamin E]
Has traces of iodine and sulphur
Carrot is useful in many disease states including anaemia ulcer, acidity, gall stones, rheumatism, etc.
In summary
Eating raw food in the form of fruits and vegetables enables you to cleanse your body from insides and provides you with a cocktail of essential vitamins, minerals, enzymes, amino acids, anti oxidants, phytochemicals, etc. and these work to promote your health. Raw food is clean food. The fruits and vegetables are sun cooked foods and of pre-digested variety. They thus do not tax our digestive system. When eaten at room temperature, there is virtually no wear and tear to our various systems. In addition they bring to lots of vitamins and enzymes much in need by our body for replacing the old cells. Thus fruits and vegetables bring to you lot of energy to take care of your functions.
But still many people would find it difficult to even think of living on raw food. Does not matter. There is no need to go to such an extreme and making it 50:50 would do. Now the choice is yours.
General Awareness
All said and done, other eatables dominate our food intake. They include cereals, pulses, grams, spices, milk and milk products, non-vegetarian items, liquor, etc.
You must have observed the traffic signals installed in the cities. The colors used are Green, Yellow and Red. They have specific meaning and when you see green, you are permitted to move, when red glows, you are asked to stop and when yellow comes up you are asked to slow down.
The same colours have application in food also. Food is also of three categories, viz. Green food, Yellow food and Red food.
Green food is positive food. This includes vegetables and fruits which have life and are perishable in a short period. Because of their short life, they are easy to digest and we need to spend only very little energy but out of which we get larger energy.
Among vegetables there are three varieties viz. leaf variety, green variety and root variety. Leaves top the list because leaf is the laboratory of the plant. It takes the energy from the sun and converts it into food. The chlorophyll present in leaves is very good for our health. Animals do not go to hospital and they remain healthy because they eat more of leaves. Leaves are also medicines out of which all medicines are prepared. Therefore pay attention to leaves first and make them your priority diet.
Then comes the non-leafy green vegetables which are fresh. That which is fresh is green, despite its colour. Green vegetables include tomato, raddish and carrot which perish faster.
Yellow food is not that good and you need to slow down here. They include any food item that you can store and use over months. Because of their capacity to live longer, they stay in your body for longer period and their digestion is time consuming. So if you consume more of them, more of accumulation of undigested food in your body and problems to you. So you can take them, but in little quantities with caution because you get less energy from them and you spend more energy for their digestion.
While discussing about vegetables, we mentioned of root variety. Among the roots, some vegetables like potato, yam, sweet potato, etc live longer and do not perish as fast as green variety. These also are to be included in the Yellow food.
If you are taking pulses, you can sprout them when they turn into green vegetables. When they become alive and fresh, they give you much nutrition.
Red food is negative food. In this category comes all spices which you like most. They carry value to your tongue and carry negative and devitalising value for the rest of your body. They require lot of energy to digest in return for no energy whatsoever. Any red food irritates your systems and if you go on eating more and more of condiments, your systems get irritated day in and day out. All this leads to inflammations, gastro entritis, liver and kidney problems, sugar complaints, etc.
You know all manufactured, processed, refined, tinned and bottled food come with all chemicals and preservatives added to them. It means they get into your body and get preserved. Our body is in fact baffled as to what they are and how to digest them. For nullifying their effect, you need additional inputs in the form of medicines and that is why you are after doctors and hospitals in your life. Please be aware that any food coming through an industry or with interference from industry is a devitalising food. In this variety also are included are oil, sugar etc. Oil adds to your fat and cholesterol problems and the sugar eats away the vitamins you take. The sugar is in fact described as the vitamin thief.
Thus if you want to be healthy do not clamor for more hospitals, do not demand for more medical aid but take more positive food, i.e. green food, reduce yellow and avoid red. Eat natural food, as they are in nature, which are not bottled or tinned. As far as salt is concerned, limit your intake to less than 5 gm. Per day.
Where should we eat
The place of eating should not be that important so long the other aspects of What, When, Why etc. are taken care of well. Nevertheless, it is better we deal with it, even if it be short.
Our own home is the place where we should prefer to eat. It is there the rules pertaining to choices of raw materials as well as the mode of cooking could be taken care of. Good practitioners of diet generally avoid taking food anywhere other than their own homes. Even if they would be out during noon say at work, they carry home made food.
Once you start taking the food at any place, such as hotels, way side stalls, etc., you should be prepared to suffer the consequences of what you eat, for at those places, the sellers are sure to prepare your food with profit motive, which means any kind of adulteration and stale food entering your stomach.
Moving on to parties, the less said the better. In the name of variety, you would have a feast of possibilities to cause discomfort to yourself. Strange things in display there may be very tempting for you and once you consume them, you could become a victim of strange problems.
Why do you think these days in many cases, the doctors are not able to pinpoint what is your real problem? Why do you think there is problem of diagnosis? It is because, we consume all kinds of food at strange places and we become victims of strange diseases.
In journeys especially we need to be more choosy of what we eat and where we eat. In fact it is very cheap and advantageous to restrict ourselves to fruits and vegetables during journeys. Taking with you vegetables like cucumber, cabbage, etc. would help you to have salads and your intake of water too would get reduced saving you from consuming contaminated water on the way. And fruits are an excellent medium to keep you feel good during travel.
For a willing person, fruits and vegetables are a great boon during journeys. The problem is of willingness and will power and nothing else.
When should we eat
The first and foremost rule under this topic of ‘when to eat’ is, we should eat only when our stomach is ready to receive what we send in. How do we know whether our stomach is ready to receive? It is simple. You need to eat when you feel the hunger.
Many people are afraid that they would become hungry. It is common sight to see mothers telling their children that they should eat as not to feel hungry because they consider getting hungry would make the children weak. Under this logic many mothers start feeding their children when they are not hungry. Naturally children do not take the food and mothers are seen having a tough time in feeding the children. This problem is present in almost every home.
Hunger should not be equated with weakness. No one would become weak by getting hungry. Hunger is not starvation. Hunger is a communication provided to us by our Creator. Through hunger, our body communicates that the earlier input is out of the stomach and you can now go in for your next input.
One of the major causes for our falling ill is our practice of eating by clock, whether we feel the hunger or not. In this process what happens is that even before the earlier food is out of our stomach, the next input is already there and before that is digested and sent out, the third one is waiting to enter the stomach. In this manner, we cause a traffic jam in our food pipe. This ultimately becomes the cause of indigestion, gas, loss of appetite, acidity, etc., i.e. illness.
And when we continue to practice sending the input before the earlier input is out, over a period, we totally lose the hunger instinct. This often happens with people who practice
06:00 Bed Tea
08:30 Breakfast
11:00 Tea
13:30 Lunch
16:00 Tea
18:30 Snacks
20:00 Tea
22:00 Dinner
Now in this method of regular hourly input, where do we give time for our stomach to feel the hunger? If this kind of consistent intake we practice, naturally the stomach loses its capacity to feel the hunger and to communicate the hunger. Loosing the hunger means, we have disturbed the natural processes and we should be willing to suffer its consequences because, we don’t allow the stomach to get empty and to rest. It is forced to work all the 24 hours all the 365 days and in this background its ability to contract is lost. Further, with continuous working it becomes weak. The consequence is, over a period it loses its ability to digest the food put into it.
You will remain healthy if you allow the natural processes to go on and let the stomach communicate to you as to when should you eat.
The second rule on ‘when to eat’ is when you are in peace. You know the brain controls all our internal activities. For the purpose of digestion, the need is secretion of right chemical at the right time. When we eat in peace, our brain works in peace and produces the right digestive juices, But, when the brain is tense or agitated, it gets busy creating other chemicals and at that time if we eat, we get wrong chemicals for digestion. It would naturally upset our digestion process and cause problems to us, even if we take quality food of fruits and vegetables. So we need to be at peace when we eat.
In case we are tense, worried, agitated, tired etc. it is better we avoid food. In fact the nature itself would not get you any desire to eat at these times. That is, the nature knows what to do. But unfortunately, we go by clock for eating and we opt to eat even if we are agitated. This practice is to be avoided and we should support the nature by not taking the food at that time.
Do you know there is a tradition among some people who first make the prayer at the dinner table and then only start their dinner? Do you know why this practice has started? One thing is, it is expressing your gratefulness to the God for what he has given you at your meal plate. The second reason for this is, it calms you down before you enter the meals and this calmness facilitates secretion of correct digestive juices. Thus this practice is worth emulating by all of us subject to the condition that we do the prayer sincerely and wholeheartedly.
With whom all to eat
We have already known that we should proceed to eat only when we are calm and at peace to facilitate right secretion of chemicals we need for digestion.
You can improve on this situation by not only being at peace, but being cheerful and happy. In such a case, not only right chemicals get secreted, but they get secreted with first class quality.
How do you get cheerful?
Needless to say that you should sit on the dining table with your entire family along, elders and youngsters all joining together. There at the dining table all of you should converse freely without touching on any sensitive issues. You can tell stories and listen to others, or discuss that day’s newspaper accounts of some interesting and amusing events. [Never, Never discuss politics and crime at the dining table].
You can add to color by inviting some interesting friends and personalities to the dinner table. Once in a fortnight you can invite one of your child’s teachers to listen to them on the subject [not on your child’s study progress] which could be very interesting. The bye product could be the development of intimacy between you, the teacher and your child, which could pay dividends in other ways.
The sum and substance of the above is that we should be either normal or positively excited at the dinner table. Being positively charged would be very preferable while eating, as it gets us additional nutrients.
Joy and cheer are to mind what sunshine and dew are to the flowers.
How should we eat?
We are aware that we need to digest our food properly and this depends to a large extent on how we eat our food. We all know that whatever we eat, it should be get digested so that we get the nutrients. But eating is not putting something into our mouth and sending it to the stomach.
The starting point for digestion is not the stomach, but the mouth itself. Chewing is essential for breaking down solid food particles as well as increasing the production of saliva, which is the main enzyme here. Saliva is the first of the digestive juices which starts digesting the food we take. The saliva has some antiseptic chemicals and germs entering through our mouth are attacked by this. Those who simply swallow their food lose this help from saliva and allow the germs to straight go into the stomach. In addition the saliva is meant to moisten and lubricate our food, the first step needed in digestion. By chewing, we allow our food to come in effective contact with the saliva and derive all the benefits that saliva is there to grant to us. This also gets our digestion to a good start.
For the saliva to act upon the food, there are certain requirements. They are:
v The food that we eat should not be hot, either by heat or by taste
v The food that we eat should not be chill
v It should stay in the mouth for sometime for saliva to do its work
You can observe that when we take something hot or cold, the saliva does not get secreted. It means that anything that we take hot or cold, goes into our stomach without the first stage of digestion having taken place. If the first part of digestion does not take place, there is difficulty in subsequent processes to be effective.
Similarly, hurried eating and swallowing also prevents the first stage digestion from taking place. That is why very often it is said that we should eat slowly and after proper chewing.
What is proper chewing? It is said that anything solid put into our mouth requires to be chewed thirty two times. The number of teeth we have provides the clue as to how many times we need to chew.
I had once tested with raw food. You too can test it while taking raw vegetable like cucumber or even plain chapati. Puit the cucumber or the plain chapati into your mouth and count the number of times the mouth chews it before it is sent into the stomach. And you can not swallow it before this number of chewing takes place. So allow a good chewing. One way of allowing this is to put your cutlery back on the plate and practicing hands off, between mouthfuls to slow down the rate at which you eat.
The message from the above paragraphs is that if you allow any food to get in without giving it first stage digestion, you are likely to develop problems like indigestion and gas. If ever any patient goes to the doctor with complaints like gas, acidity, etc., the doctor would invariably advice that you should eat slowly after due chewing. The reason behind the same is what has been stated above.
Thus chewing the food thoroughly is very essential. In chewing we break down the solid food particles and increase the saliva enzyme which is the first chemical that prepares the food for the stomach to process next. Chewing would be effective, if you can focus your mind to what is happening inside your mouth while eating. Many people read or watch TV while eating. Those people cannot really chew to an optimum extent.
Whatever is stated above for eating, applies also for drinking. You should avoid chill or hot water which would prevent production of saliva. Take warm water instead. Whenever you drink water, here too, you need to ensure that you chew the water to facilitate production of saliva to take care of the first state of digestion of water. We generally gulp water. That is wrong. Naturopathy says
Drink the solid – i.e. chew, make it liquid and then drink it
Eat the liquid - i.e. chew the liquid and eat it
This much about the first stage digestion at the mouth. Now let us move on to the digestion that takes place in our stomach.
Our stomach is said to produce two types of digestive juices to suit two kinds of input that we make. If we input protein, the stomach produces hydrochloric acid for its digestion. If we put carbohydrate, it produces alkaline. When you take in your meal both protein and starch, the stomach produces both acid and alkaline. Any one who had read chemistry would tell that when acid and alkaline come into contact with each other they neutralise each other.
So what would happen if you eat both protein and starch in a single meal? There would be no digestive juice to digest them, since the juices produced by the stomach got nullified by the process of neutralisation. The result is undigested food and resultant problems. Then you take in tablets and capsules.
Somebody said that we the human beings are the only species in the world who need medicine to move the food out of stomach to the intestine.
So, we need to ensure that we in a single meal, either eat protein or carbohydrate. It means no rice and meat together. But rice and beans are ok.
Even among proteins like Flesh, eggs, diary products, nuts, etc. it would be better we don’t combine different proteins in a single meal, since proteins are of different character and complexity.
They say that the one function that demands more energy from our body than any other function is digestion. Digestion of food, according to scientists, takes more energy than running, swimming, etc.
Why all of us feel sleepy after a good meal? It is because all energies are concentrated on digestion of the food and we feel energy less. If only we would take regulated food, our body would not be over taxed and we would feel energetic.
One more thing on ‘how to eat’. That is about drinking water.
You know when we eat, our organs like the mouth and stomach secrete digestive juices for digestion. Now at that time, if we drink water, this liquefies the chemicals and they lose their power. Therefore it is better if we avoid taking water while eating, except for some small quantity if we feel suffocated without water. Otherwise, water should be taken either well in advance of or well after the mealtime so that the water vacates the stomach before the meal arrives therein.
How much should we eat?
Cooking and eating food are among our greatest pleasures and the food we most often enjoy is often fatty. This fat often compels us to overeat fatty foods. This fat has a tendency to slow down the body’s BMR [Basal Metabolic Rate] allowing activities such as heart beat, respiration, etc. to continue functioning on fewer calories and thus conserve calories and thus making you eat lot more calories than your body needs to function optimally. This thus adds to your weight. Fat also dulls your ability to experience fullness.
There is a popular saying that we should ensure that we leave adequate space in our stomach for food, water and air and therefore the ideal way is to take food for half the stomach and leave the remaining half for water and air in equal measure. There is also another saying that we should not eat to the full stomach since it needs space for contracting in the process of digesting the food within it. In fact both these versions are correct. The question however arises at what exact time do we really stop the intake.
The answer is simple in the scheme of things that the nature has prescribed. The first requirement is when there is no hunger, we never go in for any input. Now, when we are taking meals, when the stomach is half full, we would get the sound of first ‘Dakar’. This noise is a communication to us that our stomach is half full and we can stop the intake. But generally at that time, since our stomach is not full, we would still fell like eating further. This is the starting point for indigestion, gas, acidity and heart burn.
Since many are in the habit of taking food to the full stomach, over the period, the first Dakar had stopped coming to them and what they get is the second Dakar after their stomach gets full. This second communication in fact says that ‘well I can’t take any further’.
Eating a heavy meal acts as a trigger for heart attack in much the same way as extreme physical exertion and outbursts of anger. Those who eat more run the risk of having a heart attack in the first two hours after having the heavy meal.
So next time, when you sit for eating, leave the table or plate when you are at the most three quarters full.
In Conclusion
Healthy eating is very essential for good health. You would then feel well, look well and do well. Your hair will become more shinier, your skin more clearer, your eyes more brighter and you would have lots of energy. All the repair works that are needed would automatically take place without any effort on your part. Hence
Overhaul your diet and eat healthily
Take more salads and sprouted grains, nuts and seeds
Drink 8 to 10 glasses of water but none during meals
Take more vegetables and fruits
Cut down on stimulants like tea, coffee, alcohol which all tax the liver
Take fresh foods only
We should eat what we require and not what we desire
The food we take should be simple to eat and easy to digest
Start the day with honey
Have the honey added to a glass of warm water plus little lime juice
Have the food in sitting position
Keep sitting for three minutes after you have finished your meal
Better to wait till those who are taking food along with you complete their food
Even a moderate restriction of food intake can help in tremendous reduction in disease and help increase longevity.
A Real Life case
One day in June 1822, a gun went off accidentally in a crowded store in Michigan, USA. The person who got wounded was Alexis St. Martin. He got wounded in his side. He was immediately rushed to a doctor and he ended up with a hole on his left side near the stomach. And this hole remained there till he died after fifty eight years. But this was no small event.
Through this hole, one could see his stomach functioning deep inside. And Dr. Beaumont, by employing St. Martin in his laboratory, observed through this window as to how the human stomach functions and published his “Experiments and observations on the gastric juice and the physiology of digestion”, the most acclaimed original classic in the field of medicine.
Dr. Beaumont found the stomach walls soft and velvet looking and found its color is pale and pink. He observed that as soon as we put into stomach something, hundreds of droplets trickle down the walls of the stomach. With the help of a rubber tube, he collected these droplets and put them on a small piece of boiled beef and heated it to the temperature of stomach and in ten hours it was completely digested. He then conducted very many varieties of tests with varieties of foods. . He found fatty foods are difficult to digest and that the stomach generally requires much less food than generally supplied to it. His findings were great guides to our eating habits.
Sometimes St. Martin was calm and sometimes angry and sometimes vexed. The doctor noticed that when St. Martin lost his temper during a meal, his digestion was very slow. In his anger, he took twice the normal time for digesting the given food. Dr. Beaumont came out with very interesting findings that emotions play a great role in digestion. The diner’s anxiety disturbs his digestive nerves and muscles and when he is frightened, his stomach lies still and that ulcer is associated with emotional stress.
Having known the above, it is now necessary for us to know in detail the relevant aspects of our eating. In this context, let us look into the following questions:
What - What should we eat?
Where - Where should we eat?
When - When should we eat?
Who - Who should all be with us when we eat?
How - How should we eat?
How - How much should we eat?
These questions are discussed in the succeeding pages.
What should we eat?
The Science
The job of our digestive system is to attend to the food that we take and ensure that the nutrients i.e. heat and energy contained in our food are reached to our various body cells, for they need food to function. Metabolism is a term used to denote conversion of food that we eat into heat and energy for use by our cells. The digestive and metabolic systems are said to transform the food we eat into blood, bones and cells.
The food that we consume contains carbohydrate, fat and protein on the one hand and vitamins, salt and water on the other.
The protein is needed for growth and repair of tissues in our body. Protein is made up of a large number of amino acids. This protein is broken into molecules. After wards, it enters into our duodenum and through that the small intestine.
The carbohydrate is a term used to denote starch and sugar that our body needs. The starch is converted into maltose and glucose. The sugar is converted into glucose, fructose, etc. Our brain cells predominantly use glucose as their food. Per 100 ml. of blood, the glucose level should be 60 to 100 mg.
Fats are useful for our body cells for heat and energy.
Any food that we take must therefore supply the needed proteins, carbohydrate, and fat to provide for the needed heat and energy.
General Discussion
It is said the man is what he eats. His mind, habits, character and performance depends on what the man eats.
Digestion is the most important activity in our body. In digestion, much of energy is spent. Our body is spending this energy only on the assumption that more energy would in flow for it to compensate the loss of energy in digestion.
Let us start with the life style of a normal person we see day to day. He is one who takes a range of cooked food every day using salt, maida, sugar, oil, milk and milk products, condiments, colorings, preservatives, etc. His two inch tongue is his guide for his eating habits. These take hours and days to get digested as they contain lot of toxic materials. This high effort to digestion means high energy spending which in effect means destruction of more cells than normal, especially those cells in our mouth, esophagus, stomach, intestine and the entire digestive track. Thus our cellular turnover goes up very high. In the normal course, red blood cells live for 60 days whereas in this pattern of eating, its life is reduced to 30 days. Thus our body is thus forced to wholesale replacement of cells on a continual basis making our body gradually lose its vitality. In addition, our body is stuffed with a lot of unwanted materials which get carried away by the flowing blood to different parts of the body.
From the above you should know that our present eating habits not only destroys our cells wholesale but also fail to facilitate generation fresh cells. This accounts for our loss of health and suffering from disease. Someone said, “If you want to be healthy, disconnect your oven”.
If we are cooked would we have prana? No. Same way, when the vegetables are cooked, they lose the prana. And that food cannot provide ‘life’ to our cells and organs. And when our cells and organs daily get life less food, how would they live and function well? And if they don’t function well, we get our illness.
So, please opt for Pranic food, i.e. the food which has prana in it. Consume more fresh fruits. Take more of raw, uncooked vegetables which are life giving. Avoid refined, processed, cooked, fried foods. Yes, you may take them to a limited quantity to fill your tongue need. But take care ti add more of pranic food to your meal than what the position currently is. We can ill afford to give full attention to our six inch tongue to the negligence of our six feet body.
Now what items could supply us the needed energy in the form of vitamins, minerals, etc?
Ask any doctor you like. He would say that you should take more vegetables and fruits. You consult any manufacturer or advertiser. He would say you should take biscuits, chocolates, tinned food, etc. It is for you to decide whether you should listen to the doctor or the manufacturer for your health. And if you value the advice of doctors, let us look into vegetables and fruits.
Do you know your body is made of five natural elements such as
Earth - Solid
Water - Liquid
Fire - Heat
Air - Air
Sky - Empty space
Who do you think fill the loss of these in your body? The filling elements are fruits and vegetables, because they are also made of the above five elements. They
Grow in earth and absorb the needed energy from earth
Grow using water but retains the distilled water for you
Grow in sun light absorbing much of energy contained in the sun light
Grow in open air, absorbing much of pure air you need for your body
Grow under the sky absorbing various nutrients coming from dews, rain, etc
Thus the vegetables and fruits carry for you all the nutrients you and your body cells look for.
They get digested easily
They provide us maximum nutrients
They add no toxins to our body
Vegetables
Washing
The first action we need to take before using vegetables is to wash them. You know in these days, they add many chemicals in growing vegetables. A proper wash before cutting them, ensures we wash away the chemicals. Wash them in water with some salt added. This is very much necessary for washing green leaves because they may carry some insects in them. And never wash them after cutting the vegetables because they would lose their nutrients.
Cutting
The next action is cutting the vegetables. We should cut them only when we are going to use them. If we keep the cut vegetables as it is for cooking after sometime, they lose much of their energy in the open condition. In many homes they have a practice of cutting the vegetables the previous night for morning cooking. This is a very wrong practice and allows the vegetables to lose the energy contained in them. Let us say we lose 10% energy in the process.
Further in cutting, you generally throw away the skin. The skins of vegetables carry the maximum protective energy. Can you tell where our military protection is most? It is in our borders. Similarly, the skins contain the maximum protective energy to ensure that the vegetables last for more days even after they are plucked from the plant. And the same protective energy when goes inside you, would also protect you. Look at the skin. There is a purpose behind everything that the God has designed. If the skin is thin, it means you can consume it. If the skin is thick, it has other external protective uses. For example, you can consume the skin of vegetable like Cucumber. Whereas the skin of say lemon, is created for your external use. Be aware of this principle.
Cooking
The next action we take is to cook the vegetables. Cooking could be in many forms such as steaming, boiling, frying or deep frying. In all these processes, the vegetables lose further energy. It has been estimated that the energy loss from vegetables is as under:
Steaming - 20% loss
Boiling - 40% loss
Frying - 70% loss also adds oil fat to us
Deep frying - 100% loss also adds carcinogens*
that cause cancer
*Any food that is blackened before consumption is a carcinogen. The fringes of dosa, the baked bread, etc. are the examples.
What and how would you like to do the cooking is up to you. By frying and deep frying, you not only loose much of its energy, you also loose your hard earned money in the form of additional inputs as oils, etc.
In bad cooking, our body does not get the energy it needs to sustain itself. You know it had spent much of its energy in digestion of your earlier meal in anticipation of fresh energy input. When you deny that input, the body starves.
Further the fat and carcinogens you had put in, need more energy for digestion. Where would your body go for it? You had already expended your energy in return for less energy. So decide to day how would you cook the vegetables henceforth.
Eating
Any cooked food must be taken immediately after cooking, i.e. at moderate heat in it, say at the level of body temperature present in it. Cooked food kept beyond say an hour, starts losing its energy because it starts perishing and decomposing. The more time you keep it only means you are eating decomposed food.
In metropolitan cities, a new eating culture is developing. They are so much hard pressed for time that they can’t find time to cook. They therefore pass up the traditional meals and grab a sandwich meals at work place. Thus snack food and fast food have replaced their Tiffin boxes. These quicky meals clearly indicate their stressed up states and such consumers are prone to stress related illnesses.
Be aware that families that eat together stay together.
Fruits
Fruits? Who takes it? Does anybody includes fruits in his regular diet? Nay. If at all we take fruits, it is very occasional, may be a plantain or two sometimes.
Fruits come in two varieties, sweet and sour. Both are good. But in case you are having bad digestion, do not go for the sour variety till you are alright. Sour fruit is likely to increase your problem.
Take only one kind of fruit at a time. Well you can take all kinds of fruits in rotation but not together. Do not make fruit salad and take.
As already stated under Vegetables, take fruits with their skin wherever it is possible. God has given thin skins to some fruits and the indication is you must take those fruits with the skin. Take for example the apples. Its peel contains phenolic compounds such as the antioxident qyuercetin which is said to have anti cancer powers.
Here again, do not cut them and keep them. Cut and immediately take them.
Another important thing in taking fruits is that you must take them only when your stomach is empty. However, avoid taking fruits like jack fruit, jamun, ber and mango in empty stomach. They can however follow other fruits.
Fruits are easily digestible and it should not get mixed up with other food which take hours for digestion. In that case the fruit element after early digestion would start decomposing in your stomach.
Juices
In the normal course, to get nutrients from fruits and vegetables, you need to consume a good amount of them. The roughage they provide, is very necessary for our waste elimination. Therefore taking whole fruit is advisable.
But if the roughage could cause problems to digestive system, in case of those who are ill and whose digestive system is already weak. Here comes the importance of fruit and vegetable juices which give the needed nourishment, without causing the burden of roughage disposal
In general, fruit juices help cleaning our body because they are all cleansers. They remove the toxins from our body and purify our blood. On the contrary, the vegetable juices help build our new cells and help us rejuvenate ourselves. Thus both the juices are very important to our health and vitality.
In these days of fast life, no one takes time to chew his food thoroughly to break cell walls of whatever they eat. Whether fruits or vegetables, they gobble down. In this context juicing out fruits and vegetables helps us to break their cell walls and extract all the nutrients available in them. The second advantage is you can also take more of vegetables or fruits in more quantity when you consume it in the form of juice. The third advantage is juice get assimilated readily in our body than the raw vegetables and fruits. So, those who have no time to sit and eat a chewed meal, they should opt for juices. But juices too must be taken sipped and taken slowly and not simply gulped.
There is a wonder vegetable which is both a vegetable and fruit. And that is carrot. Carrot is both a vegetable and a fruit. It means it is both a cleanser and builder of our body. It both purifies and revitalizes our blood. Carrots are a good source of
Beta carotene out of which liver synthesizes vitamin A
Potassium, sodium and calcium
All vitamins [especially B complex and vitamin E]
Has traces of iodine and sulphur
Carrot is useful in many disease states including anaemia ulcer, acidity, gall stones, rheumatism, etc.
In summary
Eating raw food in the form of fruits and vegetables enables you to cleanse your body from insides and provides you with a cocktail of essential vitamins, minerals, enzymes, amino acids, anti oxidants, phytochemicals, etc. and these work to promote your health. Raw food is clean food. The fruits and vegetables are sun cooked foods and of pre-digested variety. They thus do not tax our digestive system. When eaten at room temperature, there is virtually no wear and tear to our various systems. In addition they bring to lots of vitamins and enzymes much in need by our body for replacing the old cells. Thus fruits and vegetables bring to you lot of energy to take care of your functions.
But still many people would find it difficult to even think of living on raw food. Does not matter. There is no need to go to such an extreme and making it 50:50 would do. Now the choice is yours.
General Awareness
All said and done, other eatables dominate our food intake. They include cereals, pulses, grams, spices, milk and milk products, non-vegetarian items, liquor, etc.
You must have observed the traffic signals installed in the cities. The colors used are Green, Yellow and Red. They have specific meaning and when you see green, you are permitted to move, when red glows, you are asked to stop and when yellow comes up you are asked to slow down.
The same colours have application in food also. Food is also of three categories, viz. Green food, Yellow food and Red food.
Green food is positive food. This includes vegetables and fruits which have life and are perishable in a short period. Because of their short life, they are easy to digest and we need to spend only very little energy but out of which we get larger energy.
Among vegetables there are three varieties viz. leaf variety, green variety and root variety. Leaves top the list because leaf is the laboratory of the plant. It takes the energy from the sun and converts it into food. The chlorophyll present in leaves is very good for our health. Animals do not go to hospital and they remain healthy because they eat more of leaves. Leaves are also medicines out of which all medicines are prepared. Therefore pay attention to leaves first and make them your priority diet.
Then comes the non-leafy green vegetables which are fresh. That which is fresh is green, despite its colour. Green vegetables include tomato, raddish and carrot which perish faster.
Yellow food is not that good and you need to slow down here. They include any food item that you can store and use over months. Because of their capacity to live longer, they stay in your body for longer period and their digestion is time consuming. So if you consume more of them, more of accumulation of undigested food in your body and problems to you. So you can take them, but in little quantities with caution because you get less energy from them and you spend more energy for their digestion.
While discussing about vegetables, we mentioned of root variety. Among the roots, some vegetables like potato, yam, sweet potato, etc live longer and do not perish as fast as green variety. These also are to be included in the Yellow food.
If you are taking pulses, you can sprout them when they turn into green vegetables. When they become alive and fresh, they give you much nutrition.
Red food is negative food. In this category comes all spices which you like most. They carry value to your tongue and carry negative and devitalising value for the rest of your body. They require lot of energy to digest in return for no energy whatsoever. Any red food irritates your systems and if you go on eating more and more of condiments, your systems get irritated day in and day out. All this leads to inflammations, gastro entritis, liver and kidney problems, sugar complaints, etc.
You know all manufactured, processed, refined, tinned and bottled food come with all chemicals and preservatives added to them. It means they get into your body and get preserved. Our body is in fact baffled as to what they are and how to digest them. For nullifying their effect, you need additional inputs in the form of medicines and that is why you are after doctors and hospitals in your life. Please be aware that any food coming through an industry or with interference from industry is a devitalising food. In this variety also are included are oil, sugar etc. Oil adds to your fat and cholesterol problems and the sugar eats away the vitamins you take. The sugar is in fact described as the vitamin thief.
Thus if you want to be healthy do not clamor for more hospitals, do not demand for more medical aid but take more positive food, i.e. green food, reduce yellow and avoid red. Eat natural food, as they are in nature, which are not bottled or tinned. As far as salt is concerned, limit your intake to less than 5 gm. Per day.
Where should we eat
The place of eating should not be that important so long the other aspects of What, When, Why etc. are taken care of well. Nevertheless, it is better we deal with it, even if it be short.
Our own home is the place where we should prefer to eat. It is there the rules pertaining to choices of raw materials as well as the mode of cooking could be taken care of. Good practitioners of diet generally avoid taking food anywhere other than their own homes. Even if they would be out during noon say at work, they carry home made food.
Once you start taking the food at any place, such as hotels, way side stalls, etc., you should be prepared to suffer the consequences of what you eat, for at those places, the sellers are sure to prepare your food with profit motive, which means any kind of adulteration and stale food entering your stomach.
Moving on to parties, the less said the better. In the name of variety, you would have a feast of possibilities to cause discomfort to yourself. Strange things in display there may be very tempting for you and once you consume them, you could become a victim of strange problems.
Why do you think these days in many cases, the doctors are not able to pinpoint what is your real problem? Why do you think there is problem of diagnosis? It is because, we consume all kinds of food at strange places and we become victims of strange diseases.
In journeys especially we need to be more choosy of what we eat and where we eat. In fact it is very cheap and advantageous to restrict ourselves to fruits and vegetables during journeys. Taking with you vegetables like cucumber, cabbage, etc. would help you to have salads and your intake of water too would get reduced saving you from consuming contaminated water on the way. And fruits are an excellent medium to keep you feel good during travel.
For a willing person, fruits and vegetables are a great boon during journeys. The problem is of willingness and will power and nothing else.
When should we eat
The first and foremost rule under this topic of ‘when to eat’ is, we should eat only when our stomach is ready to receive what we send in. How do we know whether our stomach is ready to receive? It is simple. You need to eat when you feel the hunger.
Many people are afraid that they would become hungry. It is common sight to see mothers telling their children that they should eat as not to feel hungry because they consider getting hungry would make the children weak. Under this logic many mothers start feeding their children when they are not hungry. Naturally children do not take the food and mothers are seen having a tough time in feeding the children. This problem is present in almost every home.
Hunger should not be equated with weakness. No one would become weak by getting hungry. Hunger is not starvation. Hunger is a communication provided to us by our Creator. Through hunger, our body communicates that the earlier input is out of the stomach and you can now go in for your next input.
One of the major causes for our falling ill is our practice of eating by clock, whether we feel the hunger or not. In this process what happens is that even before the earlier food is out of our stomach, the next input is already there and before that is digested and sent out, the third one is waiting to enter the stomach. In this manner, we cause a traffic jam in our food pipe. This ultimately becomes the cause of indigestion, gas, loss of appetite, acidity, etc., i.e. illness.
And when we continue to practice sending the input before the earlier input is out, over a period, we totally lose the hunger instinct. This often happens with people who practice
06:00 Bed Tea
08:30 Breakfast
11:00 Tea
13:30 Lunch
16:00 Tea
18:30 Snacks
20:00 Tea
22:00 Dinner
Now in this method of regular hourly input, where do we give time for our stomach to feel the hunger? If this kind of consistent intake we practice, naturally the stomach loses its capacity to feel the hunger and to communicate the hunger. Loosing the hunger means, we have disturbed the natural processes and we should be willing to suffer its consequences because, we don’t allow the stomach to get empty and to rest. It is forced to work all the 24 hours all the 365 days and in this background its ability to contract is lost. Further, with continuous working it becomes weak. The consequence is, over a period it loses its ability to digest the food put into it.
You will remain healthy if you allow the natural processes to go on and let the stomach communicate to you as to when should you eat.
The second rule on ‘when to eat’ is when you are in peace. You know the brain controls all our internal activities. For the purpose of digestion, the need is secretion of right chemical at the right time. When we eat in peace, our brain works in peace and produces the right digestive juices, But, when the brain is tense or agitated, it gets busy creating other chemicals and at that time if we eat, we get wrong chemicals for digestion. It would naturally upset our digestion process and cause problems to us, even if we take quality food of fruits and vegetables. So we need to be at peace when we eat.
In case we are tense, worried, agitated, tired etc. it is better we avoid food. In fact the nature itself would not get you any desire to eat at these times. That is, the nature knows what to do. But unfortunately, we go by clock for eating and we opt to eat even if we are agitated. This practice is to be avoided and we should support the nature by not taking the food at that time.
Do you know there is a tradition among some people who first make the prayer at the dinner table and then only start their dinner? Do you know why this practice has started? One thing is, it is expressing your gratefulness to the God for what he has given you at your meal plate. The second reason for this is, it calms you down before you enter the meals and this calmness facilitates secretion of correct digestive juices. Thus this practice is worth emulating by all of us subject to the condition that we do the prayer sincerely and wholeheartedly.
With whom all to eat
We have already known that we should proceed to eat only when we are calm and at peace to facilitate right secretion of chemicals we need for digestion.
You can improve on this situation by not only being at peace, but being cheerful and happy. In such a case, not only right chemicals get secreted, but they get secreted with first class quality.
How do you get cheerful?
Needless to say that you should sit on the dining table with your entire family along, elders and youngsters all joining together. There at the dining table all of you should converse freely without touching on any sensitive issues. You can tell stories and listen to others, or discuss that day’s newspaper accounts of some interesting and amusing events. [Never, Never discuss politics and crime at the dining table].
You can add to color by inviting some interesting friends and personalities to the dinner table. Once in a fortnight you can invite one of your child’s teachers to listen to them on the subject [not on your child’s study progress] which could be very interesting. The bye product could be the development of intimacy between you, the teacher and your child, which could pay dividends in other ways.
The sum and substance of the above is that we should be either normal or positively excited at the dinner table. Being positively charged would be very preferable while eating, as it gets us additional nutrients.
Joy and cheer are to mind what sunshine and dew are to the flowers.
How should we eat?
We are aware that we need to digest our food properly and this depends to a large extent on how we eat our food. We all know that whatever we eat, it should be get digested so that we get the nutrients. But eating is not putting something into our mouth and sending it to the stomach.
The starting point for digestion is not the stomach, but the mouth itself. Chewing is essential for breaking down solid food particles as well as increasing the production of saliva, which is the main enzyme here. Saliva is the first of the digestive juices which starts digesting the food we take. The saliva has some antiseptic chemicals and germs entering through our mouth are attacked by this. Those who simply swallow their food lose this help from saliva and allow the germs to straight go into the stomach. In addition the saliva is meant to moisten and lubricate our food, the first step needed in digestion. By chewing, we allow our food to come in effective contact with the saliva and derive all the benefits that saliva is there to grant to us. This also gets our digestion to a good start.
For the saliva to act upon the food, there are certain requirements. They are:
v The food that we eat should not be hot, either by heat or by taste
v The food that we eat should not be chill
v It should stay in the mouth for sometime for saliva to do its work
You can observe that when we take something hot or cold, the saliva does not get secreted. It means that anything that we take hot or cold, goes into our stomach without the first stage of digestion having taken place. If the first part of digestion does not take place, there is difficulty in subsequent processes to be effective.
Similarly, hurried eating and swallowing also prevents the first stage digestion from taking place. That is why very often it is said that we should eat slowly and after proper chewing.
What is proper chewing? It is said that anything solid put into our mouth requires to be chewed thirty two times. The number of teeth we have provides the clue as to how many times we need to chew.
I had once tested with raw food. You too can test it while taking raw vegetable like cucumber or even plain chapati. Puit the cucumber or the plain chapati into your mouth and count the number of times the mouth chews it before it is sent into the stomach. And you can not swallow it before this number of chewing takes place. So allow a good chewing. One way of allowing this is to put your cutlery back on the plate and practicing hands off, between mouthfuls to slow down the rate at which you eat.
The message from the above paragraphs is that if you allow any food to get in without giving it first stage digestion, you are likely to develop problems like indigestion and gas. If ever any patient goes to the doctor with complaints like gas, acidity, etc., the doctor would invariably advice that you should eat slowly after due chewing. The reason behind the same is what has been stated above.
Thus chewing the food thoroughly is very essential. In chewing we break down the solid food particles and increase the saliva enzyme which is the first chemical that prepares the food for the stomach to process next. Chewing would be effective, if you can focus your mind to what is happening inside your mouth while eating. Many people read or watch TV while eating. Those people cannot really chew to an optimum extent.
Whatever is stated above for eating, applies also for drinking. You should avoid chill or hot water which would prevent production of saliva. Take warm water instead. Whenever you drink water, here too, you need to ensure that you chew the water to facilitate production of saliva to take care of the first state of digestion of water. We generally gulp water. That is wrong. Naturopathy says
Drink the solid – i.e. chew, make it liquid and then drink it
Eat the liquid - i.e. chew the liquid and eat it
This much about the first stage digestion at the mouth. Now let us move on to the digestion that takes place in our stomach.
Our stomach is said to produce two types of digestive juices to suit two kinds of input that we make. If we input protein, the stomach produces hydrochloric acid for its digestion. If we put carbohydrate, it produces alkaline. When you take in your meal both protein and starch, the stomach produces both acid and alkaline. Any one who had read chemistry would tell that when acid and alkaline come into contact with each other they neutralise each other.
So what would happen if you eat both protein and starch in a single meal? There would be no digestive juice to digest them, since the juices produced by the stomach got nullified by the process of neutralisation. The result is undigested food and resultant problems. Then you take in tablets and capsules.
Somebody said that we the human beings are the only species in the world who need medicine to move the food out of stomach to the intestine.
So, we need to ensure that we in a single meal, either eat protein or carbohydrate. It means no rice and meat together. But rice and beans are ok.
Even among proteins like Flesh, eggs, diary products, nuts, etc. it would be better we don’t combine different proteins in a single meal, since proteins are of different character and complexity.
They say that the one function that demands more energy from our body than any other function is digestion. Digestion of food, according to scientists, takes more energy than running, swimming, etc.
Why all of us feel sleepy after a good meal? It is because all energies are concentrated on digestion of the food and we feel energy less. If only we would take regulated food, our body would not be over taxed and we would feel energetic.
One more thing on ‘how to eat’. That is about drinking water.
You know when we eat, our organs like the mouth and stomach secrete digestive juices for digestion. Now at that time, if we drink water, this liquefies the chemicals and they lose their power. Therefore it is better if we avoid taking water while eating, except for some small quantity if we feel suffocated without water. Otherwise, water should be taken either well in advance of or well after the mealtime so that the water vacates the stomach before the meal arrives therein.
How much should we eat?
Cooking and eating food are among our greatest pleasures and the food we most often enjoy is often fatty. This fat often compels us to overeat fatty foods. This fat has a tendency to slow down the body’s BMR [Basal Metabolic Rate] allowing activities such as heart beat, respiration, etc. to continue functioning on fewer calories and thus conserve calories and thus making you eat lot more calories than your body needs to function optimally. This thus adds to your weight. Fat also dulls your ability to experience fullness.
There is a popular saying that we should ensure that we leave adequate space in our stomach for food, water and air and therefore the ideal way is to take food for half the stomach and leave the remaining half for water and air in equal measure. There is also another saying that we should not eat to the full stomach since it needs space for contracting in the process of digesting the food within it. In fact both these versions are correct. The question however arises at what exact time do we really stop the intake.
The answer is simple in the scheme of things that the nature has prescribed. The first requirement is when there is no hunger, we never go in for any input. Now, when we are taking meals, when the stomach is half full, we would get the sound of first ‘Dakar’. This noise is a communication to us that our stomach is half full and we can stop the intake. But generally at that time, since our stomach is not full, we would still fell like eating further. This is the starting point for indigestion, gas, acidity and heart burn.
Since many are in the habit of taking food to the full stomach, over the period, the first Dakar had stopped coming to them and what they get is the second Dakar after their stomach gets full. This second communication in fact says that ‘well I can’t take any further’.
Eating a heavy meal acts as a trigger for heart attack in much the same way as extreme physical exertion and outbursts of anger. Those who eat more run the risk of having a heart attack in the first two hours after having the heavy meal.
So next time, when you sit for eating, leave the table or plate when you are at the most three quarters full.
In Conclusion
Healthy eating is very essential for good health. You would then feel well, look well and do well. Your hair will become more shinier, your skin more clearer, your eyes more brighter and you would have lots of energy. All the repair works that are needed would automatically take place without any effort on your part. Hence
Overhaul your diet and eat healthily
Take more salads and sprouted grains, nuts and seeds
Drink 8 to 10 glasses of water but none during meals
Take more vegetables and fruits
Cut down on stimulants like tea, coffee, alcohol which all tax the liver
Take fresh foods only
We should eat what we require and not what we desire
The food we take should be simple to eat and easy to digest
Start the day with honey
Have the honey added to a glass of warm water plus little lime juice
Have the food in sitting position
Keep sitting for three minutes after you have finished your meal
Better to wait till those who are taking food along with you complete their food
Even a moderate restriction of food intake can help in tremendous reduction in disease and help increase longevity.
Know your water
Need for water
Next to air, water is the element most necessary for survival. Our body is 70% water.
Water intake helps us to flush out toxins from our body. Naturally inadequate water intake means accumulation of toxins in our body with added dryness and constipation.
Our kidneys remove uric acid and urea and it is necessary that these are dissolved in water for effective removal from our body. So, without water, we would get poisoned by the unremoved wastes. In addition, if we don’t consume adequate water, the kidney may receive no water for dissolving the uric acid and urea. It means kidney stones inside us.
Water has other uses. It carries nutrients and oxygen to the cells through the blood. Then it helps us cool the body through perspiration. Water also lubricates our joints. We also need water to breathe because our lungs must be moist to take in oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide. Lack of water inside our body means excess body fat, poor muscle tone and size, decreased digestive efficiency and organ function, increased toxicity in ithe body, joint and muscle soreness. If you don’t drink adequate water, your body retains the water in you without releasing it. And it has its own consequences.
Proper water intake is a key to weight loss. Take eight to ten glasses of water per day. In summer you would need more water. If you exercise, you would need more water. If you are over weight, you need additional water at the rate one glass extra for every ten kilos of extra weight you may have.
You need about 8 to 10 glasses of water every day including the other liquid intakes by you such as butter milk, coconut water, milk etc. In general, you should take 30 ml of water for every kilo of your weight. And this water consumption should be spread through out the day.
Water Contamination
Water contamination is the main source of infection and diseases like:
Jaundice
Diarrhoea
Gastroenteritis [vomitting, diarrhoea and fever]
Cholera [Severe gastroenteritis]
All these happen when our drinking water at some stage gets contaminated.
Water Resources
There was a time when our rivers and tanks were considered as holy and people who went to take bath there used to first worship the water and than take bath without applying on themselves any oil or soap. These traditions were prescribed with the sole intention that our life giving water sources need to be treated with respect and reverence and if treated that way these sources of water supply would remain pure.
But those days are long over and today in full view and participation of public, our water resources are polluted even in the name of worship. The way we pollute our own drinking water, it is very clear that we don’t need any other foreign enemy to destroy us and that we are totally self reliant in the matter.
Already people use the banks of our water resources for human defecation. They also pollute the water by washing clothes, applying detergents, and throw garbage into it. Many people religiously bring used puja flowers etc. in plastic bags and throw into the water of lake and rivers. Industries allow their effluents to flow into the nearby water resource and municipalities connect their drain to it.
It had been reported that more than twenty thousand idols of dieties are immersed into the water in each of our city water resources at the time of festivals like Ganesh Chathurthi and Kali pooja along with used puja materials in plastic bags. And what is notable is the local Governments make elaborate arrangements to oversee this planned and festive water contamination.
There were times when the immersed idols were only made of mud and it caused no water contamination at all. Today’s idols of small, big and huge sizes, are made by using tons of plaster of paris, manganese, chromium, sulphide, mercuric oxide, arsenic, cadmium, oil, grease, etc. Where does this water go ultimately? Into our stomach. I just can’t understand as to why the Governments can not prevent all this water contamination or at least start educating public through media advertisements and announcements. Every one is doing this murderous activity with all the festive celebrations and no one is bothered about our health implications including diseases and physical handicap in those who consume this water.
We all know there is plenty of pollution all around us. When rain falls on this earth, it naturally picks up the dust, germs, lead and other polluting minerals which we leave in the air. Now this water falls and gets accumulated in rivers and lakes. And when the river passes through our towns, our ground pollution and sewerage get added to it. Thus the water we have in our rivers and lakes today are all highly polluted. Possibly under this reason our elders stated that water from the house well is more good for health. Because the water in the well comes out of mother earth who gives us the spring after due cleaning and distillation. But these days well water is out of fashion and people do not provide for wells in houses. And the few old wells still remaining is unused collecting all dirt. Thus we have come a full circle and perfected the art of polluting our all water resources.
Water Supply points
Now let us move on to the next stage, i.e. to water treatment plants and water lines.
The water being consumed now a days by most of city dwellers come through a civic agency and through the pipes installed by the consumers. The water contamination in this network takes places at different levels as under:
Inadequate treatment and chlorinating at the treatment plant
Higher level of chlorine content in the water
Non-monitoring of water drawn from the source, say the wells
Complacency in testing samples
Corrosion in water lines
Pores and leakage in the distribution network allowing entry of bacteria
Aging and rusted pipes at the consumers’ place
Non-cleaning of storage tanks periodically
Mineral Water
In these days some people opt for mineral water believing they are very pure. It is said that the demand for bottled water has bloomed to over 400 million liters per year. It must certainly be true when we view the fierce competition in this field and availability of different brands in the market.
Based on the recommendation of the Central Committee of Food Standards, the Government it appears issued orders that mineral water should be sold in the market only under the ISI mark, but we find no bottled water bearing this mark. There was a newspaper reporting quoting a survey conducted by Consumer Education and Research Society that in many cases traces of arsenic, fluorides and aluminium were found in the bottled water. It has also been found that many operators in the field set up bottling plants and start marketing filtered and treated water as mineral water and exploit the huge market.
Natural Water
In this context, it would be interesting and useful to listen to what naturopaths advocate. They advice intake of more of vegetables and fruits in raw form, so that the water contained in them would meet our water needs and reduce the consumption of water from the municipal supply network. They advice consumption more of coconut water, kheera, water melon, etc. so that your need to take the pumped water gets reduced to the minimum.
Some people are even skeptic of even these vegetables, as they believe that these vegetables are grown with sewage water these days. It is true. As a resident of a metropolitan city, I had observed growing of palak etc along the railway tracks with all the sewage water. But naturopaths inform that whatever may the form of water that is fed to a coconut tree, it filters the same before consumption and its water is always sweet. Similarly, they say, all plants and trees, filter the water supplied to them and accordingly the water contained in these vegetables and fruits are distilled water. So, according to them, they are very safe for our consumption.
What can you do?
In case you are interested in getting pure drinking water, you need to boil the water and allow it evaporate leaving behind all the residues. And now you have to collect the residue free evaporated water and help it to condense. When you have done this well, you would have the hundred percent pure water for your drinking purposes. But do you have the needed time for doing this?
Well, we can’t avoid using the municipal tap water. In which case, we the consumers are to be careful of the above pitfalls and take all actions to safeguard our health against the water borne diseases. You are therefore advised to take the following actions to prevent water borne diseases:
Clean your overhead tank or the underground sump every fortnight
Check your service pipelines and attend to any damage, rusting or leakage
Replace them if they are more than 15 years old
Shift your service/water pipe line if it is passing through a drain or sewer
If you are using bore wells or tube wells for drinking water, get the water tested
Do not use the water of shallow hand pumps for drinking purposes
Do not use online booster as it increases the risk of contamination
Avoid the online booster as it affects your neighbors too
Do not use the water supplied by private tankers for drinking
Good habits
Drinking cool and plain water in the empty stomach right in the morning is generally practiced by many people. It is said that this cleanses the stomach and makes every organ function well. If you are one among those who follows this practice, make sure you also observe the following procedures:
The water you drink should be pure
It should be boiled the previous night and kept cooling till the next morning
You should have brushed your teeth prior to going to bed the previous night
The water is not more than 1.25 litres, say one water bottle
You don’t take tea or coffee or any other thing till an hour after drinking water
The best time to drink water is when you are thirsty. Drink water according to your body’s demand. Your body knows the best. But also be conscious of your bare minimum needs of 8 to 10 glasses of water every day. It is possible by your not taking adequate water you have made your body accustomed to less of water and hence you don’t feel the thirst. So you can start your day with drinking 2 to 3 glasses of water to cleanse your body of toxins and get yourself rid of any accumulated acidity and constipation.
Never drink water during meals as it would dilute the digestive juices coming up in your stomach. If they get diluted they would be unable to work effectively and consequently would not be able to absorb the nutrients from the food you take. Yes sometimes we may feel the need to take water while eating. It may be due to your intake of more of sugar, salt, spices or maida which always demand for more water. Avoid these enemies to your health and your body would not demand for water while you take food. You need too take water minimum half an hour before meals or one hour after meals.
When you go out in hot sun, take sugar candy along with you. That will serve as water for you
Next to air, water is the element most necessary for survival. Our body is 70% water.
Water intake helps us to flush out toxins from our body. Naturally inadequate water intake means accumulation of toxins in our body with added dryness and constipation.
Our kidneys remove uric acid and urea and it is necessary that these are dissolved in water for effective removal from our body. So, without water, we would get poisoned by the unremoved wastes. In addition, if we don’t consume adequate water, the kidney may receive no water for dissolving the uric acid and urea. It means kidney stones inside us.
Water has other uses. It carries nutrients and oxygen to the cells through the blood. Then it helps us cool the body through perspiration. Water also lubricates our joints. We also need water to breathe because our lungs must be moist to take in oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide. Lack of water inside our body means excess body fat, poor muscle tone and size, decreased digestive efficiency and organ function, increased toxicity in ithe body, joint and muscle soreness. If you don’t drink adequate water, your body retains the water in you without releasing it. And it has its own consequences.
Proper water intake is a key to weight loss. Take eight to ten glasses of water per day. In summer you would need more water. If you exercise, you would need more water. If you are over weight, you need additional water at the rate one glass extra for every ten kilos of extra weight you may have.
You need about 8 to 10 glasses of water every day including the other liquid intakes by you such as butter milk, coconut water, milk etc. In general, you should take 30 ml of water for every kilo of your weight. And this water consumption should be spread through out the day.
Water Contamination
Water contamination is the main source of infection and diseases like:
Jaundice
Diarrhoea
Gastroenteritis [vomitting, diarrhoea and fever]
Cholera [Severe gastroenteritis]
All these happen when our drinking water at some stage gets contaminated.
Water Resources
There was a time when our rivers and tanks were considered as holy and people who went to take bath there used to first worship the water and than take bath without applying on themselves any oil or soap. These traditions were prescribed with the sole intention that our life giving water sources need to be treated with respect and reverence and if treated that way these sources of water supply would remain pure.
But those days are long over and today in full view and participation of public, our water resources are polluted even in the name of worship. The way we pollute our own drinking water, it is very clear that we don’t need any other foreign enemy to destroy us and that we are totally self reliant in the matter.
Already people use the banks of our water resources for human defecation. They also pollute the water by washing clothes, applying detergents, and throw garbage into it. Many people religiously bring used puja flowers etc. in plastic bags and throw into the water of lake and rivers. Industries allow their effluents to flow into the nearby water resource and municipalities connect their drain to it.
It had been reported that more than twenty thousand idols of dieties are immersed into the water in each of our city water resources at the time of festivals like Ganesh Chathurthi and Kali pooja along with used puja materials in plastic bags. And what is notable is the local Governments make elaborate arrangements to oversee this planned and festive water contamination.
There were times when the immersed idols were only made of mud and it caused no water contamination at all. Today’s idols of small, big and huge sizes, are made by using tons of plaster of paris, manganese, chromium, sulphide, mercuric oxide, arsenic, cadmium, oil, grease, etc. Where does this water go ultimately? Into our stomach. I just can’t understand as to why the Governments can not prevent all this water contamination or at least start educating public through media advertisements and announcements. Every one is doing this murderous activity with all the festive celebrations and no one is bothered about our health implications including diseases and physical handicap in those who consume this water.
We all know there is plenty of pollution all around us. When rain falls on this earth, it naturally picks up the dust, germs, lead and other polluting minerals which we leave in the air. Now this water falls and gets accumulated in rivers and lakes. And when the river passes through our towns, our ground pollution and sewerage get added to it. Thus the water we have in our rivers and lakes today are all highly polluted. Possibly under this reason our elders stated that water from the house well is more good for health. Because the water in the well comes out of mother earth who gives us the spring after due cleaning and distillation. But these days well water is out of fashion and people do not provide for wells in houses. And the few old wells still remaining is unused collecting all dirt. Thus we have come a full circle and perfected the art of polluting our all water resources.
Water Supply points
Now let us move on to the next stage, i.e. to water treatment plants and water lines.
The water being consumed now a days by most of city dwellers come through a civic agency and through the pipes installed by the consumers. The water contamination in this network takes places at different levels as under:
Inadequate treatment and chlorinating at the treatment plant
Higher level of chlorine content in the water
Non-monitoring of water drawn from the source, say the wells
Complacency in testing samples
Corrosion in water lines
Pores and leakage in the distribution network allowing entry of bacteria
Aging and rusted pipes at the consumers’ place
Non-cleaning of storage tanks periodically
Mineral Water
In these days some people opt for mineral water believing they are very pure. It is said that the demand for bottled water has bloomed to over 400 million liters per year. It must certainly be true when we view the fierce competition in this field and availability of different brands in the market.
Based on the recommendation of the Central Committee of Food Standards, the Government it appears issued orders that mineral water should be sold in the market only under the ISI mark, but we find no bottled water bearing this mark. There was a newspaper reporting quoting a survey conducted by Consumer Education and Research Society that in many cases traces of arsenic, fluorides and aluminium were found in the bottled water. It has also been found that many operators in the field set up bottling plants and start marketing filtered and treated water as mineral water and exploit the huge market.
Natural Water
In this context, it would be interesting and useful to listen to what naturopaths advocate. They advice intake of more of vegetables and fruits in raw form, so that the water contained in them would meet our water needs and reduce the consumption of water from the municipal supply network. They advice consumption more of coconut water, kheera, water melon, etc. so that your need to take the pumped water gets reduced to the minimum.
Some people are even skeptic of even these vegetables, as they believe that these vegetables are grown with sewage water these days. It is true. As a resident of a metropolitan city, I had observed growing of palak etc along the railway tracks with all the sewage water. But naturopaths inform that whatever may the form of water that is fed to a coconut tree, it filters the same before consumption and its water is always sweet. Similarly, they say, all plants and trees, filter the water supplied to them and accordingly the water contained in these vegetables and fruits are distilled water. So, according to them, they are very safe for our consumption.
What can you do?
In case you are interested in getting pure drinking water, you need to boil the water and allow it evaporate leaving behind all the residues. And now you have to collect the residue free evaporated water and help it to condense. When you have done this well, you would have the hundred percent pure water for your drinking purposes. But do you have the needed time for doing this?
Well, we can’t avoid using the municipal tap water. In which case, we the consumers are to be careful of the above pitfalls and take all actions to safeguard our health against the water borne diseases. You are therefore advised to take the following actions to prevent water borne diseases:
Clean your overhead tank or the underground sump every fortnight
Check your service pipelines and attend to any damage, rusting or leakage
Replace them if they are more than 15 years old
Shift your service/water pipe line if it is passing through a drain or sewer
If you are using bore wells or tube wells for drinking water, get the water tested
Do not use the water of shallow hand pumps for drinking purposes
Do not use online booster as it increases the risk of contamination
Avoid the online booster as it affects your neighbors too
Do not use the water supplied by private tankers for drinking
Good habits
Drinking cool and plain water in the empty stomach right in the morning is generally practiced by many people. It is said that this cleanses the stomach and makes every organ function well. If you are one among those who follows this practice, make sure you also observe the following procedures:
The water you drink should be pure
It should be boiled the previous night and kept cooling till the next morning
You should have brushed your teeth prior to going to bed the previous night
The water is not more than 1.25 litres, say one water bottle
You don’t take tea or coffee or any other thing till an hour after drinking water
The best time to drink water is when you are thirsty. Drink water according to your body’s demand. Your body knows the best. But also be conscious of your bare minimum needs of 8 to 10 glasses of water every day. It is possible by your not taking adequate water you have made your body accustomed to less of water and hence you don’t feel the thirst. So you can start your day with drinking 2 to 3 glasses of water to cleanse your body of toxins and get yourself rid of any accumulated acidity and constipation.
Never drink water during meals as it would dilute the digestive juices coming up in your stomach. If they get diluted they would be unable to work effectively and consequently would not be able to absorb the nutrients from the food you take. Yes sometimes we may feel the need to take water while eating. It may be due to your intake of more of sugar, salt, spices or maida which always demand for more water. Avoid these enemies to your health and your body would not demand for water while you take food. You need too take water minimum half an hour before meals or one hour after meals.
When you go out in hot sun, take sugar candy along with you. That will serve as water for you
All Time Best Medicines
The All-time medicines
Laughter
It is well known that health and cheerfulness go together and negative moods can put us onto a wheelchair. Unhappy feelings trigger off changes in our glands and upset our body’s natural balance. Whereas, the positive feelings energise our glands and facilitate production of right hormones at the right time. Therefore, coping with life’s vicissitudes with cheerfulness is something desperately needed by ailing patients.
In this context it is nice to know that a one-minute laughter gives our body 45 minutes therapeutic relaxation. The laughter is free, easy and good for our health. The laughter produces greater quantities of the healing chemical called interferongamma. You can yourself feel it. You know immediately after laughter, you feel a ‘high’. That is the effect of this healing chemical getting unleashed. It does its work till long after we had finished our laughter.
Laugher lightens our heart and stimulates appetite. Laugher also acts as a great pain killer. Laughter expands our blood vessels and sends more blood into our extreme parts. It sends more oxygen into our parts and strengthens them against infection, etc. During laughter our muscles and body cells receive positive stimulation which creates a pleasant state all over our body. This reduces our ESR, reduces stress hormone levels, enhances respiration, tones up circulation and kills our pains and removes our fears and worries. Laughter releases chemicals like neuropeptides and provides us with antioxidant properties that improve our health. These help us tackle our stress, high blood pressure, depression, etc. and help us emerge more relaxed. When you laugh, your whole body benefits; your lungs are exercised, your heart is given extra tuning up. After a good laugh, your blood pressure would be lower, your breathing would be easier and you would have a sound sleep. Thus laughter helps our body to cure itself.
Even faking laughter helps. Whatever be the nature of laughter, when we laugh, our muscles get activated and when we stop, these muscles relax. Since muscle tension means pain, muscle relaxation means relief from pain. Thus those who laugh, get good amount of relief from pains of arthritis, rheumatism, headache, etc.
So next time you fall ill, instead of taking medicines, try to laugh. If you can’t, view laughter movies, listen laughter cassettes and read jokes and laughter books. Laughter would release the needed healing power and with the release of ‘feed good’ chemicals, you would soon feel good. Thus you can laugh your way to health.
No body can wait to be happy. If he waits, he would have to wait longer and longer. Happiness is NOW. If you are happy now, you would be happy for ever. So, laugh. Make light of your personal problems and laugh. Be light hearted and have an optimistic and positive approach towards life.
Walking
Benefits of walking are multifarious. You walk into the consulting room of any doctor anywhere in the world. They would advise you to walk and benefit yourself. It is because, walking produces its positive effect in every part of our body, as under:
Your Muscles and bones
· Your shoulder and neck muscles hold your head erect
· Your foot, leg, hip, tummy, diaphragm, rib and back muscles take an active part in our walking
· They all tighten to actively support the weight of your internal organs
· They eliminate impact of injuries
· Walking preserves and increases the bone mass and bone strength
· It is a perfect work out for big bone joints and arrests osteoporosis
· This muscular activity puts pressure on the veins and helps emptying blood clots in the veins
· If you don’t walk, blood clots in your veins and get you leg pain [thrombophelebitis]
Your lungs
· While running, you gasp because you fall short of oxygen. It does not happen when you walk
· Walking helps you to inhale more air [oxygen] without much effort and use it purposefully
· It thus enhances your respiratory reserve and improves the functional capacity of lungs
Your blood flow and heart
· It increases the healthy cholesterol, i.e. the HDL and lowers the unhealthy cholesterol, i.e. the LDL
· It checks clot formation in the arteries and reduces blood clotting
· It reduces blood sugar
· It stimulates the natural growth of newer blood vessels [fuel lines]
· It improves the elasticity of blood vessels
· It encourages good blood flow throughout the circulatory system
· All the above means helping your heart to function well
· This helps to lower your blood pressure
· Thus you save yourself from heart attacks and cerebral strokes
Your general physical health
· Walking helps in containment of sugar levels in your blood and increases the body’s sensitivity to insulin
· It is a very good insurance against blood sugar
· Brisk, rhythmic, aerobic walking tones up your basal metabolic rate and burns the excess calories
· It reduces your weight and helps you sweat away your risk for heart diseases
Your mental health
· It is the best remedy for stress, anxiety and depression
· It releases a number of natural neuro-hormones in your body
· The endorphins and encephalins give you a pleasant feeling and helps you get your tranquilizer you need
· It improves relationships when you take your spouse or friend along while you go for walking
· This way you release yourself of stress; relax, energise and bring enthusiasm back in your life
· Walking provides you a ‘pondering time’ which can prove greatly beneficial to you
How to walk
· To start with, walk twenty minutes a day
· Increase for 10 minutes each week till you reach a 45 minutes walk a day
· Take care of your speed of walking
· Subtract your age from 220; that gives you your maximum heart rate
· Now work out sixty percent and eighty percent of your maximum heart rate. To get best results, walk at your heart beat / pulse rate between your sixty and eighty percent
· The best advantages of walking will reach you when you walk within this range
· Count your pulse rate immediately after you have come to sitting position and verify
Exercises
If we see around us, we can see many people engaging themselves in one physical exercise or the other every day. At the same time we can also see around us people who say they have no time do any exercises.
The latter are the people who at their advanced age who are afraid whether, even if they start an exercise programme now, they can continue the same and whether they would be physically able to sustain themselves.
Yet some of them force themselves to do the exercises, but they don’t really enjoy doing the same because they feel tired during the exercises and due to all the discomfort and pain arising out of the exercises feel convinced that their goal is unattainable. The net result is that they soon wind up doing nothing.
Notwithstanding the above efforts and failures, many of us agree that exercises are very important to maintenance of our health. Muscles starve through lack of exercise. If you want proof of this, look at hospital patients who get all the balanced diet and medicines but still leave the bed too weak. Why do they feel weak despite balanced food and good rest? Because, they never put their muscles to inactivity. If you spend your days in bed or in wheel chair, your muscles and bones assume that you don’t need them to become strong. The same thing applies to those, who work sitting in chairs and attend to sedentary work.
One thing that we all need to note is that the exercises are not intended to make us enter into any competition with champions. They are to simply remain personal to us and what we do, how much we do and when we do are matters that we and we alone are to decide and implement. Our goals in doing these exercises are:
We want to remain fit
Our movements must be comfortable
We should continue to feel youthful
Our joints must remain flexible, whatever be our age
We should have sufficient stamina to do our day to day jobs
We should live with no undue physical worries
To tell you frankly, the above objectives are attainable and are within our reach with no rigid and punitive exercises. Formalised, special and regular exercises are needed only for those who eat junk and negative foods or those who want to develop muscles. People who take care to add natural food with their daily meals need not resort themselves to doing any rigorous exercises. All they need to do is to ensure that their various limbs are kept in movement. They are not to aim at any muscle strength and they are to exercise only to keep fit, They therefore only need to do some minimal exercises within one’s comfortable range. For them the sufficient daily exercises are
30 minutes of brisk walking in the open in the early morning and
10 minutes of exercises within their homes
When you exercise at home, if possible, put on some light, spirited and non-aggressive but rhythmic music. This music could make you feel energetic and enthusiastic to do your exercises.
This ten minutes exercise is meant for all your joints and limbs and this could be :
1st minute [Leg/knee]
You must have stairs in or around your house leading to the first floor.
Identify one such
Measure the height of the first step. Generally it would be upto 9 inches
If that is the case, stand down on your left leg and climb on the step with your right
Then pull the left also up the stair
Then bring back the right down
Then bright your left also down
Right up, left up, right down and left down
This way, just climb up and down on the first step of the stairs only
Do it for thirty times in one minute. No more and no less
If you feel discomfort at any moment during the exercise, stop. If you feel discomfort at any moment during the exercise, stop.
Don’t continue because you have low tolerance level
If you could do only 20 times, perhaps you can increase it to 21tomorrow
You can slowly increase it to 30 over a week
2nd minute
[Leg/knee]
Do the above exercise with Left up, right up, left down and right down 30 times, no more and no less
3rd minute [Hip]
Stand with stretched legs
Stretch both your arms parallel to the ground in front of you
Standing at the same place, make your hip swing semi circular
Take your arms along to the right extreme and then to the left extreme
4th minute
[Shoulder]
Stand in attention
Rise your arms parallel to the ground at their respective sides
Then raise them up above your head
Then bring them back to the sides and then down
5th minute
[Elbow]
Rise your arms parallel to the ground at their respective sides
Fold both the arms and touch your shoulder and get back
6th minute [Wrist]
Stretch both your arms parallel to the ground in front of you
Rotate your wrists clock wise and anti-clock wise
7th minute
[Finger joints]
Stretch both your arms parallel to the ground in front of you
Without moving the arms, close your first and release
Do it again and again
7th minute [Neck]
Stand erect
See straight
slowly lower your head and see down
slowly lift it to see straight
slowly lift it to see up
Bring it back to see straight
Neck exercise sideways
8th minute
[Neck]
See straight, bright slowly your right chin to touch your shoulder
Slowly get back to normal and do it towards left and get to normal
minute
Neck exercise sideways
See straight, slowly turn to see the right side and get back to see straight
Then do the same to see the left and back to normal
10th minute
Jog at the standing position, i.e. pretend running
Well, in addition to these 10-minute exercises, you are also prescribed some other exercises which can be done while you are on some other job and they do not consume your time They are:
· While taking bath pull your bath towel from both sides and increase
· your muscle strength
· Twist the wet cloth [clockwise and anti] and enhance your wrist strength.
· Wet the cloth, keeping it between your palms, push water out
Walk up your stairs while climbing to your office premises. Mind
you, you can climb up to 6th floor. If you find it difficult, go by lift
upto 3rd floor and then climb the balance
· Make sure you walk down in the evening
· In the office, don’t sit dormant, intermittently stand and work
· Possibly you can also move around often
· If you want to talk to someone in office, Don’t call him, walk up to him. [You get the exercise and you build good relationships too.Also you casually inspect what does he do! And your subordinates could become alert and office efficiency improves]
· Be on your legs say for one to two hours in the eight hour office
· Don’t use vehicles, walk to the market
· Lift the groceries yourself and walk back home
· At home just lift some heavy item once a day and hold it for five seconds.
All these help you to have better orthostatic tolerance
Do deep relaxation when you go to bed. You can pray or you can concentrate on each part of your body and command them to relax ; or you can do both. When you get up in the morning respond to your natural urge to stretch yourself as much as you need. Enjoy your best yawn. Correct stretching dispels lethargy and energises body and mind. It is a great stress reducer. It rejuvenates the stiff spots. Hence from time to time stretch yourself by ensuring that your shoulders, hips, knees and ankles all have a ballet like movement.
If one does the exercises, he can bring in a variable of 20 years. Suppose you are sixty, you can live an active life of 40 if you do the right kind of exercises. Experts say that the variable can be increased up to 30 years. Exercises are meant to awaken our youthfulness residing in our body all the time.
In exercise make sure that every joint and every muscle had had enough activity. Have emphasis on body movements and regularity. If you can combine exercises with playing games like tennis, squash, badminton, swimming, gardening, etc. it would be both useful and interesting.
Exercises are essential also to digestion, sleep and peace of mind. They keep the muscles in good tone, bones in good strength, blood in good circulation and bowels to good movement. By bringing more oxygen to lungs and removing carbon dioxide, they also tone up the functioning of your organs and glands. It induces better sleep and brings beneficial effects on your nervous system.
Exercise makes our heart work better. It can now pump more blood into our body benefiting every organ. Exercise also reduces triglyceride, cholesterol levels, etc. it means reduced coronary risks. Exercise also reduces body fat which influences insulin action. Exercise strengthens our muscles and bones and enhances flexibility. The nervous system also gets invigorated by exercises. Exercise also helps us to sleep better. Exercises increase oxygen transport capacity within your body and accordingly every part of your body gets more oxygen and thus function more efficiently including your mental performance. Regular exercises also stimulate our brain due to increased circulation of oxygen and blood.
Health decline is generally associated with old age, whereas it is actually related to inactivity. Muscles and bones generally degenerate when they are not in effective use. Matters like what exercise you do, at what age you do are of no consequence, so long you do it regularly and less strenuously. Make it your daily habit like brushing your teeth. Poor fitness is as dangerous as smoking or high cholesterol. The good news is that even moderate exercises can substantially reduce your chances of ill health.
Breathing exercise
Breath is the foundation of all human life since it supplies oxygen to the cells. But beyond this, it also helps the flow of lymph fluid in our body, which is our sewage system. The blood in our body is moved by our heart. But our sewage has no such pumping system and it is moved by our breathing. So, the more we are able to breathe deeply, the more the movement of sewage. And if the movement of this sewage is slow, you know it can result in accumulation of dirt in our body and we could get into lot of illness. So it is in our interest, that we deep breathe more and facilitate our sewage system move well.
Deep breathing is so easy, but it requires practice. Inhale to the count of two. Hold the breathe to the count of eight. And then exhale to the count of four. 2:8:4 is the mantra. Start doing it. But this is the beginning. After you have mastered it, prolong these a little longer and take it to 4:16:8.
Do this exercise 10 times in the morning, 10 times in the afternoon and 10 times in the evening.
Prayer
In today’s fast moving life, there is need for high degree of achievement and the resultant tensions, worries, anxieties and stress. In this situation people need something which would not only release their stress and calm them down but would also pep up their morale, self confidence and optimism. In case people had already fallen victims to their day to day stress and have contracted illnesses and are not getting any relief from any of the medical treatments and therapies, they need to be lifted out of their defeated feelings.
Here comes the importance of prayer. Prayer is not merely worship and is not repetition of formal routine of words. To those people who think so and undervalue prayer, it cannot do anything.
Prayer is the most powerful form of creating one’s own energy. It has a high positive impact on the mind and body. It can provide us the needed antibiotics, restore our spirits, re-supply our lost power and thus re-start our glands. In nutshell, by addressing our emotional and spiritual dimensions, it can overcome all our problems and create miracles in our lives.
Sudden accidents, unexpected illness and unexpected birth of handicapped children at home can bring sea change in life all of a sudden. We should never take normalcy for granted. We should always thank God for our being able to do our work independently.
Love
The lack of love makes us sick. Love is thus very important to our mental and consequently physical health.
Patients in general face terrible onslaught of negative feelings, such as fear, anxiety and worry. At that time, there is a dire need to counter the harsh voice of negative feelings. And then if love is showered on them, it would greatly help in facilitating their physical and mental balance. So love the patients, hug them, hold them close and recharge them. Let them feel comforted, protected and relaxed. Love is at the root of what makes us enjoy life because you know you have someone to turn to. Thus love gives us better immune system through its antidotes to stress and thus provides longer life expectancy.
Oxytocin is a medicine provided by doctors to treat depression in patients. But this oxytocin is already produced within our body if the patient enjoys physical touch, affection and care from near and dear.
There are effects of everything you do and marriages are no exception. If your marriage had been good, it has positive effects on you and the reverse is also true. Hold on to your partner in good romance and you are sure to live longer happily without disease even in your old age.
If your relationship with your spouse is good, you are better looked after and your positive mental state helps your glands to secrete all the required chemicals in good amount at the required time. On the contrary, if your relationships are unsatisfactory, it weakens your immunity system and you become more susceptible to diseases are prone to cardiovascular and nervous disorders. A good marriage is good for health and a bad marriage is bad for health. You can join the group which suits you best.
And I tell you, if your marriage is good, your relationships with every other would also be good and you would have no tensions in your life.
Touch Therapy
Whenever a child gets cough or undergoes some pain, it is normal for anxious parents to reach for antibiotics. Such parents would need to know that God has given to them great healing powers, which grand mothers generally use. What do they do when the child gets some uneasiness? They invite the child to lie in their lap. Then they take some domestic oil such as eucalyptus oil and rub it on the chest, throat, back and nose assuring the child very lovingly that nothing is wrong him/her and that he/she would become alright in an hour. This Touch Therapy has a measurable impact on the child. This causes tactile sensations and makes the child more comfortable and tension free. And this really helps in early and easier recuperation.
Touch therapy, i.e. caressing by loving parents reduces the level of stress hormones and relaxes the child hastening the process of recovery.
This touch therapy can used by all parents to their children and by all wives and husbands to their spouses. This way of using hand with plenty of love and assurance, is called the ‘magic touch’.
Speaking to your body
When your child cries or when your spouse is upset, what do they essentially communicate? They only tell you, you need to attend to them and their needs. And if you calmly and lovingly speak to them, their cry and upset is gone instantly.
The same is true with your body. When you feel pain in any part of your body, it only communicates that you are not paying attention to it and you are neglecting it. And what do you do next? You speak to it!
So, when you have some pain or discomfort, take the following actions:
Sit quietly
Close your eyes
Identify the organ giving you the trouble
Speak to that organ
Ask the following questions one by one and wait for its responses before moving to the next question:
Hey, what is the problem? – Listen to the answer and then ask
How was the problem caused? – Listen to the answer and then
ask
Now what do you want me to do?
If you really listen to your organ, you would hear your body responding to your questions
It would tell you the nature of the problem
It would tell you how you are neglecting it and its welfare
It would tell where you are over doing things and how you are causing pain
It would tell how you need to modify your life style
If you really follow whatever your organ tells you to do, your cure is at hand. Please be aware that nature has given us lots of tools and keep ourselves in good order. You only need to know them to avail of the nature’s help systems.
Self questioning
In case you have difficulty in believing in talking to your body, then you can opt for self questioning. In fact it is the same this as speaking to your body.
Fearing illness would not being us health. We would never be cured if we look at our illness the medical way. What would cure and heal us is our knowledge of what is deficient in us and taking remedial action to fill that deficiency. Therefore, when ever you fall ill ask yourself the following questions:
Why this disease?
Where did I go wrong?
What food am I taking?
What avoidable habits do I practice?
How do I prevent its recurrence?
What remedial action I need to initiate and sustain?
If you do not get the answers to the above, ask whom you consider can provide the answers to you to the above questions.
Support Group
When you fall ill, you know the symptoms and troubles arising out of it. Sometimes it so happens that the healthy people around you may not be able to understand your problems and provide you the support and guidance you need.
That is where the importance of support group comes in. In western countries support groups are most prevalent for different disease states such as cancer patient association, asthma patients association, etc. In these associations, the patients join hands to form support groups as they are convinced that they need emotional understanding and support and guidance beyond the doctor’s pills and medicines. These support groups act as a complement to medical care. In these group meetings, patients share their individual experiences and exchange helpful advice. They also come forward to help each other to make life easier for the members.
In many cases, individual patients had taken the lead to form an association with great success. You, as a patient would greatly benefit by joining such support groups if there is one within your reach or start one, if there is none around.
Nutritious living
Many people start thinking of nutrition only when they fall sick. If there had been nutrition already in their lives, they would not have fallen sick even at the first instance.
And there are lots and lots of people who think of nutrition only in their food. That is again wrong. Nutrition should not be limited to food alone. It should extend also to
Nutritious food
Nutritious air
Nutritious water
But even beyond the above, nutrition need extend to
Nutritious sunshine
Nutritious exercises
But here we are stretching it even beyond. In our opinion, nutrition extends to mind also, i.e. to our thinking, reading and relationships which are very important to our healthy living
:
Nutritious education / reading
Nutritious thinking
Nutritious relationships
If you fall sick, believe that you are mal nourished in any one or more of the above. Shift nutrition from food to your whole life and adopt nutrition as philosophy of your life for happy living.
Many think healthy people are happy people. But it is only partially true. In reality only happy people can become healthy people. And who those happy people are? They are ‘Nutritious people’ who had adopted nutrition in their ‘whole’ life.
Human beings are also forms of energy. All our actions and their results thereof emanate from our internal energy. And what gives us the energy to do anything? It is our thought. It is your thought that makes you walk into a restaurant. It is again your thought that asks you to get married or to get divorced. Thus all your actions precede your thought. You thought this is a book worth reading and so you are reading it.
Now, if a person’s thoughts are negative, he could do anything, even commit a murder. On the contrary, if his thoughts are very positive, he would even win over murderers and save one’s life. Do you remember the story of Angulimal? Angulimal was a cruel robber who way laid Mahatma Budha and wanted to kill him. But when Buddha talked to him with all his positive approach, Angulimal abandoned robbery and became Buddha’s disciple. There is nothing that cannot be changed with positive thinking in this world.
Positive people always remain cheerful and energetic and it is they who attract people around them. On the contrary depressed people lose their available energy and people leave them and go away because they make others also depressed.
Be aware that you are created by God and God does not wish you to get sick. It is you who invite your sickness. The best method to come out of sickness is to approach life with all positive thinking and see yourself as a healthy person. If you can visualise yourself as a healthy person and feel optimistic, you are already on the road to recovery.
In the field of relationships, accept people as they are and develop good relationships with them. This is better than worrying and going nowhere. Once you have good relationships, you can talk things over and bring in the needed changes. Problem people are in fact opportunities for you to create an impact in their lives. A happy relationship in family can add so much of good health to your life.
Fasting
There are many toxic material that enter our body every day through the food we take, through the air we breath and through the water we drink. These toxic material create impurities in our blood. And when these impurities increase, your immunity against diseases decrease and you start encountering illness. Therefore there is need to periodically clean our blood of toxins. And this cleansing is done by fasting. How? Let us see.
Suppose you go to office on a holiday for some work. You have completed your work and you have still two hours to get your next bus or train. Then during those two hours what do you do? Since you have no work on hand, you start cleaning your table and table drawers. Right?
Same thing applies to your body. Generally your system is very busy in digesting what you eat. But on a given day when you fast, your system does not have the usual work of digesting. So it opts for cleaning. And cleaning would clear your blood and other organs of all their impurities. That is why fasting has been prescribed in most of our religions as a way of life. Our great elders know the value of fasting to our good health.
Despite the advantages of fasting, there are some people who are hesitant to go on fasting, because they don’t believe they can fast. It is because they consider fasting as starving.
Starving occurs when you desperately need food and food is not available. Whereas fasting occurs when there is plenty of food around and we consciously keep away from food because we are on a different mission of cleaning our body of accumulated waste.
In starving, our mind is focused on food. Whereas, in fasting, the mind is focused on health.
Thus the key to fasting is too know the purpose of fasting and taking a deliberate decision not to focus your mind on food. Once this decision is taken by the mind, which is our king, then the ministers and army go to execute the decision of the king.
People who have difficulty in fasting are those people whose sensory organs are in control of the mind. Their mind is yet to take control and the king is a prisoner in the hands of his army.
Well, people who are yet to master the art of fasting, there is a way to fast without fasting.
We know from the above that fasting means cleaning the body from within. If you go for cleaning your clothes, you need detergents. If you want to clean the floor of your house, you need a different kind of cleaning material. So is if you want to wash your car. Thus cleaning materials are different for different things. Now to clean your body, your cleaning materials are some amino acids found in fruits. So when such people go on fast, they can take fresh fruits during fasting or fruit juices instead. This is called juice fasting. In this way those people can overcome their hesitation to go on total fasting and at the same time also supply their system with the needed cleaning material.
So, have a nice in-house cleaning at least once a fortnight.
Music
Indian history is replete with names of great people like Narad, Haridas, Sur, Mira, Raidas, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and others who had all attained God through music. When music can take us to God, why not to health?
When man invented music, it is said that he took his first step towards civilisation. He learnt music from nature. Thus when we get into music mode, we align ourselves with nature and the nature takes care of the rest.
You are already aware that mothers ‘use’ music to make their crying babies sleep.
Well, in the field of health, music has plenty to offer. When we listen to some good music, i.e. soft music such as Gazal, Bhajan, Classical music, etc.
There is a happy change to our sensations
It creates a pleasant impact on our blood vessels and nervous system
We start enjoying the present and forget our worries and concerns
Psychologically analysed, when you are on some great music
Tensions, fears, anxieties, depression, etc in the minds are removed
Our mental balance is restored and our mood improves
Medically analysed, the music
Releases positive endorphine in our body
Reduces our blood pressure, palpitation, breathlessness etc.
Provides the patient with a pleasant environment
Makes the patient feel better
Induces sleep in the patient and provides him further rest and relief
Medical researchers know that almost 90% of our illnesses are due to mental tensions and worries. They accordingly advocate music therapy towards curing patients. The researchers say that our music is not one, but made of different ‘ragas’, i.e tunes. They say that different tunes can work to reduce different illnesses, such as:
For asthma
Kedar, Shyam Kalyan
For fever
Basanth Bahar, Hindol, Marwa, Bhairav
Constipation
Asavari
High BP
Poorvi, Thodi, Alap in Multani
All pains
Peelu, Malcose, Thodi
Heart problems
Darbari, Kaanhada
Cancer
Sindhu Bhairavi
Migraine
Darbari Kaanhada, Jay Jayvanti, Sohni
Hyper acidity
Marwa, Deepak, Kalavathi
Ulcer
Madhuvanti, Deepak
Diabetes
Jounpuri, Jay Jayvanti
Mental depression
Lalit, Kedar
So make music an essential part of your life. It is a definite anxiety reliever and mood booster. With proper doses of good and gentle music you get your body tonic.
And, by the way, can you sing? Sing if you can. If you are worried about the reaction of others to your singing, then sing or hum to yourself and get more benefits than listening to the music. He who sings frightens away his ills. .
Stress Management
There are only three rules for living long. They are,
· Self control on food intake
· exercising the body and
· leading a stress free life.
We have covered the first two rules extensively in this book. This chapter is devoted to the third rule, i.e. leading a stress free life.
Leading a stress free life is very important because stress is one of the main causes of disease. Stress activates three glands, viz. the pituitary and the two adrenals. Their hormones have a great impact on our body functions. When there is stress these glands pour out hormones that create an internal emergency within our body. Than makes all our organs tensed up.
Now when we continue to remain stressful, our body continues to remain tensed up. You know when there is an internal emergency, there is preparation for war and all peacetime activities get stopped. The same thing happens in our body and all peace time activities including digestion stops. This means disastrous consequences to our body. So we suffer because of stress.
The first thing therefore is to get an awareness whether you are stressed up.
How do you find whether you are stressed up? Ask yourself a simple question whether other people find it a pleasure to interact with you. If yes, you are not stressed up. If no, you are under stress, which makes you act in manners unpleasant to others.
Stress is a killer. It is a great killer. In these modern days, you can’t avoid getting stressed. But escape the stress by finding relaxing hobbies. Physical activities, gardening, playing, walking, listening to music, writing poems, painting, sleeping well or any such thing that can reduce your stress level.
You can also consider taking he following corrective actions:
ü Come out of the belief that you are a big man
ü Shun the superman image
ü Take criticisms easy
ü Make yourself available to others
ü Cooperate with people
ü Help people solving their problems
ü Live sensibly
ü Don’t waste your energy on quarrels and conflicts
ü Never opt for complaining
ü Learn not to be upset by small things
ü Cry if need be and let off stream
ü Make your attitude and thinking pleasant and cheerful
ü Don’t look upon work as something to be done with
ü What you need to do, do it with pleasure
ü Like people
ü Listen to what people say
ü Avoid spending 100 rupee energy on a 10 rupee worth problem
ü Tune in to the feelings of others
ü Pay compliments to spouse and children
ü Give yourself positive messages
ü Laugh
ü Exercise
ü Develop reading habit – read self development books
ü Keep smiling!
Hobbies
Hobbies can also work as therapy. Any hobby has a therapeutic value. It is because you are on a creative mode and creation is God’s domain. When you are in God’s domain, there is no question of your being in any kind of trouble. When you are focused, say on art, you lose yourself to it and you come of out of internal stress. This unstressing of yourself removes all internal conflicts and you get cleansed.
Meditation
Someone it appears asked a sage whether he can smoke while meditating. He was promptly admonished for asking this question. Another friend asked the sage whether he can meditate while smoking. Pat came the reply, you can meditate at any time.
Meditation can be done anywhere and at any time. It is a great medicine to relieve you of your stress. In these days of stiff competition, when we often suffer from anxiety, fear, worry, depression, etc. our immunity levels deplete. So in this disturbing scenario, we need to recoup of our lost immunity powers by reuniting our body and mind and creating the needed harmony within.
Meditation isolates you from the negative surroundings at least for some time during the day during which you can slow down, breath well, lower your anxieties and calm your mind and allow your body to loosen out and get back its balance.
For doing the meditation, look for places which are quiet. Seek out fresh air and open spaces if you can.
One of the effective methods of meditation is to concentrate on our breath, i.e. to concentrate on your nose tip while you breathe. Another method is to count your breath. You can meditate on anything, a picture, a thought, a glowing candle, etc. and watch the thoughts that come and go in and out of your mind. You can just behave an observer. This is called receptive meditation.
There is a second kind of meditation which is called ‘problem solving meditation’. In this meditation, you can think on anything with a focus and introspect. If you have problems, you can focus on it and think where things have gone wrong and what virtues and adjustments you need to acquire or make to overcome the situation. Ask yourself as to what a mature man would do in these situations. Ask yourself as to what life style changes you need to make to help your life become more healthy and enjoyable. In this way find a value based solution to all your problems.
Similarly you can check about your relationships with your near and dear and confirm to yourself they are all pleasant and healthy. Take one aspect of your life in each day’s meditation and go on introspecting. One day your family relationships and the other day your official relationships. One day your self development and another day your children’s studies. One day your health and another day someone else’s health. On another day check your attitude towards your friends, parents and even to inanimate things like materials and great books. Ask yourself are you selfish, possessive, status conscious, book loving, etc. Like this, concentrate on each day on each of your areas of concerns and interests.
When you meditate, if and when you find your thoughts have gone astray, bring it back to the object on which you are meditating without criticizing yourself. This is the way to focus your attention on your meditation.
Someone beautifully said that meditation is a dance and not a running race. In a running race, you need to go fast towards your destination. Where as in dance, the goal is not any destination, but enjoying what you do. So don’t just worry about your distracted thoughts while on meditation. What is important is sitting to do the meditation which helps you to relax your body and mind or to find solutions to your problems.
Cleanliness
Keep your house clean. Your house would consist of many areas such as kitchen, hall, rooms, toilet, etc. and each of these areas need to be kept clean.
Let us take the kitchen first. It is in the kitchen you tame lot of micro organisms which affect your health. Clean the kitchen platform and the tiles regularly and if possible with a little shampoo. Clean the exhaust fans periodically, if necessary with kerosene. If the kitchen has no outlet for smells and smoke to go out, keep one lighted candle on the kitchen platform.
Now let us move on to kitchen appliances and utensils. Take your vegetable cutter for example. After repeated use, you could see lots of scratches in that. It is there micro organisms live and grow. Don’t think it would become clean by simply washing it with water. Use washing liquids to clean it off. Same thing applies when you wash your utensils or the kitchen platforms. Sodium hypochlorite is the chemical that can kill the micro organisms. Clear up the kitchen of old preparations. Clean the cloth pieces used in the kitchen regularly. Soak them in water with little shampoo added and rinse them after half an hour.
Let us now move on to your Refrigerator. Food kept in refrigerator does not remain free from micro organisms. Cold temperatures do not kill the bacteria. Please avoid keeping cooked items in the fridge. Use the fridge only for storing uncut vegetables and fruits. And in case you keep any cooked food or items like milk, keep them closed. Clean the inside and outside of your fridge regularly.
Avoid bringing meat or poultry products. If you bring them, you also bring with them the bacteria living on them.
Wash your hands before you go for eating.
Keep the house clean at all times. Avoid keeping pets at home.
Make sure you take all steps to avoid accidents at home. Let the floors be free of clothes, shoes, toys, books, magazines, disorderly furniture etc. Discard wobbling chairs and tables. Make sure wires, extension chords do not obstruct path ways. Let there be light switch just beside your bed. If not keep a torch beside your bed. And when phone or door bell rings, don’t get up in a hurry.
Take care of stairs. When you walk down be extra careful. Don’t walk with socks on. Don’t bring loads of materials on hand which obstructs your vision. Be careful about single steps and elevations.
You need to ensure that your house is free of flies. When you find too much of house flies around, take ‘kadipatta’ or pudina leaves, squeeze it and keep it around that place to avoid flies coming in. Otherwise, you can mix some salt in water and sprinkle around. In the alternative, you can put camphor in hot water and keep the vessel in the room where flies exist. That would also drive them away. While washing the house, you can mix some salt in the water and wash. That would also give relief from flies.
To avoid mosquitoes, use black jeera or mango flowers or neem flowers or dried organge peels and burn. You can also take bleaching powder, mix it with water and sprinkle along the four sides of your house. More simpler method would be to have a traditional neem oil hand lamp with thick threads burning overnight. If interested, you can prepare mosquito coils with Tulsi, thumbai, pudina, camphor leaves and maida of equal quantity and grind them without water. Then boil them in water and cool. Cut cakes and use for burning.
If the ants have made their house, drop asafetida powder or alam powder on it. If ants problem in containers and bottles of provisions, etc., take poondu, hand crush and draw line around the bottle or container openings. Similarly, wipe cup boards with neem oil to avoid entry of ants. In case of white ants, spread vibhooti powder around.
Change bed sheets and pillow covers as often as possible, maximum once a week. To avoid insects and bugs in the beddings, always keep a piece of camphor in them. Protect woolens with neem leaves while storing them in summer.
If there is movement of lizards, keep at places either empty egg shells, or peacock feathers or onion shoots / flowers. In old boxes, to avoid cockroaches, keep some pudina leaves in a cloth tie. Pudina leaf is a great pest control device. Cockroaches also keep off phenyle. Keeping garlic in almirahs and shelves would also keep away all kinds of insects.
Ensure your bathroom and toilet are not slippery. Have skid proof floors. Remove spills of soap, lotions, shampoos, etc. To get rid of the mosquitoes, cockroaches, etc. at toilets, sprinkle kerosene or phenyle.. In the bath rooms, you can keep some camphor which would keep away the insects and would give good smell also. Wash your hands with soap after you come out of toilet.
Daily clean your house frontage with water mixed with phenyle, dettol or clean cow dung. This is especially necessary for those living in flats as so many people walk through your frontage and many people may bring in so many germs through their foot wear. And wash your own foot wear once a week and keep them clean.
To avoid insects entering the house, spread salt at the door entrances. If by any chance snake has entered your house, first put salt at entrances where you don’t want it to go and thus cordon it off leaving only one way to exit and then drive it out.
Laughter
It is well known that health and cheerfulness go together and negative moods can put us onto a wheelchair. Unhappy feelings trigger off changes in our glands and upset our body’s natural balance. Whereas, the positive feelings energise our glands and facilitate production of right hormones at the right time. Therefore, coping with life’s vicissitudes with cheerfulness is something desperately needed by ailing patients.
In this context it is nice to know that a one-minute laughter gives our body 45 minutes therapeutic relaxation. The laughter is free, easy and good for our health. The laughter produces greater quantities of the healing chemical called interferongamma. You can yourself feel it. You know immediately after laughter, you feel a ‘high’. That is the effect of this healing chemical getting unleashed. It does its work till long after we had finished our laughter.
Laugher lightens our heart and stimulates appetite. Laugher also acts as a great pain killer. Laughter expands our blood vessels and sends more blood into our extreme parts. It sends more oxygen into our parts and strengthens them against infection, etc. During laughter our muscles and body cells receive positive stimulation which creates a pleasant state all over our body. This reduces our ESR, reduces stress hormone levels, enhances respiration, tones up circulation and kills our pains and removes our fears and worries. Laughter releases chemicals like neuropeptides and provides us with antioxidant properties that improve our health. These help us tackle our stress, high blood pressure, depression, etc. and help us emerge more relaxed. When you laugh, your whole body benefits; your lungs are exercised, your heart is given extra tuning up. After a good laugh, your blood pressure would be lower, your breathing would be easier and you would have a sound sleep. Thus laughter helps our body to cure itself.
Even faking laughter helps. Whatever be the nature of laughter, when we laugh, our muscles get activated and when we stop, these muscles relax. Since muscle tension means pain, muscle relaxation means relief from pain. Thus those who laugh, get good amount of relief from pains of arthritis, rheumatism, headache, etc.
So next time you fall ill, instead of taking medicines, try to laugh. If you can’t, view laughter movies, listen laughter cassettes and read jokes and laughter books. Laughter would release the needed healing power and with the release of ‘feed good’ chemicals, you would soon feel good. Thus you can laugh your way to health.
No body can wait to be happy. If he waits, he would have to wait longer and longer. Happiness is NOW. If you are happy now, you would be happy for ever. So, laugh. Make light of your personal problems and laugh. Be light hearted and have an optimistic and positive approach towards life.
Walking
Benefits of walking are multifarious. You walk into the consulting room of any doctor anywhere in the world. They would advise you to walk and benefit yourself. It is because, walking produces its positive effect in every part of our body, as under:
Your Muscles and bones
· Your shoulder and neck muscles hold your head erect
· Your foot, leg, hip, tummy, diaphragm, rib and back muscles take an active part in our walking
· They all tighten to actively support the weight of your internal organs
· They eliminate impact of injuries
· Walking preserves and increases the bone mass and bone strength
· It is a perfect work out for big bone joints and arrests osteoporosis
· This muscular activity puts pressure on the veins and helps emptying blood clots in the veins
· If you don’t walk, blood clots in your veins and get you leg pain [thrombophelebitis]
Your lungs
· While running, you gasp because you fall short of oxygen. It does not happen when you walk
· Walking helps you to inhale more air [oxygen] without much effort and use it purposefully
· It thus enhances your respiratory reserve and improves the functional capacity of lungs
Your blood flow and heart
· It increases the healthy cholesterol, i.e. the HDL and lowers the unhealthy cholesterol, i.e. the LDL
· It checks clot formation in the arteries and reduces blood clotting
· It reduces blood sugar
· It stimulates the natural growth of newer blood vessels [fuel lines]
· It improves the elasticity of blood vessels
· It encourages good blood flow throughout the circulatory system
· All the above means helping your heart to function well
· This helps to lower your blood pressure
· Thus you save yourself from heart attacks and cerebral strokes
Your general physical health
· Walking helps in containment of sugar levels in your blood and increases the body’s sensitivity to insulin
· It is a very good insurance against blood sugar
· Brisk, rhythmic, aerobic walking tones up your basal metabolic rate and burns the excess calories
· It reduces your weight and helps you sweat away your risk for heart diseases
Your mental health
· It is the best remedy for stress, anxiety and depression
· It releases a number of natural neuro-hormones in your body
· The endorphins and encephalins give you a pleasant feeling and helps you get your tranquilizer you need
· It improves relationships when you take your spouse or friend along while you go for walking
· This way you release yourself of stress; relax, energise and bring enthusiasm back in your life
· Walking provides you a ‘pondering time’ which can prove greatly beneficial to you
How to walk
· To start with, walk twenty minutes a day
· Increase for 10 minutes each week till you reach a 45 minutes walk a day
· Take care of your speed of walking
· Subtract your age from 220; that gives you your maximum heart rate
· Now work out sixty percent and eighty percent of your maximum heart rate. To get best results, walk at your heart beat / pulse rate between your sixty and eighty percent
· The best advantages of walking will reach you when you walk within this range
· Count your pulse rate immediately after you have come to sitting position and verify
Exercises
If we see around us, we can see many people engaging themselves in one physical exercise or the other every day. At the same time we can also see around us people who say they have no time do any exercises.
The latter are the people who at their advanced age who are afraid whether, even if they start an exercise programme now, they can continue the same and whether they would be physically able to sustain themselves.
Yet some of them force themselves to do the exercises, but they don’t really enjoy doing the same because they feel tired during the exercises and due to all the discomfort and pain arising out of the exercises feel convinced that their goal is unattainable. The net result is that they soon wind up doing nothing.
Notwithstanding the above efforts and failures, many of us agree that exercises are very important to maintenance of our health. Muscles starve through lack of exercise. If you want proof of this, look at hospital patients who get all the balanced diet and medicines but still leave the bed too weak. Why do they feel weak despite balanced food and good rest? Because, they never put their muscles to inactivity. If you spend your days in bed or in wheel chair, your muscles and bones assume that you don’t need them to become strong. The same thing applies to those, who work sitting in chairs and attend to sedentary work.
One thing that we all need to note is that the exercises are not intended to make us enter into any competition with champions. They are to simply remain personal to us and what we do, how much we do and when we do are matters that we and we alone are to decide and implement. Our goals in doing these exercises are:
We want to remain fit
Our movements must be comfortable
We should continue to feel youthful
Our joints must remain flexible, whatever be our age
We should have sufficient stamina to do our day to day jobs
We should live with no undue physical worries
To tell you frankly, the above objectives are attainable and are within our reach with no rigid and punitive exercises. Formalised, special and regular exercises are needed only for those who eat junk and negative foods or those who want to develop muscles. People who take care to add natural food with their daily meals need not resort themselves to doing any rigorous exercises. All they need to do is to ensure that their various limbs are kept in movement. They are not to aim at any muscle strength and they are to exercise only to keep fit, They therefore only need to do some minimal exercises within one’s comfortable range. For them the sufficient daily exercises are
30 minutes of brisk walking in the open in the early morning and
10 minutes of exercises within their homes
When you exercise at home, if possible, put on some light, spirited and non-aggressive but rhythmic music. This music could make you feel energetic and enthusiastic to do your exercises.
This ten minutes exercise is meant for all your joints and limbs and this could be :
1st minute [Leg/knee]
You must have stairs in or around your house leading to the first floor.
Identify one such
Measure the height of the first step. Generally it would be upto 9 inches
If that is the case, stand down on your left leg and climb on the step with your right
Then pull the left also up the stair
Then bring back the right down
Then bright your left also down
Right up, left up, right down and left down
This way, just climb up and down on the first step of the stairs only
Do it for thirty times in one minute. No more and no less
If you feel discomfort at any moment during the exercise, stop. If you feel discomfort at any moment during the exercise, stop.
Don’t continue because you have low tolerance level
If you could do only 20 times, perhaps you can increase it to 21tomorrow
You can slowly increase it to 30 over a week
2nd minute
[Leg/knee]
Do the above exercise with Left up, right up, left down and right down 30 times, no more and no less
3rd minute [Hip]
Stand with stretched legs
Stretch both your arms parallel to the ground in front of you
Standing at the same place, make your hip swing semi circular
Take your arms along to the right extreme and then to the left extreme
4th minute
[Shoulder]
Stand in attention
Rise your arms parallel to the ground at their respective sides
Then raise them up above your head
Then bring them back to the sides and then down
5th minute
[Elbow]
Rise your arms parallel to the ground at their respective sides
Fold both the arms and touch your shoulder and get back
6th minute [Wrist]
Stretch both your arms parallel to the ground in front of you
Rotate your wrists clock wise and anti-clock wise
7th minute
[Finger joints]
Stretch both your arms parallel to the ground in front of you
Without moving the arms, close your first and release
Do it again and again
7th minute [Neck]
Stand erect
See straight
slowly lower your head and see down
slowly lift it to see straight
slowly lift it to see up
Bring it back to see straight
Neck exercise sideways
8th minute
[Neck]
See straight, bright slowly your right chin to touch your shoulder
Slowly get back to normal and do it towards left and get to normal
minute
Neck exercise sideways
See straight, slowly turn to see the right side and get back to see straight
Then do the same to see the left and back to normal
10th minute
Jog at the standing position, i.e. pretend running
Well, in addition to these 10-minute exercises, you are also prescribed some other exercises which can be done while you are on some other job and they do not consume your time They are:
· While taking bath pull your bath towel from both sides and increase
· your muscle strength
· Twist the wet cloth [clockwise and anti] and enhance your wrist strength.
· Wet the cloth, keeping it between your palms, push water out
Walk up your stairs while climbing to your office premises. Mind
you, you can climb up to 6th floor. If you find it difficult, go by lift
upto 3rd floor and then climb the balance
· Make sure you walk down in the evening
· In the office, don’t sit dormant, intermittently stand and work
· Possibly you can also move around often
· If you want to talk to someone in office, Don’t call him, walk up to him. [You get the exercise and you build good relationships too.Also you casually inspect what does he do! And your subordinates could become alert and office efficiency improves]
· Be on your legs say for one to two hours in the eight hour office
· Don’t use vehicles, walk to the market
· Lift the groceries yourself and walk back home
· At home just lift some heavy item once a day and hold it for five seconds.
All these help you to have better orthostatic tolerance
Do deep relaxation when you go to bed. You can pray or you can concentrate on each part of your body and command them to relax ; or you can do both. When you get up in the morning respond to your natural urge to stretch yourself as much as you need. Enjoy your best yawn. Correct stretching dispels lethargy and energises body and mind. It is a great stress reducer. It rejuvenates the stiff spots. Hence from time to time stretch yourself by ensuring that your shoulders, hips, knees and ankles all have a ballet like movement.
If one does the exercises, he can bring in a variable of 20 years. Suppose you are sixty, you can live an active life of 40 if you do the right kind of exercises. Experts say that the variable can be increased up to 30 years. Exercises are meant to awaken our youthfulness residing in our body all the time.
In exercise make sure that every joint and every muscle had had enough activity. Have emphasis on body movements and regularity. If you can combine exercises with playing games like tennis, squash, badminton, swimming, gardening, etc. it would be both useful and interesting.
Exercises are essential also to digestion, sleep and peace of mind. They keep the muscles in good tone, bones in good strength, blood in good circulation and bowels to good movement. By bringing more oxygen to lungs and removing carbon dioxide, they also tone up the functioning of your organs and glands. It induces better sleep and brings beneficial effects on your nervous system.
Exercise makes our heart work better. It can now pump more blood into our body benefiting every organ. Exercise also reduces triglyceride, cholesterol levels, etc. it means reduced coronary risks. Exercise also reduces body fat which influences insulin action. Exercise strengthens our muscles and bones and enhances flexibility. The nervous system also gets invigorated by exercises. Exercise also helps us to sleep better. Exercises increase oxygen transport capacity within your body and accordingly every part of your body gets more oxygen and thus function more efficiently including your mental performance. Regular exercises also stimulate our brain due to increased circulation of oxygen and blood.
Health decline is generally associated with old age, whereas it is actually related to inactivity. Muscles and bones generally degenerate when they are not in effective use. Matters like what exercise you do, at what age you do are of no consequence, so long you do it regularly and less strenuously. Make it your daily habit like brushing your teeth. Poor fitness is as dangerous as smoking or high cholesterol. The good news is that even moderate exercises can substantially reduce your chances of ill health.
Breathing exercise
Breath is the foundation of all human life since it supplies oxygen to the cells. But beyond this, it also helps the flow of lymph fluid in our body, which is our sewage system. The blood in our body is moved by our heart. But our sewage has no such pumping system and it is moved by our breathing. So, the more we are able to breathe deeply, the more the movement of sewage. And if the movement of this sewage is slow, you know it can result in accumulation of dirt in our body and we could get into lot of illness. So it is in our interest, that we deep breathe more and facilitate our sewage system move well.
Deep breathing is so easy, but it requires practice. Inhale to the count of two. Hold the breathe to the count of eight. And then exhale to the count of four. 2:8:4 is the mantra. Start doing it. But this is the beginning. After you have mastered it, prolong these a little longer and take it to 4:16:8.
Do this exercise 10 times in the morning, 10 times in the afternoon and 10 times in the evening.
Prayer
In today’s fast moving life, there is need for high degree of achievement and the resultant tensions, worries, anxieties and stress. In this situation people need something which would not only release their stress and calm them down but would also pep up their morale, self confidence and optimism. In case people had already fallen victims to their day to day stress and have contracted illnesses and are not getting any relief from any of the medical treatments and therapies, they need to be lifted out of their defeated feelings.
Here comes the importance of prayer. Prayer is not merely worship and is not repetition of formal routine of words. To those people who think so and undervalue prayer, it cannot do anything.
Prayer is the most powerful form of creating one’s own energy. It has a high positive impact on the mind and body. It can provide us the needed antibiotics, restore our spirits, re-supply our lost power and thus re-start our glands. In nutshell, by addressing our emotional and spiritual dimensions, it can overcome all our problems and create miracles in our lives.
Sudden accidents, unexpected illness and unexpected birth of handicapped children at home can bring sea change in life all of a sudden. We should never take normalcy for granted. We should always thank God for our being able to do our work independently.
Love
The lack of love makes us sick. Love is thus very important to our mental and consequently physical health.
Patients in general face terrible onslaught of negative feelings, such as fear, anxiety and worry. At that time, there is a dire need to counter the harsh voice of negative feelings. And then if love is showered on them, it would greatly help in facilitating their physical and mental balance. So love the patients, hug them, hold them close and recharge them. Let them feel comforted, protected and relaxed. Love is at the root of what makes us enjoy life because you know you have someone to turn to. Thus love gives us better immune system through its antidotes to stress and thus provides longer life expectancy.
Oxytocin is a medicine provided by doctors to treat depression in patients. But this oxytocin is already produced within our body if the patient enjoys physical touch, affection and care from near and dear.
There are effects of everything you do and marriages are no exception. If your marriage had been good, it has positive effects on you and the reverse is also true. Hold on to your partner in good romance and you are sure to live longer happily without disease even in your old age.
If your relationship with your spouse is good, you are better looked after and your positive mental state helps your glands to secrete all the required chemicals in good amount at the required time. On the contrary, if your relationships are unsatisfactory, it weakens your immunity system and you become more susceptible to diseases are prone to cardiovascular and nervous disorders. A good marriage is good for health and a bad marriage is bad for health. You can join the group which suits you best.
And I tell you, if your marriage is good, your relationships with every other would also be good and you would have no tensions in your life.
Touch Therapy
Whenever a child gets cough or undergoes some pain, it is normal for anxious parents to reach for antibiotics. Such parents would need to know that God has given to them great healing powers, which grand mothers generally use. What do they do when the child gets some uneasiness? They invite the child to lie in their lap. Then they take some domestic oil such as eucalyptus oil and rub it on the chest, throat, back and nose assuring the child very lovingly that nothing is wrong him/her and that he/she would become alright in an hour. This Touch Therapy has a measurable impact on the child. This causes tactile sensations and makes the child more comfortable and tension free. And this really helps in early and easier recuperation.
Touch therapy, i.e. caressing by loving parents reduces the level of stress hormones and relaxes the child hastening the process of recovery.
This touch therapy can used by all parents to their children and by all wives and husbands to their spouses. This way of using hand with plenty of love and assurance, is called the ‘magic touch’.
Speaking to your body
When your child cries or when your spouse is upset, what do they essentially communicate? They only tell you, you need to attend to them and their needs. And if you calmly and lovingly speak to them, their cry and upset is gone instantly.
The same is true with your body. When you feel pain in any part of your body, it only communicates that you are not paying attention to it and you are neglecting it. And what do you do next? You speak to it!
So, when you have some pain or discomfort, take the following actions:
Sit quietly
Close your eyes
Identify the organ giving you the trouble
Speak to that organ
Ask the following questions one by one and wait for its responses before moving to the next question:
Hey, what is the problem? – Listen to the answer and then ask
How was the problem caused? – Listen to the answer and then
ask
Now what do you want me to do?
If you really listen to your organ, you would hear your body responding to your questions
It would tell you the nature of the problem
It would tell you how you are neglecting it and its welfare
It would tell where you are over doing things and how you are causing pain
It would tell how you need to modify your life style
If you really follow whatever your organ tells you to do, your cure is at hand. Please be aware that nature has given us lots of tools and keep ourselves in good order. You only need to know them to avail of the nature’s help systems.
Self questioning
In case you have difficulty in believing in talking to your body, then you can opt for self questioning. In fact it is the same this as speaking to your body.
Fearing illness would not being us health. We would never be cured if we look at our illness the medical way. What would cure and heal us is our knowledge of what is deficient in us and taking remedial action to fill that deficiency. Therefore, when ever you fall ill ask yourself the following questions:
Why this disease?
Where did I go wrong?
What food am I taking?
What avoidable habits do I practice?
How do I prevent its recurrence?
What remedial action I need to initiate and sustain?
If you do not get the answers to the above, ask whom you consider can provide the answers to you to the above questions.
Support Group
When you fall ill, you know the symptoms and troubles arising out of it. Sometimes it so happens that the healthy people around you may not be able to understand your problems and provide you the support and guidance you need.
That is where the importance of support group comes in. In western countries support groups are most prevalent for different disease states such as cancer patient association, asthma patients association, etc. In these associations, the patients join hands to form support groups as they are convinced that they need emotional understanding and support and guidance beyond the doctor’s pills and medicines. These support groups act as a complement to medical care. In these group meetings, patients share their individual experiences and exchange helpful advice. They also come forward to help each other to make life easier for the members.
In many cases, individual patients had taken the lead to form an association with great success. You, as a patient would greatly benefit by joining such support groups if there is one within your reach or start one, if there is none around.
Nutritious living
Many people start thinking of nutrition only when they fall sick. If there had been nutrition already in their lives, they would not have fallen sick even at the first instance.
And there are lots and lots of people who think of nutrition only in their food. That is again wrong. Nutrition should not be limited to food alone. It should extend also to
Nutritious food
Nutritious air
Nutritious water
But even beyond the above, nutrition need extend to
Nutritious sunshine
Nutritious exercises
But here we are stretching it even beyond. In our opinion, nutrition extends to mind also, i.e. to our thinking, reading and relationships which are very important to our healthy living
:
Nutritious education / reading
Nutritious thinking
Nutritious relationships
If you fall sick, believe that you are mal nourished in any one or more of the above. Shift nutrition from food to your whole life and adopt nutrition as philosophy of your life for happy living.
Many think healthy people are happy people. But it is only partially true. In reality only happy people can become healthy people. And who those happy people are? They are ‘Nutritious people’ who had adopted nutrition in their ‘whole’ life.
Human beings are also forms of energy. All our actions and their results thereof emanate from our internal energy. And what gives us the energy to do anything? It is our thought. It is your thought that makes you walk into a restaurant. It is again your thought that asks you to get married or to get divorced. Thus all your actions precede your thought. You thought this is a book worth reading and so you are reading it.
Now, if a person’s thoughts are negative, he could do anything, even commit a murder. On the contrary, if his thoughts are very positive, he would even win over murderers and save one’s life. Do you remember the story of Angulimal? Angulimal was a cruel robber who way laid Mahatma Budha and wanted to kill him. But when Buddha talked to him with all his positive approach, Angulimal abandoned robbery and became Buddha’s disciple. There is nothing that cannot be changed with positive thinking in this world.
Positive people always remain cheerful and energetic and it is they who attract people around them. On the contrary depressed people lose their available energy and people leave them and go away because they make others also depressed.
Be aware that you are created by God and God does not wish you to get sick. It is you who invite your sickness. The best method to come out of sickness is to approach life with all positive thinking and see yourself as a healthy person. If you can visualise yourself as a healthy person and feel optimistic, you are already on the road to recovery.
In the field of relationships, accept people as they are and develop good relationships with them. This is better than worrying and going nowhere. Once you have good relationships, you can talk things over and bring in the needed changes. Problem people are in fact opportunities for you to create an impact in their lives. A happy relationship in family can add so much of good health to your life.
Fasting
There are many toxic material that enter our body every day through the food we take, through the air we breath and through the water we drink. These toxic material create impurities in our blood. And when these impurities increase, your immunity against diseases decrease and you start encountering illness. Therefore there is need to periodically clean our blood of toxins. And this cleansing is done by fasting. How? Let us see.
Suppose you go to office on a holiday for some work. You have completed your work and you have still two hours to get your next bus or train. Then during those two hours what do you do? Since you have no work on hand, you start cleaning your table and table drawers. Right?
Same thing applies to your body. Generally your system is very busy in digesting what you eat. But on a given day when you fast, your system does not have the usual work of digesting. So it opts for cleaning. And cleaning would clear your blood and other organs of all their impurities. That is why fasting has been prescribed in most of our religions as a way of life. Our great elders know the value of fasting to our good health.
Despite the advantages of fasting, there are some people who are hesitant to go on fasting, because they don’t believe they can fast. It is because they consider fasting as starving.
Starving occurs when you desperately need food and food is not available. Whereas fasting occurs when there is plenty of food around and we consciously keep away from food because we are on a different mission of cleaning our body of accumulated waste.
In starving, our mind is focused on food. Whereas, in fasting, the mind is focused on health.
Thus the key to fasting is too know the purpose of fasting and taking a deliberate decision not to focus your mind on food. Once this decision is taken by the mind, which is our king, then the ministers and army go to execute the decision of the king.
People who have difficulty in fasting are those people whose sensory organs are in control of the mind. Their mind is yet to take control and the king is a prisoner in the hands of his army.
Well, people who are yet to master the art of fasting, there is a way to fast without fasting.
We know from the above that fasting means cleaning the body from within. If you go for cleaning your clothes, you need detergents. If you want to clean the floor of your house, you need a different kind of cleaning material. So is if you want to wash your car. Thus cleaning materials are different for different things. Now to clean your body, your cleaning materials are some amino acids found in fruits. So when such people go on fast, they can take fresh fruits during fasting or fruit juices instead. This is called juice fasting. In this way those people can overcome their hesitation to go on total fasting and at the same time also supply their system with the needed cleaning material.
So, have a nice in-house cleaning at least once a fortnight.
Music
Indian history is replete with names of great people like Narad, Haridas, Sur, Mira, Raidas, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and others who had all attained God through music. When music can take us to God, why not to health?
When man invented music, it is said that he took his first step towards civilisation. He learnt music from nature. Thus when we get into music mode, we align ourselves with nature and the nature takes care of the rest.
You are already aware that mothers ‘use’ music to make their crying babies sleep.
Well, in the field of health, music has plenty to offer. When we listen to some good music, i.e. soft music such as Gazal, Bhajan, Classical music, etc.
There is a happy change to our sensations
It creates a pleasant impact on our blood vessels and nervous system
We start enjoying the present and forget our worries and concerns
Psychologically analysed, when you are on some great music
Tensions, fears, anxieties, depression, etc in the minds are removed
Our mental balance is restored and our mood improves
Medically analysed, the music
Releases positive endorphine in our body
Reduces our blood pressure, palpitation, breathlessness etc.
Provides the patient with a pleasant environment
Makes the patient feel better
Induces sleep in the patient and provides him further rest and relief
Medical researchers know that almost 90% of our illnesses are due to mental tensions and worries. They accordingly advocate music therapy towards curing patients. The researchers say that our music is not one, but made of different ‘ragas’, i.e tunes. They say that different tunes can work to reduce different illnesses, such as:
For asthma
Kedar, Shyam Kalyan
For fever
Basanth Bahar, Hindol, Marwa, Bhairav
Constipation
Asavari
High BP
Poorvi, Thodi, Alap in Multani
All pains
Peelu, Malcose, Thodi
Heart problems
Darbari, Kaanhada
Cancer
Sindhu Bhairavi
Migraine
Darbari Kaanhada, Jay Jayvanti, Sohni
Hyper acidity
Marwa, Deepak, Kalavathi
Ulcer
Madhuvanti, Deepak
Diabetes
Jounpuri, Jay Jayvanti
Mental depression
Lalit, Kedar
So make music an essential part of your life. It is a definite anxiety reliever and mood booster. With proper doses of good and gentle music you get your body tonic.
And, by the way, can you sing? Sing if you can. If you are worried about the reaction of others to your singing, then sing or hum to yourself and get more benefits than listening to the music. He who sings frightens away his ills. .
Stress Management
There are only three rules for living long. They are,
· Self control on food intake
· exercising the body and
· leading a stress free life.
We have covered the first two rules extensively in this book. This chapter is devoted to the third rule, i.e. leading a stress free life.
Leading a stress free life is very important because stress is one of the main causes of disease. Stress activates three glands, viz. the pituitary and the two adrenals. Their hormones have a great impact on our body functions. When there is stress these glands pour out hormones that create an internal emergency within our body. Than makes all our organs tensed up.
Now when we continue to remain stressful, our body continues to remain tensed up. You know when there is an internal emergency, there is preparation for war and all peacetime activities get stopped. The same thing happens in our body and all peace time activities including digestion stops. This means disastrous consequences to our body. So we suffer because of stress.
The first thing therefore is to get an awareness whether you are stressed up.
How do you find whether you are stressed up? Ask yourself a simple question whether other people find it a pleasure to interact with you. If yes, you are not stressed up. If no, you are under stress, which makes you act in manners unpleasant to others.
Stress is a killer. It is a great killer. In these modern days, you can’t avoid getting stressed. But escape the stress by finding relaxing hobbies. Physical activities, gardening, playing, walking, listening to music, writing poems, painting, sleeping well or any such thing that can reduce your stress level.
You can also consider taking he following corrective actions:
ü Come out of the belief that you are a big man
ü Shun the superman image
ü Take criticisms easy
ü Make yourself available to others
ü Cooperate with people
ü Help people solving their problems
ü Live sensibly
ü Don’t waste your energy on quarrels and conflicts
ü Never opt for complaining
ü Learn not to be upset by small things
ü Cry if need be and let off stream
ü Make your attitude and thinking pleasant and cheerful
ü Don’t look upon work as something to be done with
ü What you need to do, do it with pleasure
ü Like people
ü Listen to what people say
ü Avoid spending 100 rupee energy on a 10 rupee worth problem
ü Tune in to the feelings of others
ü Pay compliments to spouse and children
ü Give yourself positive messages
ü Laugh
ü Exercise
ü Develop reading habit – read self development books
ü Keep smiling!
Hobbies
Hobbies can also work as therapy. Any hobby has a therapeutic value. It is because you are on a creative mode and creation is God’s domain. When you are in God’s domain, there is no question of your being in any kind of trouble. When you are focused, say on art, you lose yourself to it and you come of out of internal stress. This unstressing of yourself removes all internal conflicts and you get cleansed.
Meditation
Someone it appears asked a sage whether he can smoke while meditating. He was promptly admonished for asking this question. Another friend asked the sage whether he can meditate while smoking. Pat came the reply, you can meditate at any time.
Meditation can be done anywhere and at any time. It is a great medicine to relieve you of your stress. In these days of stiff competition, when we often suffer from anxiety, fear, worry, depression, etc. our immunity levels deplete. So in this disturbing scenario, we need to recoup of our lost immunity powers by reuniting our body and mind and creating the needed harmony within.
Meditation isolates you from the negative surroundings at least for some time during the day during which you can slow down, breath well, lower your anxieties and calm your mind and allow your body to loosen out and get back its balance.
For doing the meditation, look for places which are quiet. Seek out fresh air and open spaces if you can.
One of the effective methods of meditation is to concentrate on our breath, i.e. to concentrate on your nose tip while you breathe. Another method is to count your breath. You can meditate on anything, a picture, a thought, a glowing candle, etc. and watch the thoughts that come and go in and out of your mind. You can just behave an observer. This is called receptive meditation.
There is a second kind of meditation which is called ‘problem solving meditation’. In this meditation, you can think on anything with a focus and introspect. If you have problems, you can focus on it and think where things have gone wrong and what virtues and adjustments you need to acquire or make to overcome the situation. Ask yourself as to what a mature man would do in these situations. Ask yourself as to what life style changes you need to make to help your life become more healthy and enjoyable. In this way find a value based solution to all your problems.
Similarly you can check about your relationships with your near and dear and confirm to yourself they are all pleasant and healthy. Take one aspect of your life in each day’s meditation and go on introspecting. One day your family relationships and the other day your official relationships. One day your self development and another day your children’s studies. One day your health and another day someone else’s health. On another day check your attitude towards your friends, parents and even to inanimate things like materials and great books. Ask yourself are you selfish, possessive, status conscious, book loving, etc. Like this, concentrate on each day on each of your areas of concerns and interests.
When you meditate, if and when you find your thoughts have gone astray, bring it back to the object on which you are meditating without criticizing yourself. This is the way to focus your attention on your meditation.
Someone beautifully said that meditation is a dance and not a running race. In a running race, you need to go fast towards your destination. Where as in dance, the goal is not any destination, but enjoying what you do. So don’t just worry about your distracted thoughts while on meditation. What is important is sitting to do the meditation which helps you to relax your body and mind or to find solutions to your problems.
Cleanliness
Keep your house clean. Your house would consist of many areas such as kitchen, hall, rooms, toilet, etc. and each of these areas need to be kept clean.
Let us take the kitchen first. It is in the kitchen you tame lot of micro organisms which affect your health. Clean the kitchen platform and the tiles regularly and if possible with a little shampoo. Clean the exhaust fans periodically, if necessary with kerosene. If the kitchen has no outlet for smells and smoke to go out, keep one lighted candle on the kitchen platform.
Now let us move on to kitchen appliances and utensils. Take your vegetable cutter for example. After repeated use, you could see lots of scratches in that. It is there micro organisms live and grow. Don’t think it would become clean by simply washing it with water. Use washing liquids to clean it off. Same thing applies when you wash your utensils or the kitchen platforms. Sodium hypochlorite is the chemical that can kill the micro organisms. Clear up the kitchen of old preparations. Clean the cloth pieces used in the kitchen regularly. Soak them in water with little shampoo added and rinse them after half an hour.
Let us now move on to your Refrigerator. Food kept in refrigerator does not remain free from micro organisms. Cold temperatures do not kill the bacteria. Please avoid keeping cooked items in the fridge. Use the fridge only for storing uncut vegetables and fruits. And in case you keep any cooked food or items like milk, keep them closed. Clean the inside and outside of your fridge regularly.
Avoid bringing meat or poultry products. If you bring them, you also bring with them the bacteria living on them.
Wash your hands before you go for eating.
Keep the house clean at all times. Avoid keeping pets at home.
Make sure you take all steps to avoid accidents at home. Let the floors be free of clothes, shoes, toys, books, magazines, disorderly furniture etc. Discard wobbling chairs and tables. Make sure wires, extension chords do not obstruct path ways. Let there be light switch just beside your bed. If not keep a torch beside your bed. And when phone or door bell rings, don’t get up in a hurry.
Take care of stairs. When you walk down be extra careful. Don’t walk with socks on. Don’t bring loads of materials on hand which obstructs your vision. Be careful about single steps and elevations.
You need to ensure that your house is free of flies. When you find too much of house flies around, take ‘kadipatta’ or pudina leaves, squeeze it and keep it around that place to avoid flies coming in. Otherwise, you can mix some salt in water and sprinkle around. In the alternative, you can put camphor in hot water and keep the vessel in the room where flies exist. That would also drive them away. While washing the house, you can mix some salt in the water and wash. That would also give relief from flies.
To avoid mosquitoes, use black jeera or mango flowers or neem flowers or dried organge peels and burn. You can also take bleaching powder, mix it with water and sprinkle along the four sides of your house. More simpler method would be to have a traditional neem oil hand lamp with thick threads burning overnight. If interested, you can prepare mosquito coils with Tulsi, thumbai, pudina, camphor leaves and maida of equal quantity and grind them without water. Then boil them in water and cool. Cut cakes and use for burning.
If the ants have made their house, drop asafetida powder or alam powder on it. If ants problem in containers and bottles of provisions, etc., take poondu, hand crush and draw line around the bottle or container openings. Similarly, wipe cup boards with neem oil to avoid entry of ants. In case of white ants, spread vibhooti powder around.
Change bed sheets and pillow covers as often as possible, maximum once a week. To avoid insects and bugs in the beddings, always keep a piece of camphor in them. Protect woolens with neem leaves while storing them in summer.
If there is movement of lizards, keep at places either empty egg shells, or peacock feathers or onion shoots / flowers. In old boxes, to avoid cockroaches, keep some pudina leaves in a cloth tie. Pudina leaf is a great pest control device. Cockroaches also keep off phenyle. Keeping garlic in almirahs and shelves would also keep away all kinds of insects.
Ensure your bathroom and toilet are not slippery. Have skid proof floors. Remove spills of soap, lotions, shampoos, etc. To get rid of the mosquitoes, cockroaches, etc. at toilets, sprinkle kerosene or phenyle.. In the bath rooms, you can keep some camphor which would keep away the insects and would give good smell also. Wash your hands with soap after you come out of toilet.
Daily clean your house frontage with water mixed with phenyle, dettol or clean cow dung. This is especially necessary for those living in flats as so many people walk through your frontage and many people may bring in so many germs through their foot wear. And wash your own foot wear once a week and keep them clean.
To avoid insects entering the house, spread salt at the door entrances. If by any chance snake has entered your house, first put salt at entrances where you don’t want it to go and thus cordon it off leaving only one way to exit and then drive it out.
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