Love and Health in an Unhealthy World

Seeking Love & Health

Recently I read an article that touched my heart.  That doesn’t happen too often.  What affected me was how unvarnished the writing was.  It talked about different seasons in life and the process of change we all go through but by sharing the stages and phases of what had unfolded in the author’s life.

 Whatever it has been in your life:  the deaths, addictions, job dissatisfactions, divorces, financial losses, illnesses or sudden calamities I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. 

On the other side the article talked about moving through and to the joys of life, from children, to travel, successes in business and work, and time spent in reflection, study and nature. 

Most of all the writing was raw, open and honest and told the story of a real human life in the first person, from the perspective of someone who knew they had more time behind them than ahead of them.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying and understanding how the human body works using many of the best tools we have in western life to look at movement, fitness and health from the lens of logic, science and experience.  Few things are as powerful as the rational mind and its ability to think, plan, observe, investigate and discover.

 
Exercise is deeply scientific.  And yet, that’s not all it is.  That’s not all we are.  We humans with minds and bodies that are more complex than the vast universe we live in and likewise know only a fraction about.

I first entered the world of yoga when I started taking classes at a studio opened by Patricia Walden, a student of the late Indian yoga teacher B.K.S. Iyengar.  To people not familiar with the practice of yoga, Iyengar is often described as the yoga teacher who popularized the use of props such as “yoga blocks” to assist students. 

I sometimes joke that my gateway drug into a deep interest in movement  and exercise was the practice of yoga.

And within that joke perhaps is a hint that many people today underestimate the power of what exercise can really do, and the depth of understanding about exercise that is truly available.

For example, if I asked you:  true or false?   Exercise can impact your DNA.  

What would you say?

.

And if you found out that exercise, in fact, impacted processes such as transcription or translation, processes used to make proteins from genetic coding, would you say that is scientific?

There is so much more to know about what exercise can do for a human body than the accepted wisdom that it’s “good for you.”

It’s a fascinating area of investigation and yet it would be hard to have spent siginficant time in the practice and study of yoga and not understand that yoga is more than just exercise.  It’s also a healing art.

Not only is yoga a healing art

but it’s a healing art that originated in a country that has a deeply spiritual and religious world view.  A world view that includes a panoply of iconographic stories and symbols for the power in god and life itself. 

It’s a cultural way of viewing life that has drawn people from all over the world to seek spiritual enlightenment, and it draws you to a history that believes in many levels of reality that science does not accept and can’t explain.

Healing arts aren’t always about logic and reason, they are often more about emotion, transformation, living a human experience, and sometimes, transcendence. And there’s an area of experience in the healing arts which is more about discovery than knowledge.  More about questions and intuition than proof and explanations.  And more about life experienced in a raw and real way, rather than tidied up and presented.

There are myriads of healing arts, spread through a vast number of cultures, each dealing with the mind, body and sensation in different ways.  

Yoga is one way. 

Another way is a practice called breath work.  

Skipping for a moment the vast practices of breathing within yoga itself, called pranayama, a good example exists which got its start in the 1950s when a Czech psychiatrist named Stanislav Grof was given a substance to investigate which later was called LSD. 

Psychedelic substances which have long been around in other cultures and subcultures, are actually today making a comeback in western therapeutics.

75 years ago, however, not knowing what LSD was, but observing its impact on people, Grof came to feel that LSD had healing properties. 

Some time after the late 1960s and early 1970s when the substance fell into disrepute and then was made illegal, Grof eventually created a breathing practice called “holotropic breathwork” which was aimed at creating the non-ordinary states of consciousness that gave rise to the same kinds of changes that he had observed with LSD, but in a legal and safer way:  using altered breathing patterns combined with facilitation and music.

Pranayama

Though Yoga had been playing with non-ordinary states of consciousness for a few thousand years, breathwork found its way as its own modality, and, as with yoga, there are multiple styles and approaches.

The practice of breathwork can bring to the surface many strong emotions.  And if power yoga in a hot room can be described as “going through the car wash without your car” for the body, then breathwork might be described as going through an emotional car wash.  

Feelings seem to arise from nowhere, without a logical cause.  Images may appear in the mind.  Body sensations may be felt powerfully.  Tears and sounds may flow.  The body may move spontaneously.The practice also can have a way of creating a more grounded feeling afterward.  Almost like a cleansing.

It’s a practice of authenticity and life experienced in a more raw way. 

The practice can be facilitated in groups with trained facilitators, or in post pandemic times it can also be found online.

Obviously as with any powerful practice that involves the mind and body one wants to approach it thoughtfully and respectfully, and to be aware that is not appropriate for everyone, and that there are health conditions of both body and mind that may make it not suitable for some people.

The breathwork world, like the yoga world, draws many kinds of people.  But among them you will find those who are on fire to find god, create healing and spread love.  People who hold the practices as dear to them as some people hold their own families and religion.

This search is often prompted by pain and suffering and a search for answers and relief.

In the article the author spoke about his efforts to impact the world for the better in a range of ways

through creating successful businesses, social reform, healing practices and raising a family. 

And yet one can’t help but notice that in his writing he still sounds at times bewildered and defeated coming up against the unyielding wall of pain and intractable dis-ease that the world contains.

Most people who seek to teach, heal or inject into the world something positive often discover that changing the world is a pretty hard thing to do. We are small, albeit important pieces, in a much larger puzzle.

A few months before reading the article I had watched a presentation by a meditation teacher that brought me to tears. 

It was a dharma talk that spoke about remembering to approach life, ourselves and other people in a loving way.

And while it touched me deeply, I also felt it was incomplete.

My logical training mind kicked in and knew that simply stating the goal isn’t enough.  One must be able to make a realistic plan, that can be executed in hours and days, that can make the goal possible.

It’s not enough to say one wants to be strong.  One needs a day-to-day, trial and error method to build strength.

It’s not enough to say that one wants to be loving. One needs a way to stay loving and remember love in a rough, and often unhealthy world.

In the best of worlds we all would be able to share our ideas, and go to places of deep discovery that provide insights about better ways to approach the challenges that beset us both individually and collectively.

And … we’d be able to hear each other.

But much of this is suppressed and lost in the pain and fear that human beings inherit.

And in the west we have the additional blessing and curse of a material world view.

As I sometimes say about the west, if footwear was world view, we’d make really good dress shoes, but be at a loss when it comes to sneakers.

 It’s easy for the love and wonder to get beaten out of us as we make our way through the challenges of decades, and it’s also easy to just stop trying.

But there’s no doubt that life is a miraculous gift.  

 If you want to be awed by the power that exists in the force of life, exercise is one place you can look.

That said, if you reduce the healing arts down to fitness and health, your’e missing something.  The study of the structure, strengthening and ability to change and train the human body is a fascinating one, but it doesn’t fully capture the human experience, the things the author of that article was talking about.

Being healthy and fit doesn’t tell you what to do when a child dies.  Or you get a divorce.  Or you face the inevitable injuries and illnesses that all human beings experience.   

It doesn’t tell us how to navigate the stages and phases of our lives.  Or how to navigate loss.  Or how to celebrate.  Or what life ultimately means. 

Health and fitness can tell you how.  But they can’t answer the bigger question of why?

They are sustaining and incredibly enriching practices, but it’s important to keep in mind there is always more to know about the challenge of seeking out love and health in an unhealthy world.