As a yoga teacher, I realize my title is actually quite silly. Let me ask it another way. Do you feel that the practice of yoga can bring about physiological changes or release trapped / dormant pathogens so that the student, as a process of healing, actually experiences symptoms of disease.
Yoga is a demister and can clear layers of ignorance. As a result students can experience various reactions to the practice - headaches, nausea dizziness, et al. And this could be defined as dis-ease since it is obviously not ease.
And of course we know that things we put in to our bodies occasionally stay in our bodies a bit longer than is best. These things would include airborne pollutants, various sundries in water, and the more obvious preservatives in packaged “food”. For a person who is not consuming organic produce we’d have to include various pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides.
Yes the practice of yoga can, when appropriately practiced, free these things from those places in which they are stored.
I personally am very careful about equating yoga with healing. This is mostly due to two things; the fact that everything under the sun is called “yoga” and the fact that yoga doesn’t heal, the body heals and yoga merely supports those systems that do that work.
I hope this is helpful.
gordon
Thank you for your very good response. Is there anything we can do to prepare a new student we feel will be releasing some of these toxins so it isn’t quite so painful of a process?
Yoga is a methodology that by itself doesn’t make anything happen. It shows ways to purify the body-mind system so that the energy can flow unhindered, glands function normally, body’s checks and balances get back in control and the natural immune system eliminates the occassional hindrances. But physical is the bottom of the pyramid.
Those who follow the spiritual path, their astral and causal bodies are activated and normalized likewise. Old habits are busted, new gentle ways are adopted, reflex reactions reduce, emotional swings recede, and the purpose of life changes from consumption to contemplation.
But these changes do not happen without pain. Any permanent change happens at the cell-level and the unwilling cells do not give up without a fight. New thought patterns require dissolution of old neural networks and their reconfiguration. That becomes momentarily chaotic. Cleansing of toxins creates similar effect.
There is one difference however. A true dis-ease and yoga’s cleansing looks similar only symptomatically. A disease makes us melancholy while in yoga we retain a general overriding sense of wel-being. Hence, the students benefit a lot if they keep personal Yoga Diaries and recognize if it is so.
[QUOTE=Painful Ahimsa;57210]Thank you for your very good response. Is there anything we can do to prepare a new student we feel will be releasing some of these toxins so it isn’t quite so painful of a process?[/QUOTE]
As a teacher of yoga you are already doing what you are asking, you are offering them a profound system for their own growth. When shared from the heart, when the teacher is able to put their ego aside and merely be the tube through which yoga is transmitted, what greater thing could one possibly offer?
Everyone is releasing toxins. It’s a natural function of the body. So I personally use care in using that terminology as I think it’s become trite from over use. I would also (personally in my teaching) use care not to read too much into students doing this or that (except as it relates to what needs to be done for safety and effect in the practice) and also watch my boundaries or attachments to their process, be it ease or difficulty.
And as always you are free to take or reject any or all as you see fit.
gordon