Is Yoga a Holistic Science?
The body needs a natural lifestyle and basic conditions as proper nutrition, detoxification, exercise, inner harmony, and appropriate energy qualities to maintain its health and vitality, which is its natural state. Ayurveda also gives us guidelines about foods, natural herbs and a whole way of life, from ambient temperatures to the colors to seek balance according to the body type.
But besides this, holistic medicines indicate how the material body is constantly exchanging information with our thoughts, emotions and reactions to the outside world and a cold or critical condition are also, in most cases, a reflection of imbalance in our own lives. It comprises of a number of therapies, methods, habits, viewing health as integrated life and diseases as endogenous; it comes from within because it creates the illness or because it allows the entry of the disease when it weakens.
Yoga is such a preventive and a curative activity which gives us tools to be healthy and work to our full potential since yoga is fully backed by science. For this ancient tradition, the body is simply the material manifestation of our subtle energies. It is our vehicle to develop ourselves in the material world. Along with our minds, human beings have a body through which we can achieve a spiritual realization, and gradually achieve higher levels of consciousness that allow us to develop our true self, intuition and universal knowledge.
Yoga comes from the Sanskrit word which means ‘union’ because it is a tradition that unites our material, mental and spiritual being and this integration is our nature. Even when there is no spiritual call or a transcendent goal, it is also legitimate that yoga is perceived as a science that offers a number of techniques for physical health and inner balance, as the practice of yoga makes us see clearer the connection between our body and our psychological and emotional aspects. This holistic view of our being is an essential step in understanding that both our health and the life we live are in our hands.
Our energy and its various manifestations i.e. physical, emotional, mental and spiritual ask us to give the body the means to heal naturally assuming the responsibility for our health and our well-being in different aspects of our lives to honor us and we seek to develop in a balanced way each of these energies which are in the universe and they are also in each of us actively.
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