Upon one death..and life continues..
I lost one of my family members recently. She had cancer for about a year and half. The treatment was painful and aggressive. None of those Western medicine worked for her.
I have known her for nearly 10 years and my regret ( people would say “do not regret over dead people”, but we do that anyway), is that I didn’t teach her yoga. I am not trying to say yoga would have actually cured her illness. No one can guarantee that. It’s just regrettable that I did not do my part fully in the relationship with her. Why I waited this long?
I was talking about the benefit of yoga to her, many times.
I asked her to join my classes time to time.
I emailed her the article of yoga, scientific research related with yoga and cancer, etc..
And finally two days before she passed away, I emailed her husband to bring her to my yoga class so that she can just lay in Savasana “Corpse Pose”, and do absolutely nothing. It took me a while to think that she can just come and feel the energy of the room and fellow practitioners instead of trying to teach her some asana (postures). It will be a great healing for her, and that is what I missed the most when I was in India in the past year: Group energy. You can only experience this sort of upliftment when you are around other people. My solo practice over the last 6 months of India taught me a lot, but it lacked this aspect of positivity.
Anyway, she is gone now, and as I think of this life and death thing we will come across eventually, I cannot help but feeling the urgency to prevent any illness from psychosomatic aspect. They say 90% or more of our physical disease is psychosomatic, other 10% is environmental. Whether this ratio is accurate or not, we all know that mental stress take a huge part of our physical health.
Holding on to the stress or emotions to any part of body is one of the causes; we hold tention physically, it gets accumulated in certain parts of body, and makes a blockage which prevents the free flow of circulation of body internally. Overtime, it might create the form of tumor, cancer, clog, joint misalignment, lack of synovial fluid in the ligaments, etc..
We do not even realize we are harming our bodies this way, until the stress becomes visible in the form of those illness.
Yoga is a wonderful tool to release those toxins and get rid of the blockage we created in our daily life, so we have free flow from top to bottom, inside out, bone to skin… Yoga is one of the ways to stay in touch with our body/heart/spirit, so when something is wrong, you are so alert that you can detect, and possibly minimize or cure the area before it is too late. Yoga is not about the beauty of the muscle tones or flexibility of the body. It is ultimately the way to keep us calm, centered, blessed, and happy. Our ultimate goal is to “stay happy” off the yoga mat even facing with difficult times of life.
The best and only way to draw people around you (especially those who are reluctant to try) to yoga is becoming a great living example: that is the only way. People will look at you living your life happily, focused, compassionately, calmly, patiently, while your physically body is totally supple and balanced. They will think “Hum.. yoga must have done the great thing to her/him.” In that notion and my family member’s death, I feel my journey with yoga has a long way to go. And it is still only a process; there is no goal of this.
Yoga is meditation and I love meditation, either moving or sitting, because it has a long lasting effect. As I still feel so blessed and fortunate after the yoga class last night, I am trying to maintain this feeling as long as I can, till next time I put out my yoga mat and sit on it to start whatever my inner-self wants. And someday, this practice will permeate my entire life, on and off of the yoga mat.
