Health and Healing Summary

Read more about Health and Healing from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

What is Health and Healing?

Good health is the exterior expression of an inner harmony.

Why is Health and Healing Important?

It is good health, a solid body, well poised when one sleeps well, eats well. When one is quite calm, well balanced, very quiet, one has a solid basis and can receive a large number of forces.

Health in its Natural Form

The body, spontaneously, without any need for one to intervene mentally or even vitally, has the certitude that even if something goes wrong it will be cured. The body carries within itself the certitude of cure, the certitude that the illness or disorder is sure to disappear. The body carries within itself the sense of its divinity. There. This is what you must try to find again in yourself if you have lost it.

Subtle Body

To whatever cause an illness may be due, material or mental, external or internal, it must, before it can affect the physical body, touch another layer of the being that surrounds and protects it. This subtler layer is called in different teachings by various names,—the etheric body, the nervous envelope. It is a subtle body and yet almost visible. In density something like the vibrations that you see around a very hot and steaming object, it emanates from the physical body and closely covers it. If this envelope is absolutely strong and intact, you can go into places infested with the worst of diseases, even plague and cholera, and remain quite immune. It is a perfect protection against all possible attacks of illness, so long as it is whole and entire, thoroughly consistent in its composition, its elements in faultless balance.

What is Illness?

Illness without any exception is the expression of a break in equilibrium. Speaking only of the body, not of the nervous illnesses of the vital or of mental illnesses. That is, if all your organs, all the members and parts of your body are in harmony with one another, you are in perfect health. But if there is the slightest imbalance anywhere, immediately you get either just a little ill or quite ill, even very badly ill, or else an accident occurs. That always happens whenever there is an inner imbalance.

An illness of the body is always the outer expression and translation of a disorder, a disharmony in the inner being; unless this inner disorder is healed, the outer cure cannot be total and permanent.

"Disease" no longer means anything, it really doesn't: it's distortions of vibrations and shiftings of vibrations, and... (what can I call it?) encrustations—from the point of view of movement, it's like bottlenecks, and from the point of view of the cell, it's like encrustations: it's what remains of the old Inertia out of which we came.

What are the Causes of Ill-health?

The origin of an illness may be in the mind; it may be in the vital; it may be in any of the parts of the being. One and the same illness may be due to a variety of causes; it may spring in different cases from different sources of disharmony.

If one cherishes desires, there is bound to be disappointment and suffering, especially if at the same time one does Yoga and takes up the spiritual life. For such desires, demand for vital affection and love from men and demand for physical comforts are not consistent with the spirit of Yoga in which one must turn one's heart to the Divine and be vitally pure and in physical things must be content with what one gets and equal-minded in all conditions.

It's something in the subconscient—in the cells' subconscient. Its roots are there.

How to Cultivate Health and Healing?

That's the one thing needed—important, very important: to keep the body in good health, in a sort of balance. We must keep our balance. Very important. The rest doesn't matter!

Potent Thought and Will

The potent thought and will of health replaces its faith in illness and its consent to illness, or the idea of strength calls in the substance, power, motion, vibration of strength; the idea generates the force and form proper to the idea and imposes it on our substance of mind, life or matter. It is in this way that the first working proceeds; it charges the whole being with a new and superior consciousness, lays a foundation of change, prepares it for a superior truth of existence.

Physical Aspiration

You may have a physical aspiration also; that the body may feel the need to acquire a kind of equipoise in which all the parts of the being will be well balanced, and that you may have the power to hold off illness at a distance or overcome it fast when it enters trickily, and that the body may always function normally, harmoniously, in perfect health. That is a physical aspiration.

Belief

If one believes in self-healing, one shall after a time find out the way to heal myself—if one hasfaith in transformation, one can end by laying the hand on and unravelling the whole process of transformation. But if one begins with doubt and go on with more doubt, how far am I likely to go on the journey?

Preoccupation

What is not good is too much preoccupation with it, anxiety, despondency in illness etc., for these things only favour the prolongation of ill-health or weakness.

All illness should be rejected and all suggestions of illness; the Force should be called in to cure by the assent to health and the refusal of assent to the suggestions that bring or prolong its opposite.

True Knowledge

Knowledge, when it goes to the root of our troubles, has in itself a marvellous healing-power as it were. As soon as you touch the quick of the trouble, as soon as you, diving down and down, get at what really ails you, the pain disappears as though by a miracle. Unflinching courage to reach true knowledge is therefore the very essence of yoga. No lasting superstructure can be erected except on a solid basis of true Knowledge.

Union with Divine

It is only by emerging from the mind's prison and consciously soaring into the light of the spirit that, through a conscious union with the Divine, we will be able to let Him give us back the balance and health which we have lost.

Peace

If you know how to concentrate, to be quiet, and if you can bring into yourself a certain peace, of any kind―it may be a mental peace, it may be a vital peace, it may be a psychic peace; they have different values and qualities, this is an individual question―you try to realise within yourself a state of peace or attempt to enter into a conscious contact with a force of peace.... Suppose you succeed more or less completely. Then, if you can draw the peace into yourself and bring it down into the solar plexus―for we are not talking of inner states but of your physical body―and from there direct it very calmly, very slowly I might say, but very persistently, towards the place where the pain is more or less sharp, and fix it there, this is very good.

Widening and Trust

But if by widening this movement you can add a sort of mental formation with a little life in it―not just cold, but with a little life in it―that the only reality is the divine Reality, and all the cells of this body are a more or less deformed expression of this divine Reality―there is only one Reality, the Divine, and our body is a more or less deformed expression of this sole Reality―if by my aspiration, my concentration, I can bring into the cells of the body the consciousness of this sole Reality, all disorder must necessarily cease. If you can add to that a movement of complete and trusting surrender to the Grace, then I am sure that within five minutes your suffering will disappear. If you know how to do it.

Mother’s Force

To separate oneself from the thing and call in the Mother's force to cure it [is the Yogic method]—or else to use one’s own will force with faith in the power to heal, having the support of the Mother's force behind you.

Japa

One can pass from a more or less mechanical, more or less efficient and real japa, to the true japa full of power and light. A power that heals everything. One can come out of it refreshed, rested, cured. So those who say they come out of it exhausted, contracted, emptied, it means that they are not doing it in the true way.

Harmony of Movements

To think constantly of the harmony of the body, of the beauty of the movements, of not doing anything that is ungraceful and awkward. You can obtain a rhythm of movement and gesture which is very exceptional.

Will for Harmony

We are ALWAYS off balance, the body is always off balance (more or less), and it is something else, above, a Will or a Consciousness, that holds it up and makes it work. So if we can call on that Will—that Will for Harmony—and if we can have the Flame within, that Flame of aspiration, and make contact, we emerge from so-called illness, which is unreal, an unreal and false sensation and just one way of being of the general Disorder, and we enter into Harmony, and then everything is fine.

Receptivity

One cannot imagine the immense flood of force that is at your disposal! And generally you do not feel it even. When one feels it, something shrinks because it is too much and produces a kind of instinctive fear in your cells; and when one receives it, more than three-quarters of it is thrown away like an overfilled vessel! It gushes out, spills over, because you are not able to hold it.

So, the first thing is to put one's will and relax this shrinking, as one does a twitching nerve or a cramped muscle; one must learn how to relax, be able to relieve this tension in whatever part of the being it may be. After having relaxed this contraction, one begins trying to widen yourself—one feels you are widening.

Memory

The body remembers for a very long time. If one wants to be completely cured, one must cure this memory in the body, this is absolutely indispensable. And whether one knows it or not, you work in order to cure the memory in the body. When the remembrance is effaced, the body is truly healed.

Future of the Body

What it craves for is duration, health, strength, physical perfection, bodily happiness, liberation from suffering, ease. These demands are not in themselves unacceptable, mean or illegitimate, for they render into the terms of Matter the perfection of form and substance, the power and delight which should be the natural outflowing, the expressive manifestation of the Spirit. When the gnostic Force can act in the body, these things can be established; for their opposites come from a pressure of external forces on the physical mind, on the nervous and material life, on the body organism, from an ignorance that does not know how to meet these forces or is not able to meet them rightly or with power, and from some obscurity, pervading the stuff of the physical consciousness and distorting its responses, that reacts to them in a wrong way. A supramental self-acting self-effectuating awareness and knowledge, replacing this ignorance, will liberate and restore the obscured and spoiled intuitive instincts in the body and enlighten and supplement them with a greater conscious action.

Content curated by Saurav

Read more about Health and Healing from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.