He acts on natural impulses and brims with wellness. Most of us don’t live naturally. We swallow our pain when our instinct says, “Speak out! Tell it like it is!” We suppress the truth. That’s why we fall ill so often.
When Francine, a nurse, was diagnosed with a neurological degenerative disease that left her paralysed, she decided to enrol in a residential healing course. This involved attending classes on nutrition, hygiene and exercise. One day, she complained to the doctor, “I can’t sit still this long. I feel like jumping up and running out of the room!” The doctor was surprised — here was a person who couldn’t move, yet she couldn’t sit and wanted to run out. The doctor then told her, “When you feel you have to jump up and run, do it! It’s a prescription!” In the next class, not only did Francine jump out of her wheelchair and run out, she also climbed two km up a hill without feeling tired!
It’s as Sri Aurobindo describes it, “The sword has a joy in battleplay — the arrow, a mirth in its hiss and its leaping; the earth, a rapture in its dizzy whirl through space; the sun, the royal ecstasy of its blazing splendour. Take thou too the delight of thy own appointed workings.”
When you feel natural, when you are doing things you are deeply interested in, you have a great amount of physical and mental energy. Life becomes a dance as stress and toxicity lying stagnant in the liver are released, and muscles lose their defensive tightness to move with newly-discovered joy. When your natural intent is followed by a corresponding action, you blossom in mind, body, spirit. The body embodies what the mind and spirit intend. This is coherence, a beautiful wholeness. Whereas, if you remain immobile when you want to run, you split yourself between intent and action. This crack in you causes lethargy, depression, illness.
True, you can’t give in to your natural impulses all the time. You can’t run out of a PTA meeting, for example. That’s good too. It teaches you self-control. All the same, there should be a beautiful balance. So, look for opportunities for natural self-expression:
*List out seven things that come naturally and spontaneously to you. Do at least two a day.
nIncorporate ‘stuff-you’d-love-to-do’ into your work wherever possible. Sometimes, doing it your way is the way.
*Offer gifts to make others healthy, happy and at peace. Often, what you can give is your own medicine that’s hidden inside you.
*See exercise as a means to restore your ability and capacity for free, spontaneous self-expression, see it as dynamic meditation. Through your nostrils and lungs, draw in pure life-enhancing energy. As you exhale, release old, stultifying energy from the body. Whenever you stretch beyond your earlier range, know that you’re moving closer to your authentic, natural, vibrant state of being.
*Have plenty of water and fruits as these are the most natural, most nourishing foods for the body. Fruits are referred to as ‘bliss foods’ because they optimise health and help focus more on life than on ailments.
*Speak up! Even the meekest voice sends a ray of light and illuminates the darkness.
*Finally, mull over this: The bird of paradise neither tries to be more beautiful nor sing beyond the range it’s blessed with. That’s what being natural is all about — when you shed the artifices, you remain eternally, ecstatically exotic.
(The writers are authors of the book, Fitness for Life.)
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