Exercise away your blues

Are you holding a grudge against somebody? Do you think or speak about it time and again? If so, resolve to drop it. Holding on to ill feelings hurts you the most.

 Modern medical research has just begun to recognise that hostility damages the heart even more than cholesterol deposits in the arteries. It has been found that many people with normal arteries have suffered heart attacks. Apparently, a constant, simmering resentment makes small blood cells cluster together to form a clot. If this happens at a crucial point inside a blood vessel, it causes a heart attack.

 It’s astounding how our emotions have such enormous influence on our body. They can restrict blood flowing through an organ or flood it with blood, adversely affect the secretion of glands, or send muscles into painful spasms. Negative emotions gobble up good health.

 That’s why Shakespeare said in ‘Macbeth’: ‘Can’st thou not minister to a mind diseased,/Pluck from the memory of a rooted sorrow,/ Raze out the written troubles of the brain,/And with some sweet oblivious antidote,/ Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff,/Which weigh upon the heart?’

 Indeed, we can. And, we must. Jesus said, “If you take me for your food and drink, you’ll never be hungry.” Our ego is a denizen of our past. If we can firmly tell our ego, ‘Your time is up, your way of looking at things is redundant’, and allow the divine consciousness  to flow freely though us, that would be the food and drink of love that would sustain us and ensure that we would never go hungry for good health.

 A seed was bitten by a caterpillar. The seed survived and even thrived. It grew into a splendid tree. However, though it had the juiciest, greenest leaves, it could not bear fruit. What was holding it back? Its hostility, hurt and rage. It was still furious with the caterpillar for biting it!

 You were a seed in the past, you are a tree now. How can a full-grown, magnificent tree think like a small seed? You cannot go back into the past. The past is gone. Even that caterpillar is a butterfly today. It has changed. You have changed. You think differently and you behave differently. The wise Pastor Olsen says, “When you complain, you remain; when you praise, you are raised.” Yesterday, as a seed, the ground was your limit; today, as a tree, the sky is your limit. Once you understand the truth of this statement, you will mature and you will feel a flowering within. That’s how it feels to meet the present and to be wholly in the present. There’s a tremendous lightness and an emptiness that sings. There are no blockages and no clots in an open heart.

 Commit to living in this vast, open luminosity. With commitment, you can make great things happen. Commit not to be a slave to your negative memories.

Exercise them away — run like the wind and feel the cobwebs blow away while simultaneously feeling your breath heaving sweetly and your heart beating strongly in the present.

 Be like the water. It doesn’t complain about the hard rocks it flows over; it just runs on laughing, singing, drunk on living. When you are full of light, body-mind-spirit completely absorbed in the present, you become tremendously strong. And, no caterpillar can enter your consciousness.

The writers are authors of the book ‘Fitness for Life’ and teachers of the ‘Fitness for Life’ programme.