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In daily life, pressure is intense: our jobs, our
marriages, our lives are at stake. A high percentage of
the maladies that people suffer from have at least some
component of stress in them, if they’re not overtly
caused by stress. Stress causes a rise of blood pressure,
the release of catecholamines (neurotransmitters and
hormones that regulate many of the body’s metabolic
processes). When catecholamine levels are high, there
tends to be more platelet aggregation, which makes a heart
attack more likely. So instead of a drug, say devotees,
prescribe yoga. All drugs give people have side effects.
Yoga has side effects too: better strength, better
balance, peace of mind, stronger bones, cardiovascular
conditioning, lots of stuff. Here is a natural health
system that, once you learn the basics, you can do at home
for free with very little equipment and that could help
you avoid expensive, invasive surgical and pharmacological
interventions.
Two oddities attend yoga’s vogue. Yoga, typically, is
practiced by the fit. Exercise, the care and feeding of
body and possibly mind, is their second career. The folks
in urgent need of yoga are the ones who are at the
fast-food counter getting their fries supersize; who would
rather take a pill than devote a dozen hours a week to
yoga; for whom meditation is staring glassily at six hours
of cricket; and who might go under the surgeon’s knife
more readily than they would ingest anything more Indian
than tandoori chicken.
Here’s another peculiarity: this ritual of relaxation
is cresting when noise and agitation are everywhere. We
work longer hours, with TVs and iPods as the sound track
for frantic wage slaves. If a teen isn’t trussed to his
headphones or plugged into a chat room, it’s because his
cell phone has just beeped.
In this modern maelstrom, yoga can be the difference
between living and partly living. |
