Health: YOGA MUDRA

Chin Mudra

I have always been one for alternate therapies, especially yoga and meditation. I find that they are the best as they don’t bring you any harmful side effects. More than that, the chances are that you receive a number of unexpected positive side effects.

While I learned about Yoga Mudras from many sources – people and the internet – I use the following Mudras to improve my health and lifestyle. I bring you this article from my own personal experience. Most of the Mudras are best done on an empty stomach.

These are long term therapies - or rather, a change in lifestyle. You start doing these Mudras and see the effect over a period of time for yourself. It’s best that you continue with them through your life for preventing a number of illnesses while bringing you tremendous energy. You need to spend less than half an hour every day to do all of these. Believe me, it most definitely is worth it. While I have mentioned a limit of 100-200 counts of deep breathing for each Mudra, you are welcome to do more if you feel so inclined.

There are a number of Mudras. I just bring you those that I personally found useful and know the positive effects of.

Chin Mudra

Most of you must be familiar with this Mudra that brings together the tips of the thumb and index finger while holding the rest of the three fingers straight. I do deep breathing while holding my fingers in this Mudra. One can do 100 to 200 counts of deep abdominal breathing depending on the time one can spare.

This Mudra is effective for de-stressing, bringing down one’s blood pressure and getting sound sleep. It improves one's concentration and focus too.

Go Mudra

Go Mudra

‘Go’ means ‘cow’ in Sanskrit. This is called the Go Mudra as it resembles the head of a cow. You bring the tip of your thumb to touch the middle and ring fingers together while holding the other two fingers straight.

This Mudra helps strengthen your pancreas and keeps away Diabetes. Amazing, isn’t it! But so true. Imagine being able to lead a healthy life free of diabetes by doing 100-200 deep breathing along with this Mudra. It takes less than five minutes.

Varun Mudra

Varun Mudra

As the name suggests, Varun Mudra balances the water content in your body. You bring the thumb tip and the tip of your pinky finger together to do this Mudra. Deep breathe 100-200 times keeping your fingers in this state.

Varun Mudra helps strengthen the kidneys and bladder. I hear that most women of 40 years and above suffer from Incontinence – lack of control over the bladder. This Mudra is extremely powerful in setting that right. It also helps in making sure that you don’t ever get dehydrated. I find this very effective.

Surya Mudra

 Surya Mudra

The name suggests the influence of The Sun. Surya Mudra helps improving the metabolism in one’s system. You bend the ring finger so that the tip touches the middle of your palm. Then press the thumb over the second phalange of the ring finger. Hold your hand in this position for 100-200 breathing counts to bring about tremendous changes in your body.

While officially this Mudra is supposed to improve thyroid function, set right metabolism and do away with constipation, what I found was something more and even better. I had – note the past tense – been suffering from Osteo-arthritis since three years. Those who are familiar with this problem will know that doctors advise losing weight in the short term, recommend steroids most of the time with patients ending up doing knee surgery in the long term. Doctors also insist that the patient should avoid climbing stairs, squatting and a number of other things.

Doing this Mudra with 200 counts of deep breathing brought such tremendous relief in just a couple of months. I had stopped doing Surya Namaskar because I could not bend my knee properly. Now I am able to do Surya Namaskar as well as a few squats because of this Mudra.

Of course, I would suggest you consult your doctor before doing any strenuous exercises. But the Surya Mudra definitely helps in making your body strong. This is one Mudra you can do on a full stomach too. It helps reduce the feeling of heaviness after a meal.

Aakaash Mudra 

Aakaash Mudra

Aakaash Mudra is performed by bringing together the tips of the thumb and middle finger while holding the rest of the fingers straight. This can also be done for 100-200 counts of deep breathing.

This Mudra is effective in reducing blood pressure, cleaning out your sinuses and keeping your heart going strong. Incidentally, it also helps one grow spiritually and is a path to enlightenment.

While a number of websites recommend that the Mudras should be performed for 15 minutes to half an hour, I would suggest that you inculcate them in your lives for about 5 minutes or less. That way, you will not feel the strain of spending a lot of time on this while reaping the golden benefits that these Mudras bring.

Health: ISN’T PREVENTION BETTER THAN CURE?

Mumbai Mirror carried an article on the deteriorating state of health among people who are barely thirty living in Indian cities.

Click Here for the original article in Mumbai Mirror (28.4.2013)

I feel the main reason for this is the lifestyle that is led by people. Please understand that I am just citing examples and not criticising here.

Work hard, party harder

Perfect! But one must also understand the limitations of the body. Sleeping for a minimum of eight hours is a must. Keeping your electronic gadgets at least a few feet away from you, while sleeping, is most important.

When you socialise, it’s not always necessary that you have to guzzle down hard drinks like there is no tomorrow. There are those who say that beer is harmless. In the long run, it most definitely is. Train yourself to enjoy your drink and just have a peg or two if you really must. I understand that drinking gives you a high, but it also wears out your body in a horrible way. Okay, after all this, you do continue to drink day after day – please have at least four to five litres of water every day. I can just hear someone argue that “Arre, already I am drinking so much fluid, why the hell should I add to it with water too?” Do understand that alcohol dehydrates the system. All the more reason for you to drink an extra litre of water every day!

Balanced meals on time

After a late night with a heavy dinner that was consumed at around 2 am, it’s very difficult to face breakfast at 8 or 9 am. Tough luck! You chose to party. If you miss this meal because you got up late or felt like puking, you are abusing your body.

There are those who are so deep into their work that they just don’t have the time to stop for lunch. Why? You understand you need to work hard to have a great career. Then, don’t you understand that you need to feed your body to make it work, especially to the limits that you stretch it? Check out brain foods and eat those more than food that is required for the physique. That might help you if you are sitting in front of your computer most of your waking hours.

Have your dinner by 7 or 8 pm at the most and try to snack lightly if you are out fraternising at night.

Regular Exercise

You hit the gym at least five times a week or go walking, running, jogging or whatever that suits you. This keeps you fit and helps you go that extra mile – literally and figuratively. This keeps your body well conditioned – your muscles, nerves, your blood circulation and your heart. It also ensures you don’t gain that extra fat that is so harmful to your system.

Yoga and meditation

Yeah, I just heard a lot of you groan. Who has the time? Well, if you fall ill and are forced to be hospitalised at the young age of 30 or 40, can you argue with the doctor that your work or social life is suffering? You don’t have a choice but to drop everything and get stuck in bed round the clock. From that perspective, I am sure you are able to understand the value of yoga and meditation. Just 10 minutes of your time for a few Surya Namaskars and another 10 minutes for either Pranayama or Chakra Meditation – every day of the week – can do wonders to prevent sickness from attacking your system.

What these processes do is to strengthen your aura. Any illness first touches one’s aura and takes at least a few months to reach the physical body. If you have a strong aura, it can absolutely stop the disease from ever reaching your physical body. It’s the truth.

Yoga and meditation also help relieve stress which is the main culprit for hypertension and high blood pressure and all kinds of heart disease.

Don’t pop that pill!

Have a cold? Take Action 500 or Crocin or whatever! Stomach upset? There are loads of medicines out there to stop it. Fever? The chemist has a variety to offer! Headache tho hona hi hai - what with lack of sleep and dehydrated bodies! Wake up with a hangover, pop a pill and rush to work without eating or drinking anything.

This is the shortest route to the hospital. To begin with, these pills break down your body’s immune system. Yes, the body is created with its own immune system that works very well.

When you have indigestion, your stomach gets upset. Give it a rest and allow it to spill its guts – literally. Have a lot of fluids and avoid eating heavy food. Having methi seeds, chaas, coconut water and pomegranate juice can do wonders. And have a lot of water! If your stomach upset does not stop within a couple of days, visit your doctor. If you take a tablet to stop your stomach from clearing itself, you are forcing it to find other methods and that’s when you come up with a major sickness.

Fever usually suggests that there is something wrong with your system. Instead of finding out what it is, you try to cure the symptom with pills. The fever goes away but what about the original illness that had caused the fever? That’s still very much there in your body. Keep doing this repeatedly and why are you surprised when you land up in bed?

A common cold happens when your system is heated up. This is your body’s way of cooling down. There is this common saying that a cold remains with you for a week at least – whether you take medicines or not. Try to have hot soup or rasam and treat it with freshly cooked food. Why bother with pills that abuse your body?

Headaches happen mainly due to dehydration. If you have a bottle of water, the headache usually disappears. Sometimes, it is due to stress. Well, yoga and meditation definitely help. Maybe you are just hungry and the body is craving for fuel and that’s why your head is hurting. You need to be observant. You can’t allow your body to remain without food for more than 4-6 hours, unless you are sleeping. Too many fizzy sodas also dehydrate the body and create headaches.

Click Here to read about how to understand your body.

Alternate Cures

To my knowledge, I find that unless it’s an emergency, alternate cures work better than allopathic medicines. More so, when the treatment is prolonged like in the case of diabetes or the heart. Homeopathy  or Ayurveda medicines – after consulting a doctor, of course – don’t have harmful side effects. You can’t beat nature cures.

Click Here to know about the Wonder Seed Methi.

Click Here to know about the value of Lemon & Water.

Click Here to know about how your body is nourished with Water.

In the long run, I am sure you will all agree with me when I say that Prevention is better than Cure as this involves the least wear and tear on this wonderful body that we are born with.

Health: STOP! THINK! PROCEED!

Flower Therapy

Maintaining good health, I feel, is more important than curing bad health. I am sure most of you who are reading this article will agree with me. 

Popping pills is a pet peeve with me. There are ‘n’ number of tablets that could be bought off the shelf. It never seems to matter that some of these medicines have been banned in countries other than the third world.

Have a headache, swallow Saridon, Crocin, Anacin, Nice or anything else that you could lay your hands on. Having a headache generally means that your body is trying to tell you that something is wrong with it. 90% of the time, a headache means that you are dehydrated. Keep drinking water and you will find that the headache disappears almost immediately. Drinking Coconut Water works like magic. Headache also happens because of indigestion. Suppressing it with a pill is not the cure. I am sure you are able to understand that. STOP and THINK before taking a tablet.

Have a cold, pop Action 500 or something similar. I did that a couple of decades ago. Had just one Action 500 and had a nose bleed. The tablet lives up to its name. It probably performs 500 actions within our body and not all of them positive. My doctor fired me for swallowing such a strong pill for just a cold. Nowadays, I drink glasses of warm/hot water with a few drops of lemon juice and my cold disappears within 24 hours – the simplest way to treat the body without harmful side effects.

Allopathy is the most accepted form of treatment today in the world. But is it the best?

• Allopathy offers the fastest cure for any disease. It is good for that reason. A course of medicines can last for a couple of weeks or may be a few months. What we need to understand is that medicines with heavy chemical content (Allopathy medicines are high in chemicals) should not be taken for a prolonged period. They will definitely have harmful side effects.
• Doctors generally specialize in certain fields. The diabetic specialist does not understand the heart and both of them don’t know anything about your bones. Okay, maybe ‘anything’ is going overboard. But they definitely don’t know the total effect of their treatment for a particular disease on the rest of their patient’s body.
• Continuously medicating a diabetic patient with medicines such as Insulin weakens the Pericardium. You might know that this is the wall that protects the heart. When the Pericardium weakens, a diabetic patient automatically becomes prone to heart attacks. Listen to my voice of experience. This is the problem my mother faces today.
• Because she had a heart attack ten years ago, my mother was advised to take Ecosprin, once every day. Ecosprin thins the blood and this ensures that the blood flows freely and makes sure that another heart attack does not occur. Almost a year ago, 9 years after she had been on Ecosprin, her doctor felt that she needed a stronger dose and suggested Ecosprin Gold. She has been on that since 11 months. This probably led to her second massive heart attack about 20 days ago. I cannot vouch for this, but all the specialists at Vijaya Hospital, Chennai – there was a cardiac surgeon, a vascular surgeon, a psychiatrist, a diabetic specialist and a couple of others – felt that Ecosprin Gold was the culprit. This is the reason why I mentioned at the beginning that a course of medicine should not be given for a prolonged period.

Well, I am no doctor and this probably means that I don’t know anything about medicine. But I do know my body. And that’s what everyone needs to do.

The body has an in-built IMMUNE SYSTEM. We need to keep that alive. We need to have balanced meals, exercise regularly, drink water and take proper rest.

When we overload the system with pills, we keep interfering with the immune system. The White Blood Corpuscles (WBCs) play a very important role in holding up our Immune System. They form the front-line defense system. When a virus gets into our body – cold, stomach upset, fever, cough, headache and more – the white corpuscles put up a strong fight and most of these problems get set right by themselves. Feed in medicines, the pills push the WBCs out of their way and do the work themselves.

For example, when artificial insulin is injected into the body of a diabetic, the Pancreas are forced to take a back seat and over a period of time, they almost die due to idleness. Does this help in the long run? You need to THINK.

Okay, the doctors give you medicines - say when you have a body ache, the doctor advises you to take a Brufen. The next time you feel an ache – maybe after a long walk that you have taken after a couple of months – you immediately pop a Brufen. Do you really consider the side-effects? In this case, one can’t even blame the doctor. When your feet begin to ache suddenly, it mostly means that you have suddenly put on weight. Or they ache because they have not been exercised over a long period. Is Brufen the solution to this problem? THINK!

When someone has periods, she may have abdominal cramps. One pill might just cure it in a jiffy. But what else does this pill do to your uterus? THINK!

It’s very important that the Excretory System functions perfectly for the Immune System to do its work.

• Constipation is a common problem at least 90% of the world seems to be facing. Popping a pill for this every day of your life IS NOT a solution. Lemon and warm water first thing in the morning; OR a teaspoon of Methi will clear up your intestines in a jiffy.
• Body Odour occurs a lot of the time because the intestines are not cleaned up and also because the body is not sweating enough. Please realize that ‘sweating’ is also part of the Excretory System. The sweat throws away toxins that are not required by the body. Block this with body spray, etc. and watch the bad health implode. Shocking? But that is the truth. When you watch the Desi Boyz on advertisements going around cool after using body sprays, you think ‘WOW’ and ape them. Believe me, it is NOT AT ALL Wow. You block all your pores with chemicals – they smell great, alright – and you stop your skin from breathing. Do this day after day and what do you think happens to all the toxins that the body intended to shed through your sweat? THINK!

God has created our body perfectly, with a classic Immune System that takes care of it. We need to be aware of it and be careful before spoiling it. WATER is a very important ingredient to balance one’s IMMUNE SYSTEM. I know at least five people that I can remember offhand who refuse to drink more than half a litre water every day. One hates the taste of water, two of them are bored of the effort and the rest of them believe that drinking water gives them a bloated look. Incredible! Can we stop breathing? Or let me put it like this – what will happen to us when we stop breathing? We just die. It is the same with drinking water. Not doing it is killing our body over a period of time.

HEALTH once lost can be recovered, with very great difficulty. Please STOP, THINK and PROCEED before you fool around with your body.

There are number of alternate therapies such as Ayurveda, Siddha Vaidya, Homeopathy, Flower Therapy, Naturopathy and more. Opting for one of these for prolonged treatments will go a long way in maintaining good health.

Then there is Yoga and Meditation. You can’t beat that!