By John Pint

It seems regrettable that so many of the world’s medical doctors spend most of their time dealing with sickness and disease and not a whole lot contemplating the benefits of the celebrated “apple a day.”

Having surpassed the age of 70 in good health, I feel I now have a right to say something on the subject. I continue to enjoy hiking, cave exploring and racquetball and, looking back over my shoulder, I realize that during the last ten years I’ve enjoyed better health than ever before in my entire life. I seem to have been doing something right and I have an idea what it is.

Energizing Exercises
These exercises take about fifteen minutes to do and come from a Yogi who was sent from India to the USA in 1920 to introduce Americans to Yoga. Now some kinds of Yoga may require people to twist their bodies into strange shapes, but these particular exercises from Kriya Yoga are extremely simple and can be done by anyone of any age. They involve tensing and relaxing muscles and some deep breathing. They definitely energize your body.

Because these exercises were developed for Americans, the Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, came up with the rather novel idea of breaking down the instructions into small bits and mailing them to recipients once a week, making it extremely easy for anyone to learn the system. To my surprise, I recently discovered that Yogananda’s organization (The Self-Realization Fellowship) continues to follow exactly the same procedure today, even though you’d expect them to be using email instead. They do have a website, though, making it easy to sign up for the mailings.

The energizing exercises which I recommend are all included in the first set of 19 lessons described on their web page, which they will mail to interested parties in the USA, Canada and Mexico for an enrollment fee of $8.00 plus $14.00 to cover mailing costs. That’s about as non-profit as you can get.

Besides the instructions for the energizing exercises, you’ll also get Yogananda’s advice on meditation and other subjects. The web page is www.yogananda-srf.org . By the way, the life story of the man behind all this is told in a very interesting book called Autobiography of a Yogi, also available at the SRF website.

Energy Redistribution Exercises
These exercises take only ten minutes a day and most decidedly improved my health within a short time after I started doing them, about 12 years ago. They are very easy to do and are not really a form of exercise at all, as their aim is to free up energy in our bodies which should be available to us but which has become “encrusted” due to our physical and mental habits. Here in Mexico, these exercises have been passed down over the centuries from shaman to shaman and are described, with illustrations, in the book Magical Passes by Carlos Castaneda (Harper 1998; ISBN 0-06-017584-2, 225 pages).

I have been doing only the first 21 of these “magical passes” for years and the good effects are so obvious that I would never think of going to bed without doing them. I could make a very long list of ailments I used to have, ranging from headaches to knee pains, all of which soon disappeared after I started doing these exercises.

Castaneda says his teacher, Don Juan, claimed that the worries and stress of daily life result in our “pushing energy away from the centers of vitality,” locking some of it up. “Having energy that is not being redeployed, is as useless as not having any energy at all,” he said. “It is a truly terrifying situation to have a surplus of energy stashed away, inaccessible for all practical purposes. It is like being in the desert, dying of dehydration, while you carry a tank of water that you cannot open, because you don’t have any tools.”

Well, Magical Passes 1-21 are just the tools you need and you can order the book from Cleargreen Incorporated and, of course, Amazon.
 

I suppose any advice for maintaining good health ought to include comments on diet, but all I have to suggest is don’t forget to eat a lot of raw vegetables every day. As for exercising, I’ve already mentioned that I enjoy hiking and playing racquetball and I suggest that if you begin to liberate some of that locked up energy as indicated above, you too will feel like getting up and moving around.