The Ancient Art of Self-Healing (eBook)

I want to give you this gift of God, this science which I have been carrying in my chest for years and years, which after my death no one will even know about. I want to share it with you. Somebody once was kind to me, he was merciful to me, and he was great to me. In my innocence and ignorance, I never knew why he wanted to pick me up and teach me this. I just had faith that this was a good man, and I followed him. I never understood what a priceless thing I had. I want to give this to you, and I want you to give it to your children, so that this priceless thing which we have goes on and on for many generations.

You are nothing but you. And you have to understand that you cannot be anything but you. Neither there was, nor there is, nor there shall be anything more important than you, and from that you as a base, you must rise unto the top as you. Excel. Command the situation and the challenge to excel. That is human.

Food is the medicine which creates essential energy in the body and creates essential rest, which creates equilibrium. That is the beauty of food. All food was considered human medicine to begin with, and to live with.

There are two types of food: nutritious food and sustaining food. Actually a lot of food on the earth is medicine. Nutritious foods are those which allow you to help your body and give you strength. Sustaining foods are those that do the medical job for you, those that maintain your metabolism. So the basic properties of food are: Food should be nutritious and food should be sustaining. Food should also be balanced. Balanced food is that food which can get digested without drawing on your health. It should not put a strain on the body of the child or the person.

There are many different foods, but that food which sustains you will always give you more joy in life. Any food which pushes you is going to kill you. You don't grow old by years, you grow old by food. Your sexual behavior, your personality behavior, and your communicative behavior, all are understandably very important. But the base of all that is how much you eat and what you eat.

We take medicine to get rid of disease. What does medicine do? It fights the disease and gives the body a chance to recuperate. What is a medicine? It is a sustaining food. Chemical medicines are produced because they are cheap. The difference between organic medicine and chemical medicine is that chemical medicine is direct and organic medicine is indirect. Organic medicine affects us slowly but its effect is long. Eating tasty food is nutritious, but eating right food is sustaining, too. Eating the right food is a cure in itself.

Sometimes you wonder about what can make you healthy. What has happened with modern medicine is that they have removed the curing properties of foods. They have taken those direct properties, filled the medicine with them and shoved them into people. When you take a medicine with the original, as well as with the embraced faculty of it, it will never have an adverse reaction. If the whole food or the whole herb is used, rather than taking the extract from it, there is hardly any negative reaction.

There are a lot of foods available to us today that were not part of the original Ayurvedic tradition. In this book we have not added anything nor instructed anything that is not in the traditional knowledge. We have to keep the knowledge pure from our own ego, and we won't change the information taught by our teachers. We are very proud of this and we want to keep our pride alive. We don't want to go left or right. And what we did was we experimented with whatever we could experiment with. - Keep Up - Yogi Bhajan