How to Achieve Glowing Health and Vitality:

How to Achieve Glowing Health and Vitality:

How to Achieve Glowing Health and Vitality:

A 10-Point Guide by Paramhansa Yogananda

1. Introduction
Human life can be likened to a house fitted with the three windows of body, mind, and soul. Through these openings come pouring the three different rays responsible for man’s physical health, mental equanimity, and soul-enlightenment. Man has the independence and free will to live in the house of life with its three windows open or closed. When man closes the windows of life, he shuts out the three divine rays and finds himself living in the darkness of physical disease, mental disquietude, or abysmal soul-ignorance.

Most people have had one or more of their windows of life jammed shut for years. As a result, they suffer from chronic maladies. Their remedy lies in discovering how to open those windows themselves and bask once more in the all-healing rays of the Divine.

2. Right attitude toward diet
You must strike a balance between non-attachment to outer things and sensible concern for your present realities. So long as you are centered in body-consciousness, you must take sensible care of your body and follow the God-made laws that govern health and the physical body. At the same time, don’t over-emphasize the importance of the body or become too fastidious about diet. Many food faddists only weaken their systems by depending excessively on dietary principles.

Since you have to eat, eat the right kind of food. Choose a balanced diet, stick to it, and then forget the body. Devote your time to meditation and right living.

3. Do’s and Don’ts of Proper Eating
Every day the tissues of the body must be supplied with the proper body-building materials. In plastering a house, if you mix less lime in the sand, the plaster will begin to fall off in a short time. Similarly, our bodies decay when not “plastered” with the right type and quantity of body-building elements. The body begins to lose vigor, the tissues become flabby, the skin begins to wrinkle, and the cells begin to lose their building power.

In planning your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, be sure to give your body the proper type and quantity of body-building materials.

Eat sparingly of the right foods
Overloading the stomach with unnecessary food is one of the most common abuses of the body. Eat sparingly and notice the great change in your health for the better. Eating too much at one meal, followed by lack of exercise, develops the body disproportionately.

Eating freely of fruits and vegetables will greatly benefit your health, whereas eating too much starchy food and protein retains the poisons in the body.

Drink milk each day
Drink at least a glassful of good milk each day. Milk is the only food except eggs that alone can support human life. Drinking milk will help prevent old age and the sudden deterioration of the body, which result from not giving the body all the elements necessary for its healthy maintenance. Drink milk alone or with fruits—never with meals.

Avoid drinking ice water
Doctors say that drinking ice water lowers the temperature of the stomach thirty degrees. This is shocking and disastrous to an individual’s digestive power. Never drink ice water with your meals or when you are overheated. It’s best not to drink water of any kind with meals.

Eat only when hungry
The man who eats without real physical hunger is skating on the “thin ice” of digestibility. When he begins to tax his poor digestive power by greedily gulping unmasticated food in large quantities, and washing it down with ice water, he opens the door to illness and disease.

Eat in an atmosphere of calmness
Other important considerations in eating and digesting food are:

1. Proper selection of food
2. Attractive appearance and aroma
3. Pleasant environment

One should always partake of food with a thankful, joyful heart. Keep mealtimes calm and pleasant, and avoid eating when under the stress of emotion.

4. Analyze your mental diet
Have you ever analyzed your mental diet? It consists of the thoughts you think as well as the thoughts you receive from close contact with friends. Good thoughts are nourishing food for the mind, but thoughts of any other nature are poisonous to both mind and body. Peaceful thoughts and peaceful friends produce healthy, magnetic minds, whereas the wrong sort of friends produces inner disquietude and an unwholesome, gloomy mind.

No matter how busy you are, do not forget to free your mind regularly from all worries. Do not allow them to torture you. Remember that they were made by you. Learn to remove the causes of your worries without permitting them to worry you.

5. Add the “magnetic diet” of sunshine and oxygen
The magnetic diet consists of such food substitutes as sunrays and oxygen, which can be assimilated and converted into energy more quickly than solids and liquids. Oxygen and sunshine should have a very important place in people’s lives, because of their direct energy-producing quality.

When you are tired or hungry, take a sunbath and you will find yourself revived and recharged with ultraviolet rays. Inhale and exhale several times outdoors or near an open window, and your fatigue will be gone. A fasting person who inhales and exhales deeply twelve times, three times a day, is able to fully recharge his body with energy.

Practice the following exercise three times a day: Exhale slowly, counting from 1 to 6. Now, while the lungs are empty, mentally count from 1 to 6. Inhale slowly, counting from 1 to 6. Then hold the breath, counting from 1 to 6. Repeat eleven times.

6. How to remain youthful
You must take care of your body machine. As the years roll along, do not give up—as so many people do. Always be interested in life. Keep the mind busy by creating and doing new things. The infinite powers are at your command. Just as the ocean can help any wave to retain its form, so also can the everlasting ocean of Immortal Power behind the human body continue manifesting itself as that youthful, vital form.

Daily exercise
Walk daily and bathe your body in the bacteria-killing sunshine. During the winter months, take time to go skating, skiing, and walking. Breathe the fresh, crisp, invigorating air of winter. Perform some sort of exercise every day until perspiration breaks out over your whole body. Your colds and other similar ills will soon disappear.

Sufficient sleep
Sleep can be induced at will by lying on the back, closing the eyes, tensing and relaxing the body, and dismissing all thoughts. Try this until you learn to sleep at will.

Healthy teeth
Diseased teeth produce many ills. After eating, give your teeth a cleansing “shower bath.”  If you have no toothbrush handy, rinse your mouth with water ten times after each meal.

Periodic fasting
One of the main causes of arthritis, rheumatism, and many other diseases is autointoxication, which is due to faulty elimination. Uneliminated, decayed food stays like a paste on the walls of the intestines and is absorbed into the bloodstream. Disease naturally follows.

A three-day fast once a month on orange juice, with a laxative each night while fasting, will expel poisons and do much to make the body strong, healthy, and youthful to the last days of life.

Smile from the heart
There is no better reviving tonic than a genuine smile, and no beauty greater than the smile of peace and wisdom glowing on your face.

7. Rejuvenation through relaxation
Physical relaxation
For complete relaxation of the body, first gently tense the entire body. Then relax and withdraw all energy from the body and remain relaxed, without the slightest physical motion. The complete absence of motion and tension from muscles and limbs is “relaxation.” Imagine that the body is jelly-like, without bones or muscles. When you can do this, you have attained perfect muscular relaxation.

Deep relaxation with AUM
Sit on a straight chair, with your spine upright. Expel the breath quickly and hold the breath, counting mentally 1 to 10. Inhale slowly, hold the breath, counting 1 to 10. Repeat ten times. Then expel the breath and forget it.

Concentrate on the toes of the left foot and say “AUM” mentally on each toe. Do the same to the toes of the right foot. Then concentrate on the sole of the left foot and then the right foot, saying “AUM” on each.

Concentrate on the left and right calves, mentally saying “AUM.” Do the same with the left and right thighs, left and right hips, navel, abdomen, liver, spleen, stomach, pancreas, heart, left and right lungs, left and right hands and arms, left side of neck, right side of neck, and front and back of neck.

Say “AUM” mentally, concentrating on the pituitary gland, pineal gland, medulla, point between the eyebrows, mouth, tongue and uvula, left and right nostrils, left and right eyes, left and right ears, cerebellum, and cerebrum.

Then go up and down the chakras: coccygeal, sacral, lumbar, dorsal, cervical, medulla, and Christ Center at the point between the eyebrows, mentally chanting “AUM.” Try to feel that the whole body is surrounded within and without with the holy vibration of AUM.

Mental relaxation
Mental relaxation consists of the ability to free the mind from haunting worries over past and present difficulties. Mastery in mental relaxation comes with faithful practice. It can be attained by learning how to free the mind of all thoughts at will and to keep the attention fixed on the peace and contentment within. By the regular practice of meditation you can achieve mental relaxation.

8. Rejuvenation through “super-relaxation”
“Super-relaxation” is the complete, voluntary withdrawal of consciousness and energy from the entire body and mind through the practice of meditation. By the practice of meditation, one achieves complete mental relaxation by releasing the consciousness from the delusion of duality and resting the mind in one’s true nature of unity in Spirit. One also achieves complete physical relaxation, inhibiting decay and the breaking down of bodily tissues. This keeps the bloodstream pure and promotes physical rejuvenation.

9. Draw on limitless cosmic energy
Willingness and determination keep the blood vitalized with life-energy. If you can maintain an attitude of joyful willingness at all times, you will find your body constantly supplied with fresh cosmic energy drawn into the body through the door of the medulla oblongata. Your blood will be charged with life-current, making it immune to the invasion of bacteria.

To keep your body vibrating with life current, strengthen your willingness and determination in everything.

10. The highest form of rejuvenation
The highest form of rejuvenation is to unite the human consciousness with the infinite Cosmic Consciousness through meditation. When you are able to feel your body as vibrating currents in the ocean of Cosmic Consciousness, you will find not only perpetual rejuvenation in the soul, but also in the body. Meditation is the greatest way of resurrecting your soul from the bondage of body and all your trials. Meditate at the feet of the Infinite. Learn to saturate yourself with Him.

Excerpted from: How to Achieve Glowing Health and Vitality,

Yoga & Food

Yoga and food

Yoga considers the balanced lacto-vegetarian food that had completely excluded meat as a source of perfect health that will generate as inner reflex of our psyche an euphoric, complex state, quite consonant, consequent to the resonance to the subtle cosmic energies more or less in our proximity (i.e. up to a cosmic scale). Besides, the lacto-vegetarian food will trigger the complete balance of the being and its integration in the universal harmony, hence ineffable spiritual experiences will emerge in our inner universe.

The ancient wisdom of yoga states that we mostly are what we eat. The delicious meals that we relish finally reach our cells in a form more or less changed and keep staying there for a while, weighting on our vitality and health but also on our manner of thinking and on our spiritual experiences.

The scientific studies confirm the lacto-vegetarian food

Recent scientific researches proved quite clearly how some food may directly break the brain activity, and have a chemical impact upon the conveying neurons involved in mental and physical processes such as the memory, the sleep, motion, pain, depression, the ability of learning and even the perception of reality. Lecithin, for instance (contained in the soja beans or in the raw yolk) may highly increase memory, whereas a meal rich in carbon hydrates and scarce in proteins may trigger brain torpidity for hours, with systematic effects shown on a large amount of persons. Besides, it’s known for a fact that the carbon hydrates stimulate the insulin secretion that increases the brain serotonin, which makes our sleep longer.

Systematic researches proved that even the symptoms of schizophrenia, the hyperactivity and other mental disorders may be gradually removed by proper diet. Thousands of years ago, the wise yogis realized the huge importance of the lacto-vegetarian food in health, as well as its multiple effects both over the body vitality and regeneration and over the mind.

At thorough analysis it gets quite obvious that the man is not a carnivore in himself; both his anatomy and his digestive system proved that he evoluated in great conditions along millions of years, by eating only fruits, oleaginous, cereals and vegetables. Just like the anthropoid monk, man’s bowls are 12 long than the body height. Therefore, it’s quite clear they are adopted for the slow digestion of the fruits and vegetables that decompose slowly. In a recent article issued in the “Medical Counter Point” magazine, William S. Collins said: “man is obviously gifted with teeth that resemble to the herbivores rather than to the carnivores: the former have sharp incisive teeth to cut the herbs, flat molar teeth to smash the fruits and vegetables and short round canine teeth unable to tear and smash meat”.

Collins also reports on studies that seriously doubt the theory claiming that human beings have a carnivore physiology. The carnivores basically have no limits in assimilating the saturate grease of cholesterol. Dogs, for instance can eat 250g butter together with their usual share of meat and not even the slightest change occurs in their veins. Such amount of cholesterol is almost 100 times more than the average amount in our meals. If the cholesterol amount increases 2g per day in the case of the rabbits, their veins undergo incredible changes. At minute analysis it turns obvious that our natural instinct does not draw to meat. Just think now what may seem the most interesting to each of us: walking in an orchard or in a vegetables garden or facing the blood and the terror hurls of agony of the animals in butcheries.

The physical energy as compared to the vegetarian food

The vegetarian food was unexpectedly acknowledged during the Denmark embargo in the World War 1. At that time, the Danish were compelled to eat only vegetables, fruits, cereals, honey and dairy products. During the first year the mortality rate incredibly decreased down to 17%. On the whole the extraordinary effects of this regime were: much better health and low mortality. Between 1940 - 1945 Norway was subjected to such an experience, too, as they wanted to inflict high restrictions on meat. The immediate decrease of heart disease mortality was followed by the same rate of mortality as before the war recovered for those who resumed eating meat.

What makes the real support and source for the subtle vitality?

In order to stay young and full of vitality we must eat living food instead of dead food. The great initiate Pythagoras appraised the importance of the food vitality 2500 years ag “the living fresh food can only help man stay healthy, happy and feel the truth”. There is nothing living in nature to be eternal and unchanged. Everything that is alive undergoes whether growth and regeneration or decomposition. The fresh fruits, the oleaginous, the cereals, they are all able to germinate and grow up and therefore liable to provide vitality, energy as well as suitable amount of proteins.

Since thousands of years ago the yogis said to those willing to understand that this is the only food that should be eaten. In order to keep alive and give birth there is another life required and this perfectly works for our food. A great yogi master said: “The human body is made up of countless living cells which grow up and develop by means of similar entities. The subtle energy of our living cells will be shaped by our prevailing food. All these can basically influence our vitality psyche and mind at a certain extent. If the human body cells grow up and feed on barely living food that is rotten and disgusting coming from the utterly instinctive animals man will naturally incline to the lower levels of life”.

Meat as compared to morals and spirituality

Since we can afford living a healthy life with no meat we should wonder whether being carnivore is a moral and human custom. It’s quite obvious that animals do not deliberately give their lives for us to enjoy the luxury of eating their flesh. There have been countless religious and spiritual groups to support vegetarianism in the name of a sacred life without pain. Vegetarian food is strongly recommended by the yogis, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Taoists, Esseniens, by the Theosophical Society, the Adventist Church, the Unitarian Church, the Cross Order, the Benedictines, the Traipses, by the Universal Christian Gnostic Movement, by the Rose Croix Order. In early Christian times many spiritual groups opposed eating meat, which they considered an expensive, barbarian and dangerous luxury.

If anyone ever saw a slaughter house very well knows that animals experience terrible pain before and as being chopped. Here is how SRI AUROBINDO, a great yogi master, explained the ahimsa yoga principle (non violence, no harming): as much as food is concerned ahimsa means that our food should mostly consist of the living entities, which display lowest consciousness. Therefore if we have enough vegetables, fruits, cereals and different dairy products, animals should never be killed in order to provide our food. Anyway, before killing an animal, which may evince more or less a high level of consciousness, we must attentively consider if we might live even much healthier without killing that animal.

The risks of eating meat

The Eskimos who mostly eat meat grow old rather fast and their life average age is 27. The kirges a nomad tribe in the eastern Russia who also eat meat grow old prematurely and die soon, as they barely go over 40.

The poisoning: Just before and particularly after their agony in the butchery, the useless fight of the animals striving to save their life triggers serious biochemical changes in their bodies. This will cause the appearance of some toxic sub-products and huge amount of adrenaline spread in the whole body now poisoned by pain. The terror of the animal basically poisons it with terrible pain. According to the Britannic Encyclopaedia there are lots of toxins in the killed animals, such as the uric acids or the toxic remains both in their bodies and in their textures.  

Cancer: Recent researches on 50.000 lacto-vegetarian people highlighted incredible results that shocked the cancer researchers. The studies report incredible low rate of persons suffering from cancer as compared to a similar group, same age and sex, eating meat. The study also shows that the life-expectation for the lacto-vegetarians is much higher and all heart and blood circulations diseases are extremely rare in this case.

Why might people fond of meat be more vulnerable to cancer? First, the fact that few days only after the animal is killed the meatloaf gets a grey green olive colour and in order to prevent this, the industry usually makes use of different substances that jeopardize people’s health such as nitrates or other preservatives to keep meat red in an artificial and unhealthy way.

Many researches during the last few years also repeatedly proved that these substances represent high cancer risk. On the other hand, in order to grow up as soon as possible and bring high profit, animals are engulfed with hormones stimulating their growth at random. They are given stimulus for excessive appetite, antibiotics, sedatives and chemical food mixtures.

The heart diseases: the animal fats such as cholesterol cover the veins and the older we get the more veins shrink. The pressure upon the heart is bigger, which triggers heart problems and high blood pressure. One person per two eating meat will get a heart disease due to the veins pressure, whereas such diseases are basically unknown in the countries with low meat consume. The autopsy on the American soldiers killed in the Korean War showed that at 22 they already evinced arteriosclerosis signs, which were completely inexistent in the case of the Korean soldiers, mainly lacto-vegetarian.

Putrefaction: unlike plants which have a stiff cell membrane and a simple circulation system, the animal cells die quite soon after the circulation is stopped. Right after death, the animal proteins are coagulated and self-destructive enzymes start being secreted. A new substance emerges: “ptomaine”.

Meat, fish and eggs have a common feature: they decompose and putrefy quickly. Meat is usually consumed within a week whereas it must be stressed that putrefaction and bacteria start growing immediately after death. The habit of eating such animal meat in its specific quick decomposing triggers violent poisons in the colon and the intestines grow old prematurely.

I like to taste meat, what shall I do?

An old principle in the yoga wisdom says that the safest way to change an attitude deeply anchored in our being is not to uproot it, but rather cultivate and feed a deeply beneficial habit, opposite to the former one and be careful and loving to the new one as if cultivating a rose. We shall soon see that the new habit will grow up in force and beauty and the weed (here the habit of eating meat) will wither and vanish all of a sudden.

Here are a few smart ideas to cultivate the new rose: buy some vegetarian food books. This strategy shall help us save money: a various original delicious vegetarian diet with lots of proteins can generally decrease our expenses down to 50%. Then we have two or three platefuls of vegetarian food, quite light and nutritious instead of a meat meal.

Changing a meat diet for a lacto-vegetarian one, made up of living, fresh, pure and nutritious food is easier than we might previously think. For there are lots of delicious lacto-vegetarian specialities, with a rich nutritious value, which we had never had the chance to taste due to ignorance, to the lack of information, to the conventional habits and the prejudice conditioning.  Many people shall be quite surprised to discover various meals quite rich in proteins that are based only on vegetal ingredients.

In case you fail despite all these, you should go visit slaughter house, which will be enough to encourage you. You might face some difficulties at the beginning, indeed, but not that much as when you quit smoking, for instance. There are many determined persons who quickly attain satisfying results (a higher level of vitality and energy, healthier digestion and clearer mind) so that changing diet becomes an existential stage to trigger exuberance and purity.

The radiant health to emerge quite soon will not be just at a physical level. We’ll gain plain joy in fulfilling charity actions and also feel the overwhelming kindness beaming from our permanent state of love conveyed to all creatures (humans or not). The vegetarianism can be justified from a medical, biological, psychic, mental and spiritual point of view. We must keep in mind that there is no valuable intelligent argument against it.

Famous vegetarians

Here is a list, not at all exhaustive, of famous people known as vegetarian: Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Empedocles, Ovidius, Seneca, Plutarch, Crysostom, Clement of Alexandria, Leonardo da Vinci, Tolstoy, Sir Isaac Newton, Milton, Sir Isaac Pitman, William Shakespeare, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Richard Wagner, William Booth, Henry David Thoreau, Alexander Pope, Rabindranath Tagore, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Show, Ghandi, Albert Schweiter, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan.