The Wisdom of Sashi

While I have been mulling over a series of blogs about the teachings of our yoga teacher Sashi, this particular post was triggered in direct response to this post from Vanee: time & money. Her basic thesis is that citing the example of highly successful (& hence busy) people taking the time out for exercise (or other seemingly non-critical tasks) to guilt people like us into making time for regular exercise is essentially hollow. I will circle back to this later, but for now I want to focus on the narrow point of exercise or more generally taking care of our bodies.

This indeed is the inspiration for the title of this blog - I am really ghost writing for Sashi here. One recurring theme in Sashi's class lectures is how we ignore our bodies. It has taken years of listening to him to actually start hearing him. The truth is that we are controlled by our brains/minds and don't always do what is good for our bodies. But our body is the only real thing that we have. I am sure that this argument can be extrapolated to all kinds of people, but I am speaking just to our demographic - highly educated and financially sound. We can find all manner of rationalizations to avoid taking care of our bodies (& I do), but that does not make it ok. I certainly believe that wealth makes a huge difference to our priorities (its been a running theme in my political blogs), but I also believe that all of us have sufficient money to avoid making that a constraint to regular exercise.

Ultimately it does come down to priorities, doesn't it? Human beings are a very smart race - we will find a way to medicate ourselves to longer and longer life spans independent of whether we treat our bodies right or not. But that is besides the point - the question is really whether you believe in the power of your body to heal itself and take care of itself. More importantly, do you have the discipline and self control to allow this to happen? This is hard - its far simpler to pop a pill or get a tummy tuck, but to the receptive person, the rewards are much greater. Unless you are a professional body builder, there will never be a time when there is nothing else to do but exercise. We can wallow self pityingly on the difficulty of waking up a bit earlier to get some exercise in, but that's all that really is - self pity. Or in the words of Sashi, "poor me", "why me?"

Actually, I think our use of the words "exercise", or "work-out" are a good hint about why we fail at this. This is not something 'additional' that we have to do, but the price we have to pay for our lifestyle. Stop using your car, couch, bed, and start growing your own produce and you can safely avoid what we call exercise. Hardly possible today, is it?

Back to the success story examples - my thesis is a bit different than Vanee's: My contention is that the reason they are able to devote time to exercise or other mundane tasks is the very same discipline and drive that made them successful in the very first place.