The following are excerpts from the book How to Achieve Glowing Health and Vitality by Paramhansa Yogananda.
All-Round Healthy Living
Health does not mean mere existence. Keeping out of the hospital is not health. To be able to resist disease, to bear strain, to stimulate mental vitality, and to feel the body as a luxury– as a bird feels when shooting through the air, and as a child does always—is health.
What distilled water is to a wet battery, food is to the body battery. The life Energy in the body battery is derived from Cosmic Energy, and from food. It is the intricate task of the life force to distill additional life force from the nourishment taken into the body, by breaking up foods and converting them into energy. Oxygen and sunshine should have a very important place in people’s lives, because of their direct energy-producing quality. And one’s diet should be confined to foods that are easily converted into energy.
How to Draw on Limitless Cosmic Energy
Learn to concentrate on your Life Energy and willpower, and to experience your subtle spiritual nature. Life and strength do not depend solely on food or exercise, but are sustained from the powers within.
The more you depend on the will and on Cosmic Energy to sustain you, the less your food requirements; the more you depend on food, the weaker your will and the less your recourse to Cosmic Energy.
Our thoughts, will, feeling, muscular strength, proper action of organs and glands—all depend for their existence on the Life Force. Billions of body cells are kept alive properly working through this secret vital power. By consciously willing, you can draw Life Energy into the body through the medulla oblongata to replenish the energy that is expended through thoughts, feelings, and physical activities. The will bridges the gulf between Life Energy in the body and the Cosmic Energy surrounding it. If you follow these teachings, you will learn to draw on Cosmic Life Energy to vitalize every body cell. You will experience yourself as Life Energy—and not merely as a body of bones and muscles. These teachings are based on the axiom: The greater the will, the greater the flow of Life Energy.
Mental Diet
We must also remember that good thoughts are nourishing food for the mind, and thoughts of any other nature are poisonous to the body and mind. Have you ever analyzed your mental diet? It consists of the thoughts you think as well as the thoughts you receive from close thought-contact with your friends. Peaceful thoughts and peaceful friends always produce healthy, magnetic minds. Inner disquiet and worries, due to the wrong sort of friends or unappreciative relatives, produces an unwholesome, gloomy mind.
If you are suffering from mental ill health, go on a mental diet.
Rejuvenation Through Relaxation
The mind must manifest calmness. Where the worries and trials of everyday life are concerned, the mind must be like water, which does not retain any impression of the waves that play on its bosom. Through the instruction on meditation, one can achieve complete calmness in the heart, lungs, and other inner organs, When the muscles and inner organs are freed from motion by relaxation, the breaking down of bodily tissues and decay is temporarily inhibited. This helps to keep the bloodstream pure, for when there is decay going on in the body the waste products are thrown into the venous blood and poison it.
How to Achieve Health and Vitality
with Nayaswami Asha, disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda
Return to Sharing the Heart of Yogananda.
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