Are you ‘burning’ calories ? STOP
In Sri Anand Yoga, ‘burning’ calories is a dirty word. Instead of burning calories, our exercise actually burns our happiness. This issue of ‘calories’ has so much predominated our minds that we always tend to think at back of our mind about that damn devil ‘calories’ the food we are eating contains. Instead of enjoying the divine pleasure of savouring the yummy food, we start feeling guilty for breaking the dieticians commandments. Her image haunts us with a stick in her hand ordering to take an extra hours walk as a sign of repentance to our Lord the Doctor.
Our redemption is not complete until we measure our weight and sugar level post our sin. A Diabetic person is considered as a handicapped person. He has to strictly follow his diet regime. Otherwise he may have to face the dim reality of his feet being cut, kidney getting damaged and he being put on permanent dialysis, blindness and finally death. He is constantly living under a shadow of this feat psychosis.
In Sri Anand Yoga, we do exactly reverse. Instead of cutting out sweets from the diet, we actually introduce it in the diet plan. This may sound foolhardy. It is not. There is preparatory process of tuning to the body and harmonizing our three levels of existence. When a diabetic person starts his meal, the first thing he is supposed to do is to take a taste of the sweet (which he is supposed not to touch as per his diet plan). He takes tiny morsel of the sweet by his bare finger, inhales a deep aroma of it through his nostrils, intensely ‘feels’ this aroma in his consciousness then softly puts it on his tongue and savours it with deep and intense focus on its taste. He takes nearly one minute for this whole process. He tells himself that this yummy food which he is taking is NOT the cause of his diabetes.
It is a divine gift to mankind and it is his destiny and blessing that he is getting an opportunity to taste this sweet. He assures himself that he will increase the capacity of the cells of his body to fully absorb this nutritious food without any adverse impact on his health. While chewing and munching the sweet, he intensely tastes and absorbs the essential nutrients in the sweet. This whole event of say 2 minutes is a deep meditative experience of food.
It is not important to eat large quantity of food in order to get satisfaction. Our body actually needs very little of the food in order to have healthy life. We eat food mostly to satisfy our craving for it, rather than the need of our body. Our cravings for food has its roots in our anxiety and stress. We treat food as a stress buster. If we are able to manage our stress in a creative manner, then this craving for food vanishes.
When we have yoga of the physical body and get fully tuned to the physical body, we are able to ‘listen’ to what body has to say.
If we go by what our body is telling us, rather than our dietician and our diabetologist consultant is prescribing, we will get immunized against the maladies of calories and glucose. This has to be done in a holistic manner. Otherwise our intelligent mind will fool us by getting its cravings satisfied by impersonating to us as our physical body. This will do us no good.
We need to have correct tuning to our physical body. There is a specific technique for this purpose. This is explained elsewhere in these notes.
Actually we also burn good amount of calories by doing our household chores. If we do them in SAY way, we have an added bonus of actually energising and harmonising our body life field in a most natural way. There will be no need to punish the body by doing exercises in a gym.
Clarifying the title of this note. In Sri Anand Yoga, we do not ‘burn’ calories. We integrate them in our body. This way we get the full benefit of the nutrition while the extra unwanted calories and glucose is discharged in a natural manner.
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