Yoga Made Easy
Why Yoga

As recently as a century ago, when the average life expectancy throughout the Western world was less than forty years, people gave little thought to keeping fit. Life was simply not long enough. The few men and women who lived into their eighties and nineties were thought old souls of whom it was said that they were so mean nothing would kill them.
Today the picture has changed. On the one hand, science and medicine have combined to lessen the hazards to which we are exposed. Plagues have been wiped out. Antibiotics and other miracle drugs are conquering diseases long considered incurable. Surgery is capable of life-saving magic. Our life expectancy has very nearly doubled and continues to rise.
On the other hand, we have acquired an entirely new set of problems. Even as the years of our lives stretch out longer, existence becomes infinitely more complex. By its very nature, twentieth century civilization makes this inevitable. The Atomic Age is hardly a relaxed age. We circle the globe in a matter of hours, we talk of trips to the moon as the reality of tomorrow—but we also know that tomorrow's wars, unless prevented, will be on a scale to wipe out continents.
On the personal level, our urban civilization brings with it tensions virtually unknown in our grandparents' time. We tend to live on the run, geared to split-second timing, to noise, to newscasts every hour on the hour, to phones jangling and cars honking, subway trains, deadlines and keeping up with the Joneses and seldom sufficient rest, relaxation or sleep. None of this is conducive to peace of mind. As for our physical conditions, as fast as the human body is enabled, through technical advances, to last longer, it falls prey to a new, totally different roster of ills.
Look around you and compare the medical picture with what it once was: Smallpox has all but vanished, tuberculosis is rapidly being wiped out, pneumonia rarely kills, death in childbirth is no longer something to fear. But now it is the diseases of old age and of tension that are the evening. Today heart trouble is the number one killer. Ulcers, arthritis, allergies, and allergic respiratory disturbances—not to mention mental illness of every variety—plague the young, the not-so-young and the elderly.
But since the world we live in is the only world we have, and since we cannot individually do much to change it, the next best thing is to learn to adjust to it with some degree of comfort. True, we cannot very well go bucolic, escape to some Thoreauvian Walden, some Shangri-La of our own making. Nor can we shut our eyes, close our ears, turn off our emotions enabling us to remain impervious to the life around us. We probably wouldn't want to do that even if we could, for who but a born hater would deliberately choose indifference to those very qualities which make us warm human beings?
Fortunately there does exist an answer to this problem. It is possible for anyone who will only take the trouble to learn to live serenely in our Age of Anxiety. Within easy reach is a key to living out one's allotted span of three-score-and-ten or more, enjoying all the while a vigorous mind in a vigorous body, both of them functioning to the very limit of their potential. The key to such well-being is Yoga.
Yoga, you say? But that's some kind of Eastern magic, or maybe a religion! Yoga is a Hindu with an exotic headdress, climbing a rope firmly anchored in mid-air. It's a man walking barefoot over hot coals or lying on a bed of nails.
Nothing of the sort! The misconceptions about Yoga are many, and naturally what sticks in the minds of most people is the flamboyant, or what we might call the circus approach. But this we can happily leave to the tricksters. The truth has nothing whatever in common with any spectacular nonsense. True Yoga philosophy and Yoga health practices are sane, serious, utilitarian and easily applicable to our own daily lives.
As far back as the days of Marco Polo travelers in the East returned home with tales of men they had met totally unlike ordinary mortals. These were sages and philosophers, described as being singularly serene, detached, apparently unaffected by the ordinary stresses and strains of living, indifferent to pain and frequently possessed of certain extraordinary sensory powers. Their concentration, their physical control, their insight were amazing. Their hands could heal, their spirit travel to distant places. And while they lived to be unbelievably old, they seldom looked their age. Invariably they were held in the highest esteem.
The sages whom the travelers described were Hindu Yogis—a Yogi being a follower of Yoga,—the ancient school of philosophy whose founder, Pantanjali, lived in the third century B.C. Often these men were also Gurus, or teachers, each of whom had dedicated a lifetime to the kind of study and practice which made him an outstanding figure in his chosen way of life. The claims made for them, fantastic as these may sound, need not necessarily have been exaggerated. In fact the modern traveler in India will still come upon their counterparts, for such men do exist, as even the most skeptical of scientists will not deny. Nor are they magicians, even though to the uninitiated they may seem to have attained truly supernatural powers.
In a later chapter we shall briefly come back to them— discuss, analyze and attempt to explain some of their more striking achievements—but only in order to give the student a general idea of what the profound study of Yoga does make possible by way of ultimate goals. Right now let us make it very clear, however, that no one advocates setting up such goals for the Occidental student. This is not the purpose of our book. Indeed nobody could hope to achieve or even approximate them without devoting a lifetime to their single-minded pursuit. Certainly it could never be done without a Guru for a guide.
For the average Westerner there exists an altogether different approach—a serviceable adaptation, as distillation of Eastern methods, which for purposes of clarity I have chosen to call Yogism. Stripped to bedrock, here is a technique in the form of mental and physical disciplines that may readily be incorporated into our day-by-day existence. One needn't make a career of it. Thus Yogism may and does serve as an easy, pleasant road to self-discovery and well-being and will help anyone willing to approach it with an open mind. Yet there is no need to devote more time to it each day than it takes to smoke a cigarette, drink a second cup of coffee and listen to newscasts after breakfast, lunch and dinner.

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Yoga Made Easy Why Yoga

Yoga Made Easy
Why Yoga