Preferences - Yoga is an ancient health-art developed and perfected over the centuries by the Sages and Wise Men of ancient India. Yoga is not a religion, a metaphysical doctrine, or a philoso­phy. It is not magic or mysticism, although the amazing im­provements it can make in your health, your appearance and your youthfulness may often seem magical, even miraculous.

I. 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.

II. What Yoga Is? - By now the reader may have decided he has been promised the millennium. It might therefore be best before continuing with any further discussion to go back, examine Yoga in its varying forms and establish a common vocabulary in regard to it. We then can be completely clear on what this philosophy really is and what it is not—also on what it bases its claims and which of its teachings are applicable and useful to us.

III. Physiological Aspect - You have learned by now that there is nothing of magic in Yoga; neither are its results achieved magically, but by work­ing for them. You have a good idea of its underlying philoso­phy, its scope and its application. You also know what you may and may not reasonably hope to gain from its study and practice, even within the limits of a form adapted to the ex­igencies of our busy, crowded, briskly-paced Western exist­ence

IV. Yoga Medicine - Shortly after World War II a team of UNESCO health ex­perts were visiting the Balkans. A woman doctor stopped to talk about mother-and-child problems to a group of peasant women in a Bulgarian village. One of the young mothers, a lusty girl in her middle twenties, turned out to be the bride of the most important man in the community—a great oak of a man past ninety.

V. Pranayama - The air we breathe is the only element our body cannot do without for even the shortest time. We can, if necessary, sur­vive without food for as long as a month, without water for many days. But deprive the body of oxygen and we die within minutes. Cut off the supply of oxygen to the brain, and vital tissues are permanently destroyed.

VI. Deep Relaxation - Have you ever had the experience of going to consult a doctor only to be told, after he has made his diagnosis of your physical ills: "... But your main trouble is that you are much too tense. Stop driving yourself so. Try to rest more. Try to get more sleep. Relax! Let down a little ..."

But if you point out to him that your nerves will not let you unwind, that when you go to bed and turn the lights out sleep will not come, that you wake in the morning as tense and weary as when finally you did drift off, the best he can do for you is to offer you a crutch.

VII. Deep Contraction - After every action there must be a reaction. Now that you have the key to complete deep relaxation, the next step is to learn Deep Contraction. The two together will enable you to better utilize the full potential of your body and mind and gear them to working for you. Think of this as a preliminary mo­bilization of all your resources for approaching the more complex physical and mental routines you will be trying later on.

VIII. Concentration - The mind should be the willing servant of the Self. But it is only the very rare man or woman who possesses sufficient natural self-discipline for achieving this. In the case of most of us, the mind is either helpless slave or tyrannical master. Lacking proper orientation, we permit the impact of the world around us forever to impinge on us. Some of us let ourselves be buffeted by emotional storms or are forever being dis­tracted by external stimuli, with the result that single-minded pursuit of what is truly important to us is all but impossible.

IX. Mediation - We have seen how Dynamic Concentration becomes the key to mastery of the mind. Consider now the purposes to which such mastery may be put—the many ways in which it can be made to work for you. In the twentieth century, with its preoccupation with the inner man, its constant questing after psychological insights, it becomes especially important and useful to each of us to be able to turn the searchlight of knowledge inward.

X. Asanas? - Although a few of the specific Yoga postures, or asanas, have been mentioned in previous chapters, we have reversed the usual procedure followed in handbooks on Yoga, postponing their general discussion until now in order to let the student first acquire a good overall grasp of the subject. For the asanas are meaningful only in conjunction with the other Yoga prac­tices with which they are both physically and spiritually interrelated.

XI. Basic Asanas - Of the 22 asanas described in this chapter, you may only be able to execute two, three or four. This is not of too great importance. As we have said again and again, Yoga is not a system of mere body culture, and since you are not in com­petition with yourself, you need not be disturbed or discour­aged at any point simply because you cannot do at once what you are trying to do while practicing.

XII. Food + Diet - Man is as he eateth, so George Bernard Shaw was fond of saying. He happened to be a vegetarian on principle, but whether or not he would have lived to his 94 years had his diet included meat no one can say. One thing is certain, how­ever.

His frugal habits, his abstemiousness, his spareness of body doubtless had a great deal to do with his long life and vigorous health.

XIII. Yoga + Sex - Contrary to what many people believe, the Yogis are no more ascetics in the matter of sex than of food even though some of their elder sages do live on a lofty spiritual plane where all things of the flesh have ceased to matter. On the contrary, Yoga, being a philosophy singularly free of both Puritanism and hypocrisy, its disciples recognize the sex urge for the healthy instinct it is and would consider any attempt at its suppression profoundly unhealthy.

XIV. Long Life - To quote George Bernard Shaw a second time, youth is wasted on the young. Of course, like all paradoxes this one can be shot full of holes, for who would really grudge young people their vitality and their joy of living! Yet it is also true that the young seldom fully savor the gifts with which the gods so liberally endow them. Some things they take too much for granted, others they cannot enjoy to the hilt because their emotions and mental capacities have not yet developed in depth.

XV. Yoga Gift - In our modern world, a long life is what most men and women are going to have. Therefore, more than at any previous time in history, how to remain healthy, active and content over the long decades is the burning problem facing countless millions. No one welcomes ripe old age if it is to be a burden. We do not want it if it is going to mean retirement and that enforced idleness, which cripples the soul long before it eventually murders the body.

THE END