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. Anti-biotics 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.

Yoga introduction.

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. So, why? Yoga...

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 yoga 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 yoga 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.

If you are an average man or women coping with just average problems, here is what you are doubtless up against: Your day is too short. You rush to work in the morning and home at night, fighting your way through crowds and traffic tangles. You work under pressure on the job or in the home, and at the end of the day you are up against more pressures: Bills must be paid, expenses budgeted, chores taken care of after hours; your children bring their problems to you; the household absorbs all your energy; family life makes endless demands on your emotional and physical resources. And even though you love your kin and give of yourself willingly, there are times when things simply pile up and threaten to overwhelm you. What can help in this situation? Yoga.

The same holds true for your work-world: In the course of any single day you are up against a dozen unforeseen complications—there are delays, disappointments, errors, misunderstandings, irritations and similar minor crises. Heaven help you if, on top of all this, a major crisis looms. All at once you feel driven beyond your capacity.

Different people have different ways of responding to all these pressures. Some panic, others lose their temper or become paralyzed. The physiological reactions vary too, but chances are they will manifest themselves (in addition to snapping at others or indulging in what the French call a crise de nerfs, freely translated as the "screaming meemies") in symptoms such as headache, insomnia, backaches, nervous ticks, hives, stomach upsets. Keep the tensions up, let them begin to feel insoluble, and the body protests by escaping into psychogenic illnesses—illnesses that are very real indeed, but whose causes are mental rather than strictly physical. Next come the perpetual frowns, the wrinkles, the graying hair, a general sense of defeat and of growing old before one's time.

Yet none of this misery is inevitable, if you only make up your mind not to let it get its insidious hold on you. That's where the practice of Yoga can be of such enormous help. Think of Yoga as a tool that will help you banish fear, and the fear of fear. Think of yoga as a key to spiritual freedom. Give yourself a chance to reshape your own destiny.

At first it may sound far-fetched to claim that taking up the practice of Yogism or any other ism might help solve or even hold out the promise of solutions to objective problems. What, you may well ask, can a few breathing exercises, a few posture routines, bring to bear on whether or not the family budget can be stretched to cover the cost of those braces the dentist just said Johnny needs at once, without cutting into his precious college fund? And will it help build the addition to the house without which it will simply be murder to let your mother-in-law come to live with you?

Of course no one suggests such over-simplification. But consider this: Inasmuch as body and mind—or, if you will, the purely physical and the purely mental processes—are part of a single organic whole, it stands to reason that whatever affects the one will of necessity, directly or indirectly, affect the other. Therefore, just as emotional tensions often result in physical illness, so a state of physical well-being and relaxation can result in a more reasoned, relaxed approach to one's emotional problems and the tensions they bring on. And that, of course, is the first important step to being able to deal with them—the first step out of your quandary and in the direction of a solution.

But a more relaxed outlook on life is only one of the benefits that Yoga has to offer. To follow its precepts means learning to get more out of yourself, in every respect. For instance, proper breathing and relaxation, the very cornerstone of all Yoga teachings, result in deeper, more beneficial sleep and a general sense of restfulness and well-being; and these in turn enable one to function at the very optimum of one's abilities. It is not just a question of building greater resistance to emotional storms with their possible aftermath of psychogenic illness; a rested mind and a rested body are, as any doctor will tell you, the best kind of health insurance. So starts an entire beneficial cycle: a healthy body means a better-functioning body, it means added tone, improved functioning of the glands; and that in turn means better metabolism, muscle tone, skin tone, elimination and general vitality and vigor. It means eyes that sparkle, hair that shines and appetites time will not dull. In fact, it means slowing up the entire process of deterioration which we call aging and which in Western man starts so pitifully early.

As for the spiritual and mental results of Yoga practice, these soon become manifest in a fresh ability to make the most of one's inner resources. As one's powers of relaxation increase, there follows an enormous improvement in concentration. Soon the student finds himself in control of his thoughts instead of being controlled by them. And so instead of living at about ten percent of capacity, as do most people, he learns to live at one hundred percent, fully, deeply. He begins to do away with the fragmentation of his emotional wherewithal, escaping the whip of self-drive which can be so destructive, learning instead to think and feel clearly so that he wastes no more precious time in letting his mind wander in circles. Rather, he makes friends with himself until his whole organism functions as an integrated, positive whole, not a house divided. In psychoanalytical language so popular today, one might say it all adds up to the conquest of what has come to be recognized as the "neurotic personality of our times."

We can also put it another way:

Through the centuries our ancestors spent years of their time and energy, and sometimes large fortunes, looking for the elixir of youth—only their search for the secret of how to make gold out of baser metals was ever pursued with as much passion. Men were willing to sell their souls to the devil for it, women to bargain away their chastity; expeditions traveled to the four corners of the earth searching for it, hoping for magic wells and magic spells and poultices. The prize, if found, was to be a promise of physical perfection without end: beauty that did not fade, an ever-supple, lovely body, a face without lines. For the man yoga meant undiminished vitality and sexual powers; for the woman the allure of a Helen of Troy. Or, translated into everyman's ultimate desire, it added up to never-ending zest for life, a boundless joy.

Well, the men who searched for magic formulae were doomed to failure. It was the Yoga sages who, without any magic whatsoever, offered the world something of this secret. For in reality it isn't eternal life that man longs for, but rather a long, good, useful life lived to the full and without fear— fear of pain, of dependence, of invalidism and weakness and all the other miseries which can make old age a burden and an indignity. It is a life so organized and so satisfying that in its twilight a person will be content to let go without regrets and without a sense of leaving too much undone. This, in many ways, is or can be our ultimate achievement.

Such goals, based on the principle of a perfect marriage between a mind at peace and a body that remains sound and active long after middle-age and old age would normally have begun to make their inroads, are not unrealistic for the student of Yoga. Once you learn to live without tensions, you discover your own optimum potential and are on the way, though without urgency, to live up to it; in short, once you begin to achieve that inner harmony which will allow you to stop living at odds with yourself, you will find your entire viewpoint changing. Your relationships with others will grow more harmonious and satisfying too, for nothing is so attractive to people as a harmonious personality. Naturally with yoga the world around you will then become a more attractive place for you to live in.

People often ask, understandably enough, whether there aren't some limitations as to the time of life when the study of Yoga may begin. Fortunately, the answer to this question is an emphatic no. You can begin yoga at any age. Old people may take it up as well as the young, and even children have benefited by it.

There are bound to be differences in approach, yet there is nothing rigid nor schematic about the study of Yoga itself, and certainly Yogism, that modified form adapted specially to our Occidental tempo, can be further varied to meet the needs of every individual. True, when it comes to certain advanced exercises and postures, an octogenarian will not be likely to try tying himself up in knots like a limber eighteen-year old. But just for the record let me mention a lady of seventy-four, and another who is eighty, both of whom make it a practice to do the headstand for a few minutes each day. Both are fairly recent students—which ought to prove a point. On the other hand the very young, who with their wonderfully elastic limbs and limber joints are often able to approach the most difficult Yoga postures in the spirit of play, will gain little from such practices if permitted to perform them like acrobatic stunts. For, the prime purpose of Yoga is a reeducation of one's mental processes along with the physical. Therefore, encouraging children to participate will only serve a purpose if it will teach them the habit of relaxing, help them grow up relaxed. Considering a child's apparently inexhaustible supply of self-perpetuating energy, this is not easy; but neither is it impossible provided the teaching is by example and emulation. Relax with yoga, and they will absorb the essence of what you are trying to get across. Above all, always keep in mind that success is a relative matter—a matter of degree.

The Eastern Yogis claim that the best time of life to begin Abbyasa, or spiritual practice, is between the ages of twenty and forty. But this is only true of the student who means to dedicate his life to it. Since such undivided dedication is not our concern—since all we are after is a practical way to improve our day-by-day living—we can proceed at our own pace. Once this is completely clear, Yogism, or the adapted study of Yoga, can be integrated into anyone's scheme of things, beginning today, NOW.