Does Yoga Help With Diabetes?

Question: Can Yoga help alleviate my Diabetes? 

Sadhguru: When it comes to a chronic ailment, whatever may be the ailment, the root cause for it is always in the energy body. Your energy body functions the way it functions for various reasons. It may be because of the kinds of atmospheres you live in, the kind of food that you eat, the kinds of relationships that you hold or because of your emotions, attitudes, thoughts and opinions. It may also be because of certain external energy situations that disturb your internal energy. In some way, your energy body is disturbed which will naturally manifest both physiologically and psychologically. Once this one layer of the body – the energy body – is disturbed, the mental body and the physical body are bound to be disturbed. Actually it becomes a doctor’s concern only after it becomes a medical problem. Till then it is not a doctor’s concern because there is no physiological manifestation.

Unfortunately, medical science understands only disease. It does not understand the roots of health, as to where it comes from and what the basis of health is. If you are a diabetic, sugar is not the problem with you. It is just that your pancreas is not functioning properly. As an emergency measure you reduce the sugar intake because in the Allopathic system of medicine, they have no other way to activate your pancreas, so this is the only measure they have taught you – “Check your sugar every day and take a little more insulin.” The Allopathic system is symptomatic in treatment; the doctor looks at your symptoms and gives you the treatment. 

Allopathic system is a fantastic system for any infections. Allopathy is the best thing as I see for anything that comes to your body from outside. But it does not offer any solution for the simple ailments which man is creating for himself from within, like diabetes, blood pressure, or migraine headaches. Modern medical science only offers to manage the diseases and never really talks about freeing you from those diseases. There are whole systems of medicine and so many kinds of specialists to manage diseases within certain limitations. A lot of money and time is being spent on just managing those diseases. It is just like people talking about stress management. People want to manage their stress, people want to manage their diabetes, people want to manage their blood pressure. It is ridiculous. This kind of foolishness has entered, simply because they have not understood the fundamentals of how their own life energies function.   

In Yoga, if there is diabetes, we see it as a very fundamental disturbance. Diabetes is not taken lightly as a disease. We see that the fundamental structure of the basic body is being disturbed. That is why diabetes happens. And it is different in each individual. For each person, the level of disturbance and the type of disturbance that happens in each system is very different. So it needs to be handled individually. However, irrespective of what the disease is, Yoga only aims at balancing and energizing or activating the energy body. The basic premise in Yoga is that if your energy body is in full flow and properly balanced, there can be no chronic disease either in your physical body or your mental body. We are not treating the disease as such, we are seeing disease only as a manifestation of the disturbance that could be existing in the energy body.

If people are willing to do a certain amount of sadhana to balance and activate their energy body, they can definitely be free of all chronic ailments.

 

Editor’s Note: Isha Rejuvenation offers a Diabetes Management Program which is an exclusive therapeutic program designed by Sadhguru to enable people with diabetes to create a basis for holistic management of their condition.