Sadhguru spoke with Dr. Sanjeev K. Chaudhry, CEO of Super Religare Laboratories (SRL), in a recent event in New Delhi.

Sadhguru started off by speaking about his own experience with yoga and how to handle the health of the human system from within. Answering the next question he elaborates on how breath and posture affect our health. Sadhguru explains how to bring our system to ease, mentioning that most people don't really know what health is.

Full Transcript:

Questioner (Sanjeev Chaudhary): Sadhguru, first of all, thank you for having this ‘Conversation with Mystic’ series in Delhi. Delhi has disproportionate influence on the health and karma of this nation. So we always welcome you in Delhi and _____ us.

Sanjeev Chaudhary: First question, Sadhguru. In your closing comment on the education segment, you talked about the marvel that human body is, the importance to have good pregnancy, raise good children, educate good children. Recent medical research shows that mother’s milk for a male child and a female child is different. In fact, it is so magical that if mother has twins, a male and a female child at the same time, the milk for the male child and the milk for the female child is also different.

Sadhguru: Did you know that in the culture, we’ve always known this? Your grandmother has always known this. It’s just that, what we have always known, you have to do a billion dollar research today, that’s the whole problem.

Sanjeev Chaudhary: So the first question, Sadhguru, is - you’re probably one of the busiest people in this country. You… those of us who’ve seen you work, it’s well past midnight. You’re probably up… if at all you are sleep by three AM and health is all about stamina and fitness and remaining in a peak state of awareness. Would you be happy to share the magic of what you do to stay alert and healthy to such _____

Sadhguru: I… I don’t get to do most of the things I know I should do about myself, because of the schedule and the travel. Usually, I am…an important part of health is - how you eat. And most of the time, I’m eating in somebody’s home. So I have to eat to their satisfaction, not to my health. You know, this is India. Hospitality means you must eat two people’s food, not one! So considering all that, I have… the choice is… gets quite restricted.

So what do I do? What… what I say right now, may not be a practical suggestion, because you can’t take it as a tip and do this. I do every day one, twenty seconds of sadhana. That is I just let my energies run through a (an?) overhaul in the morning and that’s all I do. I have no regular exercise regimen; I don’t walk every day, I… Nothing! But since I am twenty-five years of age to this day, my weight has not varied more than two kilograms. I have been seventy-four, seventy-five since I was twenty-five. It’s just that little from my shoulder, it slipped little down. It was all on my shoulder, now kind of going towards the earth. Except for that, which I am wanting to correct.

So this is not a practical suggestion, but there are ways to do your health, in ways other than physical ways. Maybe you have not heard of, maybe you have, a couple of times in the last ten-twelve years, doctors have written me off as, ‘For sure, you won’t make it’ kind of thing because all my systems were failing because of certain things that happened. But I’ve come out of that, just in a matter of days or weeks, because, you need to understand this - this whole body was manufactured from inside, not from outside. You provided the raw material from outside, but the piece of bread that you eat becomes human body from inside. So there is an intelligence here, there is a competence here, which creates this body. If you have access to that, if there is a repair job to be done, would you go to the manufacturer or the local tinker? If you have lost access to the manufacturer, you go to the local tinker; otherwise you go to the manufacturer. Most of you take your cars to the company service station, isn’t it? Not to the local tinker unless you’re in some place where you have no access.

So, this is possible for every human being. It is just that, they think it’s not important to play… pay attention to the source of their creation. They think something else is more important, which is… which amazes me. How is this possible? But somehow, the… a large segment of the population thinks, something else is more important than what… that which is the very source of your creation.

Your thoughts and emotions are more important than something of this intelligence, that is, it can transform a piece of bread, into such a sophisticated mechanism called a ‘human being.’ When such a level of intelligence is there within us, I cannot understand how anybody can ignore it. It’s always, though I’ve lived this long in this world and I’ve worked with people continuously, it still amazes me. How is it? How is it that they can ignore this?

Sanjeev Chaudhary: Sadhguru, so long as we’re alive, we breathe and we have this beautiful instrument of the human body, in Isha Yoga Center, you place a lot of emphasis on two things - the posture and breathing. How these two things impact our health?

Sadhguru: See the way we sit, for example, people who’re on the path of Hata yoga spend a lifetime learning how to sit. A logically thinking person cannot understand, why should somebody spend a lifetime learning how to sit?

Health… You’re talking about health, I’m sorry. There are other dimensions to it, but coming to health - if you have to be healthy, you have to be at ease. This is like, you’re driving your car, you may be… (Talks Aside - What do you drive, Sanjeev? ‘M’… ‘M’ is not a Maruti, okay?) … So, you’re driving a good car. It’s a wonderful machine, but drive it without the engine oil. In ten minutes, it’ll be junk. Yes or no? Because there is no ease, lubrication is lost.

So when you say you’re stressful, you’re anxious, you’re disturbed by this and that, what you’re saying is, your lubrication is lost. It is not because of the speed at you’re… at which you’re traveling, you’re struggling. It is because there is no ease, there is no lubricant inside. And everything is friction. When there is friction, there will be stress. Drive your car for ten minutes without engine oil and see what happens. However great your car is, it’ll be gone.

So bringing this to ease - there are too many things to it, I can’t go about. At one simple thing is - today fortunately, they put these kind of chairs for you. Otherwise, these days slowly, you know we’re getting European furniture-makers in India, big-time now. So, you go to United States and sit down in a sofa, you have no choice, you anyway become like this. You have no choice about how you sit. Like this.

Now you need to understand this - if…there’s something called as muscular comfort, skeletal comfort, organ comfort. Muscular and skeletal comfort is largely… just comfort, comfort it is. It is needed at some times. But your organs should be comfortable for you to be healthy.

If you take all the vital organs in your body… I am putting it in a very simplistic way, considering the time - all these vital organs in your body, they are not fixed with clamps and nuts and bolts; they are hanging in nets like this. Only if you sit like this with your spine erect, your organs are at maximum comfort. You sit like this they collapse one on top of each other. Now how do they function well? They will not function well.

So in a day, if you’re sitting like this for eight, ten hours, you’re asking for it. You’re just asking for it. It’s like you want to drive your car on two wheels, one day if you flip around to show off, it’s okay. Every day if you drive like this, it’s not going to last. That… that’s happening to your body all the time. So maintaining a certain level of organ comfort is very important if all these things have to function well.

See, you may not be medically diagnosed as ‘diseased’ or you have an ailment, but I would say… Pardon me for my percentages, I would say over eighty-five percent of the people do not know what’s health. They’ve not experienced it. Maybe they knew it as children where they bounced around. If you’re healthy, you feel like bouncing around. That means you’re grave. You know your destination.

So, this sense of gravity has entered you, not because of age, not because you’ve become profound, simply because there is no ease, either in the mind or in the body. So it’s… it’s trying to save itself. It is trying to live in a limited way. It is not trying to live, it is trying to save life and curtail it and hang on for a little while longer. So keeping the body at ease is most important.

Coming to mind and other things, there are so many things. Apart from that, if you learn to sit right… You know, in… in seventies, late seventies or eighties, when you first got your television, you were watching your television, which was a one-channel wonder, and you’re watching your favorite program - you know what it was - and suddenly, it went bup, bup, bup. Then you go up on the terrace, there is a piece of aluminum there, you try to do this and this doesn’t come. Then very carefully, you bring it to that level suddenly the world pours into your house. Once again the world is back in your sitting room, simply because, you got the aluminum piece to the right position. You need to understand, you are who you are, only because of what you have perceived, isn’t it? Perception means you must be like an antenna. The whole system of yoga is just this. You learn to hold your body right.

Now, if I go anywhere even in India, you know, because they think if you wear Indian clothes, you’re archaic. You have to be in Western clothes to be modern… And they’ll give me a chair with armrests like this; because they have lost their flexibility, they can’t cross their legs, they all sit like this and every two minutes, they keep shifting and shifting. If I sit like this, I’ll sit the whole day like this, because the body is at ease. Now if I have to think, if I have to perceive, the body has to be in a certain way. They don’t perceive anything; they got everything stored in their iPad. It’s a very different world. Health is not just physical. There’re a whole lot of dimensions to it, isn’t it? Unless this… this human being feels complete in every way, you cannot say he is healthy, isn’t it?

So we have a phenomenal sense of what human mechanism is. I want you to know this. Being Indians, being in Delhi, which is the capital of India, I want you to know this - I… this is not my nasture… nationalistic fervor, this is a reality - nowhere else on the planet, no culture, at any time in the history of humanity, has looked at human mechanism with as much profoundness as we have looked at it here. If you destroy this knowledge, if it is not a living knowledge, it is only with a few people, it is no good. We have to live it.

This is the greatest advantage we had and it is showing in many ways. Though our people… sixty percent of the population is malnourished in the country right now, their physical bodies, their skeletal system has not grown to full size - still in spite of this, I speak across the planet to all kinds of people, highest level of academics, scientists, tribal women, rural people, all kinds - I always find, traveling around the world, I always find the basic general intellect in India is way higher than most places on the planet. But it has no expression. In other places, they have found systems to allow people to find expression to their intelligence. Here, we’re blocking it in a million different ways, in spite of that, you can’t kill it. But if you keep them malnourished for another generation or two, this intellect which came because of thousands of years of breeding carefully, doing the right things with life - we call this ‘Samskriti’ that means doing the right things with life.

Life does not mean party. Life means this that you’re doing the right things with this, so that this gradually evolves to a higher and higher space. Because of this, so many things happened in this country. So many wonderful things were invented, so much knowledge and knowing happened. But now, that knowledge and that possibility, we are not able to pass it on large-scale to our children, which is the greatest tragedy the country is going through right now.