Can Yoga Help Someone With Chronic Ailments Such as Diabetes?

Chronic Disease Versus Infectious Disease

Sadhguru: There are two types of ailments – infectious and chronic ones. Infectious diseases are those that happen because an external organism invades the system and causes trouble which has to be dealt with through medication. In a chronic ailment, our own body is creating the problem. The disease is being manufactured in the system.

Every cell in the body is programmed for health, so why would it cause an ailment? Either something very fundamental has gone off balance, or there is a certain level of misunderstanding within the system because of which it creates ill-health instead of health. We may incubate this misunderstanding in many different ways. This is not an misunderstanding of your mind, but it happens on the cellular and elemental level.

The root cause of any chronic ailment is always in the energy body. Your energy body functions the way it functions for various reasons. It may be because of the atmosphere you live in, the food you eat, the relationships 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 energies. When your energy body is disturbed in some way, it 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 too. It becomes a doctor’s concern only when it becomes a medical problem, which means there is a physiological manifestation.

The Fundamental Flaw of Allopathy

Unfortunately, medical science understands only disease. It does not understand the roots and basis of health. 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 allopathic medicine, they have no other way to activate your pancreas. The only measure they have is for you to check your sugar every day and take some insulin.” The allopathic system is symptomatic in treatment; the doctor looks at your symptoms, and based on them, prescribes a treatment.

Allopathic medicine is a fantastic system for any infections; from what I see, it is the best thing for anything that comes to your body from outside. But it does not offer any solutions for ailments that the system creates from within, like diabetes, blood pressure, or migraine headaches. Modern medical science only offers to manage the diseases and hardly ever 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 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. This kind of foolishness has entered simply because they have not understood the fundamentals of how their own life energies function.

Yoga and Chronic Ailments

In Yoga, we see diabetes as a fundamental disturbance in the structure of the body. And in each individual, the level and the type of disturbance that happens in the system are very different. So it needs to be handled individually. However, irrespective of what the disease is, Yoga aims at balancing, 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 in your physical or mental body.

We are not treating the disease as such; we are seeing disease only as a manifestation of the disturbance that could exist in the energy body. If people are willing to do a certain amount of sadhana to balance and activate their energy body, they can be free of chronic ailments.