These are some of my personal experiences with yoga and healing during
36 years of practicing and teaching yoga.
I had a few minor experiences with healing in my first few years of yoga practice but it was not until my sixth year that I really had to come to a realization about how the phenomenon of yoga actually heals....
In my second year at Ananda ashram my friend Nina brought me a small kitten which had been poisoned by digging in some garden dirt that had insecticides and DDT in it. She asked me if I could do something to help the kitten because I knew more about energy than most of the first year students. I did not know if I could help or not but I thought I would try working with this cat and simply give it some energy. I sat down on the steps right where we were with the kitten in one hand and my other hand on top of his spine, did some deep breathing while conducting the prana into the seemingly lifeless corpse. I continued to do this with full concentration for all of 15 or 20 minutes at which point the kitten came back to life, jumped up and ran halfway across the floor only to collapse again. I picked up the little body again and repeated this sequence for another 20 minutes, after which he seemed fine again, and so he was for the rest of his time at the ashram.
I considered it to be my first healing experience since the kitten was seemingly dying when I began and quite full of life at the end of our session. This was in the early months of 1972. |
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Towards the end of that year I was introduced to self healing through a little mishap. I had come back to the Western hemisphere by then, and realized that living indoors in Canadian winters no longer suited me, after three winters in the tropics. By December I had found my way back to the tropics – Mexico again. Staying on a beach near Veracruz , I was still as a Saddhu (Indian renunciate monk), living on a $0 budget and found that coconuts were being provided daily by mother nature. I had a hatchet, to which I had attached a long pole so that I could cut the coconuts out of the trees. While I was opening a coconut with this hatchet one day the pole hit the ground behind me, redirecting my aim so that the hatchet came down across the joint on the index finger of my left hand, which was holding the coconut.
The result was one finger in two pieces. There was only a small piece of epidermis attaching the end of the finger so that it was dangling off the end and not falling into the sand. I was quite fresh out of India at that time, full of the magic of the last three years of esoteric studies. I didn't think twice of just sticking the end of the finger back on. There was some bamboo around so I took a piece that was the right size for my finger and used one half of it to make a cast that held it all together. I wrapped that with a cloth after cleaning the wound with salt water from the ocean, visualized it all re-connecting and went on with the business at hand – my coconut.
The other gringos camping on the beach thought I was being foolish to not go in for some kind of medical attention, but after two years of hearing Dr. Swami Gitananda's stories about the non-effectiveness of western medicine I had no interest or need for that. It healed quite well, quickly, without infection and with very little pain as I recall. The sensation that did come up, I used as a focal point to send more prana. Six months later when I came back from Columbia I realized that the finger could not straighten itself out (because the tendon had been severed), so I did a small amount of visualization – prana going to re-create the tendon. Two weeks later I could straighten it again.
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You can still see the scar line going across the joint in my index finger 33 years later.
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I took this experience, like the kitten, to be normal and natural, nothing spectacular.
Three years later...
1975 was the sixth year of my yogic journey, and also the 27 th year of my life. That is the year when we shift from the first minor chakra to the second (see YantraYoga). For me this shift brought a reality check whereby I needed to verify that what I was teaching about health was no longer just a theory, but rather a Realization, in the Eastern sense of the word. I was confronted with a strange disease that started on my leg one day as a simple boil or pimple. Not so simple was the fact that it developed into some kind of tropical ulcer that almost cost me my leg.
Up until it began I had been living in the mountains of Guatemala on the shores of Lake Atitlan. It was an ideal yogic setting and I was taking advantage of it by practicing rather intensive forms of yoga that involved long hours of visual concentration, breathing and mantra as well as the asanas of hatha yoga. My inner visionary capabilities were at an all time high, keeping me fascinated and somewhat addicted to the inner colors and patterns. The purpose was to explore that world of the chakras through visual techniques I had learned from Swami Gitananda. I was attempting to paint my inner scene, reproducing it on cloth in large mandalas. This meant several hours each day of seeing with my eyes closed and seeing it again with my eyes opened.
In the fourth month I was pulled away from the intense project to go help a friend fulfill a business commitment in Guatemala City . Obviously this was a radical shift in focus, from deep levels of spiritual concentration to absolute material consumerism. Assuming the role of a purchasing agent for an exporting friend left me as frustrated as a fish out of water. I found myself eating weird foods like French fries and grilled cheese sandwiches to try and maintain a vegetarian diet, a far cry from my fruit and vegetable diet at the lakeside retreat. This is part of what led to the pimple on the leg. There was also the lack of hatha yoga, or should I say the exercise part of my life had been replaced by walking around on much polluted city streets.
As the days progressed so did the pimple progress into a boil, a swollen boil and then an open sore that kept oozing out puss and clear liquid virtually all day long. Within a couple of weeks it had become a half inch hole in the skin on my leg. Looking like some kind of crater from the moon, the edges were all puffed up, and it continued to secrete this clear yellowish liquid that made it seem like the skin was melting away.
By the time I returned to my mountain retreat this hole in my leg had grown to over 1 inch in diameter. My concern about its progress kept me on a fairly clean diet which seemed to keep it from becoming infected. Nevertheless the clear liquid kept oozing out and the hole kept getting larger. The business trip in the city was now over and I was back to my painting of mandalas and a more intense yoga practice. However, this wound on my leg kept expanding while the liquid kept leaking down my leg.
I was applying some yogic healing techniques as far as relaxing and bringing energy to the area, doing some massage around the area, deep breathing, chanting etc., but nothing was really working as far as an actual healing. I did notice that while I was trying to relax I had many thoughts about disease and, worrisome thoughts, and guilty memories of all the grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries that I really did not believe I should have been eating. It was as if these worrisome and guilty thoughts kept me from focusing on the actual process of healing, destroying my confidence and putting me in somewhat confused state of mind.
It was July by the time I returned to Canada and the original pimple from three months ago had progressed into a 2 inch crater on my left leg. My mind was still in a state of doubt and confusion yet I could sense that this was some kind of a test for me and I needed to figure out how to heal this problem. At my sister-in-law's request however I did go in to the hospital in Kelowna to have a doctor look at it. He was a rather young doctor and when he saw this severe problem on my leg he freaked out, told me it was dangerously infected with gangrene and that's some serious surgery would be required, basically indicating amputating my leg below the knee. I left the emergency ward of the hospital with more determination than ever to figure this thing out.
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In this photo I have highlighted the outline of where the "crater" was 30 years ago (black dots). there was virtually no skin left there, only raw meat and yellow liquid. Now it is scar tissue that has very little feeling in it. this old battle scar is reminiscent of my graduation from the theory of healing to the more adept reality of healing with yoga. |
I had done and was still doing a lot of fruit fasting which had taken my weight down by at least 20 pounds but seemed to keep the infection at a minimum. Still, it was another two months of this growing crater on my leg before I met a fellow called John Fletcher, who turned me on to a stabilizing diet. which not only helped the healing process but brought my mind to a whole new level of understanding the disease phenomenon.
This was called the macrobiotic diet number seven and consisted of eating only organic grains such as rice and for a period of 10 days. For me this was quite different from the fruit fasting, but I found that after only four days my mind came to a place of freedom from the fears, the guilt and the uncertainties, and at that point the healing began to take place and the skin started growing back over the crater.
My direct observations over this 10 day period were more focused on what was happening in my mind than on the healing of my leg. In fact I was seeing for the first time just how much the state of my mind indeed controlled the condition of my body and its healing functions particularly. I had never been in such a calm place mentally. This “peace of mind” surrounding my consciousness was like a warm woolen blanket wrapped around my body on a cool morning. I was finding “rest” from all the mental and emotional turmoil of the past months, perhaps from the mind flurries of my whole life. The thoughts that did occasionally arise were inspiring and affirming, without any doubts, that the process of healing had been successfully activated. Clarity itself had come in to blow the clouds out of my vision like a midday breeze blowing the morning fog away. My external vision could now see the progress of the skin growing back daily, with zero infection, creating a blissful feeling of accomplishment.
For me this experience had not only healed a wound on my leg but had brought me to a much more enlightened view of the whole mind/body connection. How intimately related these two were, and how instantly they affected each other, I never would have believed prior to going through this lengthy procedure. Now I understood from a very deep level the essence of psychosomatic medicine, its ultimate reality. It was only decades later that scientific research verifying this reality came to public attention; this was through the research of Dr. Candace Pert .
In her book “The Molecules of Emotion” she revealed the findings of her research and exposed us to a reality which indicates how much we should be responsible for our own thoughts and subsequent health.
NEXT...
The first cancer client...
One decade later I was pushed into another personal healing adventure. I refer to this one as "the cahinsaw incident".
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