LACK OF PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
When it comes to being couch potatoes, Americans aren’t alone. Physical inactivity has become a global pandemic, according to researchers in a series of related papers published in the journal, “Lancet”. According to one of these reports, lack of exercise causes as many as 1 in 10 premature deaths around the world each year — roughly as many as smoking and contributes to depression and anxiety.
Studies also show that exercise and meditation can help overcome depression, reduce anxiety and reduce stress. Meditation and exercise are powerful for several reasons. Practicing either or both of these promotes many changes in the brain, including neural growth, reduced inflammation, and creates new activity patterns that promote feelings of calm and well-being. It also releases endorphins, powerful chemicals in your brain that energize your spirits and make you feel good.
Most significantly, studies claim that you’ll get a bigger benefit if you pay attention instead of zoning out while exercising or meditating. Isha Kriya, Shambhavi Mahamudra and Hata Yoga are all powerful tools that can help you achieve this, as well as additionally providing countless benefits: greater coherence within the brain, improved sleep, improved attention and focus, relief of chronic health conditions, stabilization of the body, mind and energy system, deceleration of the aging process and ability to handle stressful situations effortlessly.
Sadhguru explains the problems caused by physical inactivity and why it is so important in this day and age, more than ever before in the history of mankind, to transform the effects of physical inactivity.
Sadhguru: Today, man has become physically inactive like never before – he could not afford to be so physically inactive before, he had to do so many things physically, just to survive. So, he has become more neurotic than in the past. As a general phenomenon, there were neurotic people then also, but not in these numbers.
Today, it has become a common phenomenon in society that too many are in some level of neurosis. This is simply because your energy is not worked out; it’s trapped. You have not transcended your madness and at the same time you’re not working it out. The therapy also is not there. If you went out and chopped wood for the whole day, a lot of your energy would be spent, and life would be peaceful; but today it’s not like that. You are not using your body the way it used to be used, so you go on generating all kinds of diseases, like never before.
This builds up inside your system over a period of time. Then your physical and emotional energy need some outlet. That is how your bars, your clubs and your discotheques have come into place. People have to work out their neurosis somewhere, somehow. These discos look like madness; you can’t even breathe inside. They are full of smoke and sweat but people are just going wild. You can’t even dance, everybody is bumping into everybody else, but it doesn’t matter, you have to work it out, otherwise you will go crazy. So, on Saturday, you go work out your neurosis for the week. Then the piling up starts once more and once again the Saturday night fever comes.
There is another way to drop this madness and go ahead. Completely leaving it behind and going ahead where you are no more a part of it. This is what meditation is all about. Now, if you dance, you simply dance for the joy of it. Lack of physical activity not because there is something to work out. If you’re dancing to work out something, maybe it is therapeutic. It is good therapy all right, but there is a certain ugliness about it. It is lusty; you cannot dance out of love. You can only dance out of lust.
Do you know the difference between love and lust? Lust is a strong need; love is not a need. When you love, you settle down, nothing more is needed. You can just sit here for a lifetime. With lust you can’t sit anywhere, you either get into some mad action, or you are bound to go crazy. When there is a certain neurosis, a certain madness within yourself, you can only be in lust. Your lust can be for sex, for food or for some particular activity or some hobby, it doesn’t matter what it is, but you develop lust for something. Without that lust you cannot live.
Even your work is an effective way of throwing out your lust. It’s just that it is the most popular and accepted way in the world. Today people just go on working, working and working. Not because they are creating something fantastic, but simply because they have to work, otherwise they don’t know what to do with themselves.
You have to guard that madness cautiously. Nobody ever knows that you have this within yourself and you yourself would like to forget it. You do everything possible to forget it. All the entertainment in the world has come just to hide your madness. If you were perfectly sane, you would not need entertainment. You need entertainment just to cover your madness. If we take away your entertainment, you will go crazy.
Man needs entertainment simply to hide his madness. If he was perfectly sane, he would not need entertainment. He could just sit and watch this bamboo grow. If the need for entertainment is gone in you, then you will become available to the magnificent exuberance of life. Every moment becomes a phenomenon of immeasurable depth.
Plus receive a free eBook by Sadhguru
