Yogic Life For Control Of Diabetes: A Practical guide to a fuller life

From the Back of the Book:

Diabetes is best controlled not by fear and dread but by knowledge and self assurance by a positive attitude. Yoga helps you to attain such an outlook.

While modern medicine treats the disease. Yoga treats the person. Yoga promises no cure for what is incurable. But is does enable you to cope better with your disease. Yoga teaches you to take good care not just of your diabetes but also of your whole self. A human being is made up of many parts. Only when all the parts heart, liver, brain, muscles etc function harmoniously like a well tuned orchestra is health of the whole assured.

Through a well-planned regimen of cultivating right attitudes, awareness of the disease, satvik food, self-monitoring of blood sugar levels, yogic asanas and Kriyas, Yama and Niyama diabetes can reestablish the homeostatic balance.

The aim of this book is not only to help you take charge of your diabetes through proper self-management but to start you on your voyage of self-discovery, where body, mind and spirit are in total harmony with the cosmos.

In Understanding a disease process and managing it, we have also to understand the whole man. Unfortunately, our progress in knowledge of man has been one of knowing less of him. For a system like Samkhya Yoga, Man (Purusa) meant more than just the physical man.

Whereas the modem management of diabetes works more at the physical level, it is only Yoga that possesses capabilities of influencing the psychopathogenesis also. Yoga here is not just physical exercises. Yoga nurtures a spiritual value system that brings about attitudinal changes. As a result, healthy habits get cultivated and a characteristic normative way of life is established.

That the above is not just a theoretical assumption is proved by results of patients suffering from diabetes undergoing Yoga processes in a holistic manner, on a long term basis. The work of The Yoga Institute Santa Cruz on managing diabetes through the Yogic way of life began when Shri Yogendraji in 1936 began pathological investigations as were then possible. With more sophisticated techniques of investigation The Yoga Institute adapted the same and set up a Pathology Laboratory for more scientific investigations, Unfortunately, research methodology keeps changing over the years. However, the work of The Yoga Institute for over sixty years on Diabetes is now receiving recognition at the hands of Diabetologists and other specialists.

We would like to thank Kumari Coomie Chinoy, the Sadhakas, Dr. B.D. Khadbadi, Kum. Vimla Jaisingh, Kum Suchitra Pareekh, Smt. Sushama Nagarkar and Shri Subba Rao in preparing this book.