All societies seek health and happiness. In any civilization or society, we have always struggled towards health. After all, modern medicine started with the discovery and use of penicillin during the second world war, not even one hundred years ago.

What did we do before that to manage our health problems, our psychological and emotional problems? What systems were followed by other cultures and civilizations? Were we all pumping medicine into our bodies, or did we have a different attitude and vision of health and happiness?

Yoga represents that aspect of life where we are able to develop a different perspective.

Modern medicine is emergency medicine only. If you have diabetes, you take insulin to balance the sugar level in the body, but that does not cure your diabetes. If you have hypertension, you take tablets to lower the hypertension, but it does not remove the cause of the high blood pressure.

It is just suppressing those symptoms that affect our performance and functions, and by suppressing them we find we can function. But we are not able to remove the causes that created those conditions in the first place.

Yoga is not an emergency treatment. It does not suppress any condition. Rather it makes us aware of the cause that has created the psychological and mental distress leading to physical disease and illness. When we complement modern medicine with the yogic practices, we can attain our balance.

As practitioners, teachers and professors of yoga, we need to understand both modern and ancient methods. We are working at that level and gradually trying to achieve this.

In the western hemisphere the perception of yoga has altered dramatically since it first became popular. In the 1970s there was a television show in England where yoga was taught as a system to trim the waistline and become beautiful physically.

Later, there was another shift and yoga became a technique for managing mental and emotional stress. Then there was another shift and we saw yoga as a meditative process to get in touch with our psychic nature.

Today we have come a long way from these initial efforts, because we know that yoga can be applied in different ways at different levels of society to improve health, character and behavior.

Wales, 2000

From the book “Yoga Sadhana Panorama, Vol 4”, pg. 157-158, Sw. Niranjanananda Saraswati