Integral Yoga & Integral Healing, Sri Aurobindo & The Mother.

INTEGRAL HEALING - From the Compiled from the Works of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother

Integral Healing provides the insights of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the causes and cure of illness. It is a comprehensive approach including consciousness and its impact on physical health, the use of yoga to transform the health of the body, harmony, weakness and the action of the forces of illness, psychological states and the nervous envelope, the impact of fear on health, the use of the will, faith and mental effort, neutralizing pain, cure by spiritual force, medicine and healing, spiritual healing and much more. Index, glossary and references. 

"Absolute cure of an illness so that it cannot return again depends on clearing the mind, the vital and the body consciousness and the subconscient of the psychological response to the force bringing the illness. Sometimes this is done by a sort of order from above (when the consciousness is ready, but it cannot always be done like that). The complete immunity from all illness for which our Yoga tries can only come by a total and permanent enlightenment of the below from above resulting in the removal of the psychological roots of ill health — it cannot be done otherwise." - Sri Aurobindo, Integral Healing.

"Instead of being upset and struggling, the best thing to do is to offer one’s body to the Divine with the sin-cere prayer, “Let Thy Will be done.” If there is any possibility of cure, it will establish the best conditions for it; and if cure is impossible, it will be the very best preparation for getting out of the body and the life without it. In any case the first indispensable condition is a quiet sur­render to the Divine’s will. Turn your mind completely away from your difficulty, con-centrate exclusively on the Light and the Force coming from above; let the Lord do for your body whatever He pleases. Hand over to Him totally the entire responsibility of your physical being. This is the cure."  - The Mother, Integral Healing

The Mother: I am against the indiscriminate use of any medicine, and when a medicine becomes fashionable there is a tendency to use it indiscriminately.<An hour’s moving about in the sun does more to cure weakness or even anaemia than a whole arsenal of tonics. My advice is that medicines should not be used unless it is absolutely impossible to avoid them; and this “absolutely impossible” should be very strict. Nature is the all-round Healer. 

Sri Aurobindo: Medicine is necessary for our bodies in disease only because our bodies have learned the art of not getting well without medicines. Even so, one sees often that the moment Nature chooses for recovery is that in which the life is abandoned as hopeless by the doctors. It is not the medicine that cures so much as the patient’s faith in the doctor and the medicine. Both are a clumsy substitute for the natural faith in one’s own self-power which they have themselves destroyed. For nearly forty years I believed them when they said I was weakly in constitution, suffered constantly from the smaller and the greater ailments and mistook this curse for a burden that Nature had laid upon me. When I renounced the aid of medicines, then they began to depart from me like disappointed parasites. Then only I understood what a mighty force was the natural health within me and how much mightier yet the Will and Faith exceeding mind which God meant to be the divine support of our life in this body. Drugs often cure the body when they do not merely trouble or poison it, but only if their physical attack on the disease is supported by the force of the spirit; if that force can be made to work freely, drugs are at once superfluous.It should take long for self-cure to replace medicine, because of the fear, self-distrust and unnatural physical reliance on drugs which Medical Science has taught to our minds and bodies and made our second nature.

The Mother: The sovereignty of mind has made humanity the slave of doctors and their remedies. And the result is that illnesses are increasing in number and seriousness. The only true salvation for men is to escape from mental domination by opening to the Divine Influence. We cannot counteract the harm done by mental faith in the need for drugs by any external measures. Only by escaping from the mental prison and emerging consciously into the light of the spirit, by a conscious union with the Divine, can we enable Him to give back to us the balance and health we have lost. 

The Mother: If you can face suffering with courage, endurance, an unshakable faith in the divine Grace, if instead of shunning it when it comes to you, you can enter into it with this will, this aspira-tion to go through it and find the luminous truth, the unvary-ing delight which is at the core of all things, the door of pain is often more direct, more immediate than that of satisfaction or contentment. . . . Pain brings us back to a deeper truth by forcing us to con-centrate in order to be able to bear, to face this thing that crushes us. It is through pain that one most easily recovers the true strength, when one is strong. It is through pain that one most easily recovers the true faith, the faith in something that is above and beyond all pain. . . . To seek suffering and pain is a morbid attitude which must be avoided; but to run away from it out of forgetful-ness, through a superficial, frivolous movement, in a spirit of diversion, is cowardice. When pain comes, it comes to teach us something. The quicker we learn it, the more the need for pain diminishes; and when we know the secret, it will no longer be possible to suffer, for that secret reveals to us the reason, the cause, the origin of suffering, and the way to pass beyond it. The secret is to emerge from the ego, out of its prison, unite ourselves with the Divine, merge into Him, not to allow anything to separate us from Him. Then, once one has discovered this secret and realises it in one’s being, pain loses its justification and suffering disappears. It is an all-powerful remedy, not only in the deeper parts of the being, in the soul, in the spiritual consciousness, but also in life and in the body. There is no illness, no disorder that can resist if this secret is discovered and put into practice not only in the higher parts of the being, but in the cells of the body. If one knows how to teach the cells the splendour that lies within them, if one knows how to make them understand the reality by which they exist, which gives them being, then they too enter the total harmony, and the physical disorder which caused the illness vanishes as do all other disorders of the being. But for that, you must not be cowardly or fearful. When physical disorder attacks you, you must not be afraid, you must not run away from it; you must face it with courage, calmness, confidence, with the certitude that illness is a false-hood and that if you turn entirely, in full confidence, with a complete quietude to the divine Grace, It will settle in these cells as It is established in the depths of  the being, and the cells themselves will share in the eternal Truth and Delight.
The Mother: This delight, this wonderful laughter that dis-solves every shadow, every pain, every suffering! You only have to go deep enough within yourself to find the inner Sun, to let yourself be flooded by it; and then there is nothing but a cascade of harmonious, luminous, sunlit laughter, which leaves no room for any shadow or pain. In fact, even the greatest difficulties, even the greatest sorrows, even the greatest physical pain… if you can look at them from that standpoint, from there, you see the unreality of the difficulty, the unreality of the sorrow, the unreality of the pain — and there is nothing but a joyful and luminous vibration. In fact, this is the most powerful way of dissolving difficulties, overcoming sorrows and removing pain. The first two are relatively easy — I say relatively — the last one is more difficult because we are in the habit of considering the body and its feelings to be extremely concrete and positive; but it is the same thing, it is simply because we have not learned, we are not in the habit of regarding our body as something fluid, plastic, uncertain, malleable. We have not learned to bring into it  his luminous laughter that dissolves all darkness, all difficulty, all discord, all disharmony, everything that jars, that weeps and wails. And this Sun, this Sun of divine laughter, is at the centre of all things, the truth of all things. We must learn to see it, to feel it, to live it.