Health and Appearance. How Your Brain Plays a Role.
Dear Friend,
Your health and appearance firstly depend on your genetic inheritance from your parents. But afterwards depends on what you do with what Nature gave you, plus the effects of your environment.
In Ayurvedic medicine, the Nature part is called your Prakriti and the Nurture/environmental part is called your Vikriti.
With stress, diet and ageing, the balance of your Prakriti start point becomes the imbalance of your current Vikriti state, with all the implications that this has for your health and appearance.
Ayurvedic medicine aims to try and restore balance using the pathway of mostly diet, on the basis that you are what you eat.
This may have only partial success however, because food and diet only make up one-fifth of who you are. The fuller picture of who you are is described by the 5 koshas or yogic sheaths of the human body (shown below):
Food and diet supplies the most material or grossest part of you, which is your physical body - anna-maya kosha, literally means ‘food sheath’.
But, equally important are the increasingly more subtle layers of which you are made, which are your Breath Body, Emotional Body, Mental Body and Bliss Body.
These relate, in turn, to your purposeful daily activity, emotional life, self-perception and ultimately your capacity for enjoyment and fulfilment.
Your daily kundalini meditation represents a top-down approach to your health and appearance (and ultimately, your longevity), as apposed to a bottom-up approach starting from your physical (anna-maya kosha).
With the top-down approach, your start point is ‘pure consciousness’ (thoughtless awareness) which gradually develops as your kundalini opens out more and more petals of your Sahasrara chakra, thereby ‘enlightening’ your brain (kundalini neuroplasticity effect)
Your ‘enlightened’ brain has at the centre of it the yogic bindu-sarvananda-maya (‘She is the dot which is joy-giving’) by which your ananda-maya kosha (bliss body) is developed.
This very subtle process then automatically influences the lower layers of who you are, right down to the vibrational effect on your physical body including your face.
From a biological perspective, we know that the human body does an on-going ‘self-refresh’. The cells of different parts of your body refresh themselves at different rates, as shown in the table below from the bionumbers.org website:
A good analogy of how the subtlety of your ‘enlightened’ brain begins to permeate the grosser aspects of yourself (right down to cell replacement) and give shape to them, is the way that a magnetic field (subtle) influences the shape that iron filings take (gross).
The closest hint that science is beginning to open the door to this knowledge already known about in yoga, is in a book written by Sally Adee, a science writer and journalist, called We Are Electric about electrical signalling in the body (Read Overview).
So now you know. You could get your glow up from winning the lottery, finding the love of your life or getting a work promotion, but the surest and deepest makeover you can do for yourself is with your daily kundalini meditation. More below.
Also below: why scent matters; and, why practicing some time-out can help you.
Best wishes
P.
PS.
Moon Calendar (at end) this coming week: Mon. 16th - Saptami (Good week ahead); Tue. 17th - Durgashtami ( small defeats the Big); Wed. 18th - Navami (Creative inspiration); Fri. 20th - Prabodhini Ekadashi (fears disappear in the light of awareness).
