INTRODUCTION

You can live in your body without really knowing it. You can take it for granted until it becomes sick or injured. On the other hand, if you radically accept your body and take care of it, you open up the lines of communication between your body, heart and mind. You can choose to experience your body as your home and begin to liberate yourself from the illusion of a separateness between your heart, mind and body.

All healing requires a multi-disciplinary, holistic approach. For a healthy self-image, to age healthily, for healthy back, joints, digestion, elimination, lungs, blood, skin, immunity and a sharp, attentive mind, we need to be less fragmented. To heal is to be whole. Healing here is radical because it goes to the radix or root of our suffering – the beliefs, attitudes and emotions which are the foundations of the pain we carry. When we bring layers of our inner world into our awareness, they no longer control us. Reconnecting in this way, with cut off parts of ourselves, creates more wholeness, more health and even more holiness!

This healing empowers you when places the skills necessary for healing into your own hands and provides simple practices that can help you support injured cells on the road to recovery. The practices must release the energy of healing to touch and positively affect the inner workings of your cells where the information, action, power and communication of your body does the work of life.

All deep healing is in present time, although you can feel as if it ‘reaches back in time’ to heal past wounds. The tools for healing are simple, powerful and available to everyone. They reside within you, and have been created as part of your genetic code. They are a natural property of the intrinsic workings of every cell in your body and address the mind-body at every level it exists at: molecular, biochemical, nutritional, physical, emotional, psychological, energetic and spiritual.

There’s no such thing as a ‘magic wand’ cure. The ‘lone cure’ mentality is a mirage that modern medicine has brainwashed us into hoping for. However, the human body is far too complex, with bad backs, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis (to name a few) or any degenerative disease being much too stubborn to be cured by a single remedy. That is why modern medicine has failed to achieve anything close to a true cure for pain, arthritis or any other chronic disease. The holistic approach, on the other hand, is why Eastern wisdom practices (such as yoga and ayurveda) have been so successful.

Structure dictates function. You can begin to study your body in two main ways. The first, called anatomy, looks at how your body is made: its shape and structure. The second, called physiology, is how the body works. It invariaby comes down to this when working with yoga and ayurveda. I encourage you to acquaint yourself experientially with the dynamic aspects of the structure and function of your body, rather than the mere description of its anatomical and physiological features. Change your posture and the way you breathe, feel, function and think to stay strong and healthy, rehabilitate and renew yourself.

By combining healing at every level with outstanding natural remedies and practices, into a synergistic program, you can achieve the cure you so desperately need. The combination of strategies will not just put pain and ageing on ‘pause’. It will actually switch on the repair button that will start to rebuild and regenerate your body.

We can look at the human body in different ways. Modern medicine has taken the approach of understanding the body by studying its individual parts (molecules, cells, tissues, organs, etc.) in a highly specialised manner. This effort has provided humankind with enormous benefits such as antibiotics, advanced surgical techniques and molecular medicine. Another approach is to view the body as a whole and study its holistic interaction with the environment, internally and externally. This is the approach of wisdom practices and ancient systems of medicine such as Yoga, Siddha, Ayurveda, and Traditional Chinese Medicine, which have benefited billions of people for thousands of years.

This book is presented to integarate these ways and give you a glimpse into your body as your home, and to help you become better acquainted with it.

Your goal will be to develop and apply the world’s premiere nondrug, nonsurgical, healing protocol that combines the top clinically proven remedies from both ancient times and the twenty-first century, into a step by step plan that multiplies its therapeutic benefits to stop the destruction of your body and activate its repair. You can be highly motivated because your life is at stake.

I love the work that I do, and consider it a joy and a privilege to be able to engage with you in our ongoing healing relationship and spreading the outcome of this work even further. I look forward to working with you and to helping you achieve your health goals for yourelf and those of your students, clients and patients.

Although these notes cover a wide area, the presentation is essentially brief, simple and to the point. However, these notes cannot replace lectures and the discussions during which further clarification, elaboration and interrelationship between various concepts could be presented.

With my unlimited blessings for your health and success,

SHANTI GOWANS