Читать книгу Yoga Therapy as a Whole-Person Approach to Health онлайн

4 страница из 110

The second part of the book describes four clusters of non-communicable illnesses which account for approximately 80 percent of deaths: chronic respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, and cancer. This section provides evidence-based descriptions of what a holistic yoga therapy approach to these problems can offer. The most beautiful part of this section of the book is the personal account of Majewski’s experience with her cancer treatment, which was effective in a medical sense, but which left her without a map for many of the exhausting, painful, and debilitating sequelae. This is important material for medical professionals to read because it details the patient experience of being left resourceless at the conclusion of the medical treatments, just when a person is at their most exhausted, depleted, and dis-spirited.

This inattention to the psychological side of illness, to the dis-ease which is the relationship every patient has to their illness, is a problem that appears wherever clinicians’ fear starts running the show from the sidelines. It is very tempting in these circumstances to simply throw science and technology at the illness. This writer saw many similar examples of this in the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It may seem surprising to some that fear of cancer still exerts such an influence on treatment, but the fear of disembodiment, as Patañjali tells us, is ubiquitous in humans and the ultimate source of all our fears. The yoga system, which is about healing relationship at every level of practice from the first item in the list of limbs of yoga, non-violence, provides the ultimate permanent freedom from fear (for both patients and clinicians).