Understanding Cancer: Sadhguru Responds from a Yogic Perspective

Every minute in the United States, there are three new cancer cases, and in that same minute, one death is caused by cancer. In 2016 alone there were an estimated 1,685,210 new cancer cases and 595,690 cancer deaths. The National Cancer Institute estimates overall annual costs for cancer treatment at $107 billion, and it estimates $37 billion for direct medical costs, $11 billion for morbidity costs and $59 billion for mortality costs. Isha Institute's Sadhguru, yogi, mystic and one of the foremost authorities on yoga, looks at how the yogic system views cancer and what can be done to prevent the disease.

"If you have read what has been written about cancer, you may have noticed that opinions and concepts seem to change frequently, sometimes dramatically," said Sadhguru. "But the fundamental physiology, the chemistry, and the very basis of your existence has not changed. So why is it that these concepts keep changing? So, rather than reading everything from the outside and getting confused as to what is true and what is false, if you start listening to your body and gain a deeper understanding and insight of your own system, you would be able to handle it more efficiently.

"We are looking at it from an experiential perspective, because what is you is everything. There are millions of people right now going through different states of cancer. These things occur for a variety of reasons and all of us are a part of it. It is not just external chemical influences that are acting on you. Your body is the biggest chemical factory. If you do not handle this factory properly, it produces the wrong kind of chemicals and freaks out on you in some way."

Yogic perspective of cancer

In yoga, we do not look at cancer as different types, said Sadhguru. Where and how it manifests in a particular individual may depend on various aspects of one's physiology, genetics, lifestyle, diet and so on, but we always see the root cause as an imbalance in what is called the pranamaya kosha, or the energy body, he said.

Fundamentally, the yogic system looks at physiology as five different layers, said Sadhguru. We will look at the first three; the other two are not concerned with health. The first layer is called the annamaya kosha or the food body. The food that you eat has become this body, isn't it? If you do not eat anything, this body will dissipate. So, the physical body is referred to as the food body, he said.

Until recently, medical science was only involved with the food body, or annamaya kosha, said Sadhguru. It did not focus on anything else, he said.

"[Medical science] thought they could handle all the infections in the world, but then they found they were unable to do anything about chronic ailments like blood pressure and diabetes," said Sadhguru. "This is because they were looking at the food body, which is only an external manifestation."

Within this is the manomaya kosha, which means the mental body, said Sadhguru. This mental body and physical body can function only because there is an energy body. The work of yoga is fundamentally on the level of the energy body or the pranamaya kosha. From the yogic perspective, cancer and other disturbances or diseases that the system manufactures from within are caused by an imbalance in the energy body, he said.

Cancerous cells are present in everyone's body, but having a few cancerous cells that are disorganized will not affect your life or health in any way. However, if you create certain situations within the energy body, they organize themselves – they go from petty crime to organized crime, he said.

Due to certain "blanks" that happen in the pranamaya kosha, either because of attitude, lifestyle, food, or so many other reasons, the energy body gets affected. If the flow of energy is not proper in certain areas of the body, cancerous cells will generally choose those places to grow and fester. When it comes to chronic diseases, the root cause is always in the energy body. Once the energy body is disturbed, it will naturally manifest both physiologically and psychologically, said Sadhguru.

For example, we generally find that for people who smoke regularly, their breathing is very different from nonsmokers. Because of this restricted way of breathing, naturally the energy levels in that area become low and that becomes a place cancer is attracted to, he said.

The energy body-health connection

If your energy body is in full flow and properly balanced, there cannot be any disease either in your physical body or your mental body. People come to us with asthma, for example, and we give them a certain practice that may release them from the condition. Someone else comes for diabetes, and we give that person the same practice, which works for them, too. This is because we are not treating the disease as such. The disease is only a manifestation of the disturbance that exists in the energy body, said Sadhguru.

Fundamentally, yoga is not a form of treatment. This is a way of balancing your inner energies. We never really treat the physical or mental body in that sense. Irrespective of what the disease is, we only aim at balancing and activating the energy body, he said.

Noteworthy:

"Rather than reading everything from the outside and getting confused as to what is true and what is false, if you start listening to your body and gain a deeper understanding and insight of your own system, you would be able to handle it more efficiently." – Sadhguru.