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.