Health and Healing Summary

Read more about Health and Healing from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

How to Cultivate Health and Healing?

What are the Prerequisites?

Health naturally depends upon the sadhana.

Whatever the effort, whatever the difficulty, whatever time it takes, whatever number of lives, you must know that all this doesn't matter: you KNOW you ARE the Master, that the Master and you are the same. To know it INTEGRALLY, and nothing must belie it. Health depends on their inner life (an intermediate inner life, not the deepest), it's because of this.

If one has the healing capacity, there is the capacity to remedy wear and tear.

For the spiritual life to give and not to demand is the rule. The sadhak however can ask for the Divine Force to aid him in keeping his health or recovering it if he does that as part of his sadhana so that his body may be able and fit for the spiritual life and a capable instrument for the Divine Work.

How Does the Physical Healing Happen?

It readily takes in all kinds of suggestions and these can rapidly change and almost remould its condition. Depression and discouragement have a very adverse effect; they cut out holes in it, as it were, in its very stuff, render it weak and unresisting and open to hostile attacks an easy passage.

How to Deal with Pain?

First point: do not stress the pain by telling yourself, "Oh, how painful! Oh, this pain is unbearable! Oh, it is being worse and worse, I shall never be able to bear it", etc., all this sort of thing. The more you go on thinking like this and feeling like this and the more your attention is concentrated on it, the pain increases amazingly. Second point: as I said, it depends on your habits. If you know how to concentrate, to be quiet, you try to realise within yourself a state of peace or attempt to enter into a conscious contact with a force of peace. Suppose you succeed more or less completely. Then, if you can draw the peace into yourself and bring it down into the solar plexus―for we are not talking of inner states but of your physical body―and from there direct it very calmly, very slowly I might say, but very persistently, towards the place where the pain is more or less sharp, and fix it there, this is very good. But if by widening this movement you can add a sort of mental formation with a little life in it―if by my aspiration, my concentration, I can bring into the cells of the body the consciousness of this sole Reality, all disorder must necessarily cease…

Useful Practices

To separate yourself from the thing and call in the Mother's force to cure it [is the Yogic method]—or else to use your own will force with faith in the power to heal, having the support of the Mother's force behind you. If you cannot use either of these methods then you must rely on the action of the medicine.

Remain quiet, within, concentrated only on receiving strength and health, confident that the Divine is with you all the time, and you will soon be all right.

Through Receptivity

It depends on the part. The method is almost the same for all parts of the being. To begin with, the first condition: to remain as quiet as possible. You may notice that in the different parts of your being, when something comes and you do not receive it, this produces a shrinking—there is something which hardens in the vital, the mind or the body. There is a stiffening and this hurts, one feels a mental, vital or physical pain. So, the first thing is to put one's will and relax this shrinking, as one does a twitching nerve or a cramped muscle; you must learn how to relax, be able to relieve this tension in whatever part of the being it may be.

Through Faith

It must be an integral faith and it must be absolute. And it must be of the right kind, not merely a force of mental thought or will, but something more and deeper.

Through Knowledge

Knowledge, when it goes to the root of our troubles, has in itself a marvellous healing-power as it were. As soon as you touch the quick of the trouble, as soon as you, diving down and down, get at what really ails you, the pain disappears as though by a miracle. Unflinching courage to reach true knowledge is therefore the very essence of yoga. No lasting superstructure can be erected except on a solid basis of true Knowledge.

Through Calm Presence

Suppose there is a pain, some sign or other that something in the body is out of order. In the consciousness—in the consciousness—you are absolutely indifferent, which means that whether it's life or death, disease or health, there is equality; but if the body reacts according to its old habit, "What should be done to get over it?" If, on the other hand, the cells have learned their lesson and say right away, "Lord, Your presence" (without words—the attitude), pfft! the thing goes.

You cannot imagine the immense flood of force that is at your disposal! And generally you do not feel it even.

Through Formation

When one has a thought, a well-made mental formation which goes out of you, it becomes an independent entity and continues on its way and it does that for which it was made. It continues to act independently. That is why one must be on your guard. If one have made such a formation and it has gone out, it has gone out to do its work; and after a time one finds out that it was perhaps not a very happy thing to have a thought like that, that this formation was not very beneficial; now that it has gone out, it is very difficult for you to get hold of it again. One must have considerable occult knowledge. It has gone out and is moving on its way…

Through Sincerity and Aspiration

One must sincerely want to be healed, for otherwise it does not work. If one wants to have the experience solely for the experience's sake and then the next minute one returns to what one was before, this does not work.

Common Errors

Overreliance on Medical Science

No external measure can enable us to react against the harm caused by mental faith in the necessity of drugs.

Read more about Health and Healing from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.