Scientists today appreciate the wisdom behind traditional practices. ‘New-agers’ seek health by embracing these.
While most resort to these from a compulsion to be copy-cats (Madonna does it), science explains the appeal behind these habits and why these reward us with good health.
lighting an agarbatti, for instance, promises instant peace. Research proves the wafting fragrance silences the mind, preparing it for concentration.
Why? Because the olfactory is the oldest, most primitive amongst our senses. Its response to stimuli is instantaneous and potent.
Or take the age-old practice of bathing before meals, never after it. As we grapple with time-management we can’t be bothered with such observances.
Pre-meal bathing ensures crucial hygiene before a meal. But post-meal bathing redirects the blood flow to the skin instead of to the digestive organs, cramping their efficiency and nutrient absorption.
Cross-legged sitting
Groaning but determined foreigners
pay in dollars and pounds to learn to sit cross-legged. But Indian
kids grow up sniffing at this custom.
Sitting cross-legged keeps leg muscles supple and retains the elasticity and strength of tendons at the ankles. Renew your contact with the floor to gauge how stiff you’ve turned.
Flexible legs are important props for back and abdominal muscles. Their limpness result in spinal mis-adventures and bloated waist-lines.
Cross-legged sitting blocks gravitational flow of blood towards legs, redirecting this towards digestive organs and higher centres like the brain.
This stokes metabolism and digestion, axing their sensitivity to stress, which nags as flatulence, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers. As spine strengthens, posture improves naturally.
Squatting toilets
Researchers assure the old-fashioned
Indian toilets, requiring the full squat, facilitate the best elimination.
This superbly works out to the entire range of muscles, including tiny facial ones. Through right pressure on the intestinal loop, it smoothens excretion.
Having disconnected from this habit, people pay gyms to relearn this squat, toasted as the ‘king of all exercises’. Those who cannot (and most of civilized humanity belong here) should brace themselves for a future ruined by a weak back, hips, legs and ankles.
Meal-time prayers
Nuclear families, TV meals, eating
on the run and official lunches have made this habit, encouraged by all
religions, extinct.
Even sheared of its spiritual overtones,
the very act of looking appreciatively at an attractively arranged platter
triggers the release of digestive juices.
Visual appreciation sets off the mouth’s salivary secretion, which breaks down simple starches.
This appreciation impacts the brain’s satiation centre, encouraging mindful eating so you eat the right amount instead of gobbling blindly as happens with the bored, or overweight or stress-hit.
Most degenerative diseases result from such mismanaged dietary habits. Mindful eating, initiated by appreciation or a prayer, encourages the parasympathetic nervous system, conducive for effective digestion.
Stress, instead, clamps it down to rev up the sympathetic nervous system.
Kneeling down
Every religion includes the act
of kneeling. Apart from reverence, this position promotes the same effect
on the parasympathetic nervous system (because of the pressure it applies
on the baro-receptors of certain arteries) and digestion as the above practices.
The blood, blocked from legs, is redirected to the digestive and nervous system.
It is calming. It powers the supporting muscles on the hips and back, makes the ankle tendons elastic, strengthens the delicate but load-bearing knees, straightens the spine naturally, and is preventive in hernia and prostatis for men and menstrual disorders for women.
Shameem Akthar is a yoga acharya
and NLP master-trainer