A Road to Cancer Recovery

Many new practitioners of yoga and meditation begin to notice changes in themselves, whether it is relief from physical ailments, reduced stress levels, increased mental clarity and emotional balance, or just greater enjoyment and fulfillment in daily life. Often these changes are recognized gradually over time, perhaps even pointed out first by friends and family members close to them. However, for others, the changes experienced after beginning a new practice can be both immediate and quite dramatic.

Below, Sadhguru discusses cancer as a disease of modern society, and he offers simple steps we can take to orient our systems to live naturally healthy and cancer-free:

Sadhguru: “Cancer is not really an ailment in the standard understanding of what an ailment is. In some way, the cells in our own body are turning against us; it could be stimulated or instigated from outside situations. The number of stimulations or instigations from the outside has considerably increased in these so-called “modern societies,” and there are innumerable reasons why this happens. To look at it in a very fundamental way, it is a bad organization of the five elements – earth, water, fire, wind and space. The way we consume food, drink water, and the type of air that we breathe are affecting our system and forcing it to turn against itself. Genetic factors may set a predisposition, but it is not the actual cause of cancer.

Reversing this trend is not an easy process because society is lunging towards a certain type of lifestyle that is bound to disturb the human system in many different ways. Because of the use of chemicals and preservatives in food substances, and the air and water we have poisoned, the incidence of cancer is only geared to rise. One simple thing we can do is move into more natural atmospheres where we breathe fresh air, drink clean water from nature – not from the bottle – and eat food that is grown from land around us. In the yogic system, it was always said that you must only eat food from land near you, within a walking distance of one day. Today, such a thing is not possible. We are very proud of our apples from New Zealand and Australia, our grapes from China, something else is coming from somewhere else. We are proud of the way we have built our market capabilities. It is wonderful on one level, but it has its consequences.  

Medical science has found many solutions, but it does not matter how many solutions they find, there will be new problems because that is the nature of life. If you try to block something one way, it will find another way and another way. More and more complex forms of cancer will come as we learn to treat it with medication in its existing forms. This is something modern societies have to live with because being modern has become synonymous with being unnatural. If you live naturally, as nature dictates, you are considered archaic. Only if you are completely divorced from the natural process of life are you considered modern. The increase in the number of people being diagnosed with cancer is in part due to more efficient detection. Earlier, many people died without diagnosis. Still, until we change this fundamental idea of modernity, which works against our own well-being, the rise of cancer will continue.”