Weather predictors have their share of failures, which has prompted continuous efforts to create weather tools. As early as the mid-17th century, an Italian scientist by the name of Evangelista Torricelli invented a device called the barometer. This device measures changes in the atmospheric pressure. The rise and fall of atmospheric pressure helps meteorologists predict the weather and helps us better understand the nature and movement of storms.
Similarly, our bodies can serve as a tool to understand our thoughts and emotions. All three are interconnected. Huffpost author Debbie Hampton writes: “It’s been shown over and over again that just thinking about something can cause your brain to release neurotransmitters, chemical messengers that allow it to communicate with parts of itself and your nervous system. Neurotransmitters control virtually all of your body’s functions, from hormones to digestion to feeling happy, sad, or stressed. Studies have shown that thoughts alone can improve vision, fitness, and strength.”
Sadhguru takes us further into understanding the basis of our physical self.
Sadhguru: Your body is like a barometer. If you know how to read it, it can tell you everything about you and the world around you. The body never lies. So in yoga, we learn to trust the body. We transform the physical body from a series of compulsions of flesh, blood, and hormones into a conscious process, a powerful instrument of perception and knowing. If you know how to read the body, it can tell you your potential, your limitations, even your past, present, and future. That is why the fundamental yoga starts with the physical body.
It is as simple as this. The more you know about your telephone or any other gadget, the better you can use it. A few years ago, the cellphone companies conducted a survey, and found that ninety-seven percent of the people were using only seven percent of a phone’s capabilities. I am not talking about the smartphone here, but the “dumb” one! Even with that simple gizmo, people were using only seven percent.
Now, as we have already said, this body of yours is the ultimate machine, the perfect state-of-the-art gadget. What percent of this machine do you think you are employing?
Well below one percent! To conduct your life in the material world, to ensure your survival, you do not need even one percent of the body’s capabilities. We are doing all kinds of trivial things with it because right now our whole perception of life is limited to the physical nature of existence. But your body is capable of perceiving the whole universe. If you prepare it properly, it can grasp everything in this existence, because all that happens to this existence is happening, in some way, to this body.
All physical creation is fundamentally a certain perfection of geometry. Without geometry, no physical form is possible. If we get the geometry of the human body right, it becomes capable of reflecting the larger geometry of the cosmos within, and making the cosmic available for our experience. In other words, the human body is capable of downloading the entire cosmos.
─Excerpt from Sadhguru’s book, Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy, pages 103–4
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