Make Exercise A Meditation: Mastering Your Breath
Hardcover or E-book
by Oscar Ichazo (Author)
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Today there is an abundance of literature about exercise which aims only at physical performance and which considers the human organism as being like a machine that has to be exercised; or, to say in other words, physical exercise is considered as the necessary movement all machinery needs in order to be in the optimum condition of functioning. In this way, we make of our body a gross material image that, as a machine, has to puff, sweat, get over-heated, and exhausted—all as part of “high performance.” However, when physical exercise is performed to awaken the organism, it will produce a flash of vital energy through all the organs, glands and tissues. With this we obtain the main purpose of physical exercise for a living organism: revitalization. We tend to forget that one of the faculties of a living organism is its ability to restore and regenerate itself continuously from the process of constant decay that every living organism suffers. We are not machines but organisms, and simple analogies between machines and organisms are destined to miss the point. As a living organism, our body is an integrality, and its optimum functioning can only be measured, not in terms of performance, like a machine, but in terms of health, as an organism. Therefore, the problem of health then, is to know the balance between these two points: decay and revitalization. This revitalization, so needed in our technological culture, can happen only if we follow the laws of how our vitality can be promoted in our organism, and not by a casual coordination of movements that in the long term means nothing. The point is that we have to promote the circulation of our vital energy as an everyday business, in the same way that we have an everyday need of food and nourishment. So, exercise has to be taken as seriously as our own diet, and just as we would avoid “junk food” and empty calories, in our routine exercise we should practice what promotes life and health in us.
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