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There is one subject we spoke about yesterday regarding stress management. Only āsanas can help us, but do not always change your asana practice. Once we go through our Yoga and Daily Life book, which is very systematic, we regenerate the whole body system. Nowadays many people have a problem, and that's called stress. With stress, we make a lot of mistakes. Teachers have stress and make mistakes in the school class. People working in offices have stress and also make mistakes. In the family system, if one person is full of this stress, then the whole family is disturbed. Also, people who practice yoga have stress because they do not practice systematically. We have to follow our body. Do we know how the body is maintaining its biorhythm, how the body is managing the distribution of our nutrition? Everything should be balanced. When we eat something, we have taste in the mouth. That's called jñānendriya, the sense of taste. This svādindriya, we call this svādindriya, the taste sense, is the cause of many illnesses in the body, stress in the body, etc. Something which is very tasteful—let's say most people like ice cream, or someone likes sweets or chocolate, someone likes chilies or cherries—but this taste is only within the mouth. When it goes a little down the channel, what we call the elementary channel after the throat, after the vocal cord, there is no more taste. If you want to taste afterwards, it is vomiting. The stomach does not care about the taste, but it cares about the quality of the nourishment. Now, 80% to 95% of our disturbances in the body—you may call it illness, body pain, problems in the joints, kidneys and livers, and many, many things—happen because the intestine tells us that you did not supply something which is good for the body, and that is a problem. So, if we eat, we should not only like the taste, but it should be tasteful and healthy. The body needs proper nourishment. We people who live in civilized society—meaning we are living in such a civilization—have lost nature. According to yoga, according to Āyurveda, according to naturopathy, if you are ill, then the first thing is no more eating. Even if you have flu or infections, they come mostly because of a lack of immunity. Even the animals in the forest live according to their nature. When they are ill, they don't eat. Also, your dog or cat will not eat, but it is a house pet. It is exactly like the house person. Your cat, your dog have the same illness which you have. You are the guilty one because you do not let them be in nature and natural. For example, a wild cat in the forest: if it didn't get anything to eat for one or two days, and if someone is passing by, that cat will run very quickly. It has energy. But your house cat, if it can't eat for two or three days, it can't walk because it took our habit. People who live in the forest or in the mountains, in the Alps, High Tatras, etc., have different energy than people who live in Martin. So, first of all, we shall immediately change our way of nourishing. If you are old—90 years, 100 years, 80 years—it is not old. You are now in the best time of life. If you change your diet completely, that's called body regeneration. You will lose the kilos, you will dream of the ice cream, but you can have a lot of ice here on the outside. So try. Besides this, practice yoga exercise. And now, also, if you cannot practice systematically, step by step, then you harm your ligaments, your joints, your spine, and your muscles—many things. It is like you give the car forward gear, and you are at speed on the highway, and you give the reverse gear immediately. What will happen? That's why, thanks to God, the engineers were very clever that the aeroplane doesn't have reverse gear. If a pilot is a little bit not in order, similarly, we should take care of our body. In Yoga in Daily Life, we concentrated, we took the postures. All yoga is yoga. Śiva is the author of yoga. But we changed many things. In the name of yoga, we changed many different things, and that's why we are not successful. Take the Ardha-matsyendrāsana posture, for example. First learn it for two months, three months, four months, one year. And then you should sit in Ardha-matsyendrāsana for ten minutes, or fifteen minutes, or half an hour. Then it has an effect. You may practice five postures in one hour, but systematically and remain in the posture. That's called āsana. And that's called Sukhāsana, and you feel pleasant in every posture. So let's make today's saṅkalpa on the day of Mahāprabhujī's Mahāsamādhi. A saṅkalpa is not a promise, because if you promise and you don't do it, then it's like a sin. So we don't promise; we will try. We make a saṅkalpa that we will try. Yes, because otherwise it's a bad habit. So we will try slowly, slowly to come to the yoga and life system. Now is Christmas time; it's a very dangerous time. In India, it is Dīvālī time, Dīvālī and Holī. And here is Christmas, and what we call Easter. Christmas is not the day for feeding the wrong way. So, it depends on you. If we practice systematically—āsanas—in a Slovakian science magazine, there was an article by Dr. Chielko. Without his knowing, a few other doctors were making research on Yoga in Daily Life. What Chielko saw, he made a picture with colored pictures. For example, Bhujaṅgāsana: how many seconds to slowly come into Bhujaṅgāsana? Five seconds. Take five seconds to come to Bhujaṅgāsana, and stay fifteen seconds. And again, come up for five seconds slowly, or five seconds coming up, fifteen seconds remaining, and ten seconds slowly coming down. This shows that for five seconds we come up, the muscles have tension, then blood goes out, and then you remain for fifteen seconds. Within seconds, you can balance your muscles, and after that, no more. If you remain more, then circulation, blood will try to come in. It's okay, it's good, but it is not according to the principle of the āsana. And so, in ten seconds, you slowly, slowly come down. So, there are two phases. It takes time to bring the blood out of the muscle and remain there. The muscles now need the blood; there is a tension there. But with the stretching, we push all the blood out, and when we remain there, it is like we are very hungry and we are looking for the food, and before preparing the bread, we take it in our mouth. So after we let the blood come out, back to the muscles, that creates energy in the body. And the restless and bad energy is gone. Dr. Čelko has written very nicely; that magazine you should find out again when we will speak. We make experiments always with the holding. So slowly, slowly, blood goes out. When we make it quickly, it doesn't function more. But when we hold long and then we release, the blood runs quickly. The speed of the blood coming into the muscles again is one of the best ways to gain health. So it doesn't matter if it is our foot soles, ankle joints, calf muscles, thigh muscles, or hip muscles, side muscles. We should know this. You have many times heard our teachers giving lessons about physiology, anatomy, the body anatomy from Vienna, and then more others also, physiotherapists like Dr. Martin, and now we have Pushpa and many. They had two, three years of training to know the anatomy. According to that, if we practice āsanas also, we can remove or heal many, many illnesses. That's what people said: how through yoga we can cure cancer. How? Control your tongue. Taste. That's it. So there are many, many things. And go to nature. The body is nature. The body does not adopt the chemical, but the body adopts natural things. After that, when the muscles get good exercise and blood circulation, then we need the fine techniques, fine practice, and that's called prāṇāyāma. We have in our Yoga in Daily Life book very systematic prāṇāyāmas. After this prāṇāyāma, according to that time, then either relaxation or meditation. It is like this now in the whole world. Many, many people begin to come to the yoga exercises. Thanks to the Prime Minister of India, Mr. Modi, through his work he made yoga a world yoga, what we call the Yoga Day, the World Yoga Day. You can't imagine how many millions of people began to practice yoga. Some people, the Muslims, they said no, we don't want to practice yoga, but now there are more numbers of practitioners of yoga in the Middle East because they need health. Similarly in many, many ways. Now the Christians also try to practice yoga, but they give the name Christian yoga. It's okay, no problem. You can say yoga in their life. Others say Śivānanda yoga, yoga, yoga nandava yoga, etc. But yoga is yoga. Religion is religion. You say Christian religion, Hindu religion, Muslim religion. Why do we have the first name? Reality is the "so." For our identity, in our identity, we are calling this and this and that. So you are a name called Joseph, or Patricia. But Józef is Józef, man, and Patricia is a woman, also finished, human. So, either male or female, it's a human. Yes. So, similarly, yoga is yoga; it's from Lord Śiva. Then you will see that your health will become good. It takes time for a tree to grow to give an apple. It takes time for the wheat to grow, at least three months, to get the corn. It takes time to regenerate our body again. So the body is nature, and we belong to nature, and we should not go against nature. Mahāprabhujī said: if you go against nature, you will suffer the consequences from nature. So we have to come to nature, and that's what we spoke about yesterday about Patañjali's yoga, the Patañjali Yoga Sūtra. This is for us the Holy Bible, this is Patañjali. But before Patañjali, there was also yoga. Yoga is not limited to Patañjali, but he put the things together in different chapters. So, first step: now we change our food. No alcohol. If it's possible, no cold drinks. No eggs, meat, or fish. Good, clean, nice cow's milk. God's milk, sheep's milk, mother's milk. Vegetation milk, like coconut milk. There's a different kind of milk. So milk is good, but it has limitations. Some have allergies, cannot digest milk; don't do it. And exercise. Reduce your diet 60 or 40 percent, finished. Though it is very good and tasteful—Slovakians like halušky, then they eat with a double stomachful—so try it, everybody try. And then systematically: Yoga in Daily Life, prāṇāyāmas, meditation, mantra, and then thinking positive. There are different kinds of kleśas, and different—Patañjali has very clearly talked about this subject, so next time we will come and do. So practice Yoga in Daily Life according to Yoga in Daily Life, and do it slowly. The minimum time that you can spend for your good health, your mental and stress management, is a minimum of one and a half hours of exercise every day: āsanas, prāṇāyāmas, and a little meditation. Give up your sleep for one and a half or two hours. So either give up the sleep, or give up your life. What is dear to you? That is the final judgment. So little sleeping, two hours, or dying two years quickly. But go to sleep earlier, except for some program, like we have until 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock. But this is a schooling. That's it. Wish you all the best. The day after tomorrow is Mahāprabhujī's Mahāsamādhi day. If you like, you should fast on this day, on Devapurījī's Samādhi day, Mahāprabhujī's Samādhi day, Gurujī's Samādhi day, we should fast. Except if you have diabetes or something, you take medicine and you have to eat. And soon Christmas is coming: less bakeries and more practice. So, on your Christmas time, give the saṅkalpa: "I will become completely healthy through my own practice and my own decision to have good, natural, healthy food." You should be like Gandhi. You can compare Gandhi and Jesus's body. Jesus was also like this. If you believe and follow Jesus on Christmas, then you should also become like it. It means all illness is gone, all bacteria is gone. That's it. So, wish you all the best. Happy Christmas, happy new year.