By Dr. Gajendra Singh
FAFMM, Master of Pain Med., Dip MSM, FRCS, Dip Ortho Eng., Dip Ortho Surgery, MBBS.
My journey on the spiritual path began when I observed and experienced the impact a debilitating health had on my family.
I have had a twenty-five year long career as a medical practitioner working in different hospitals. I was in the process of establishing a private practice when my wife became ill. I found that no amount of clinical training, knowledge, and experience as a medical practitioner, could help her heal or even improve her condition without investigating alternative factors, outside of the traditional clinical diagnosis and treatment.
Admittedly, it was a personal experience that created a turning point in my medical education. My wife’s debilitating health had an impact on my life and on my heart. It was a turning point that led me and my wife on a spiritual approach to health and wellbeing.
What I am sharing with you is my own observations and experiences. In other words, the authority I stand on is none other than one of personal experience; something I hold with greater reverence than any formal medical training.
When my wife became ill, she was constantly tired and struggling around the house and was unable to walk more than a couple hundred metres. It was a challenging time with uncertainty for all of us in the family. When a colleague of mine suggested lypospheric vitamin supplements, to my surprise she made good progress. But then, within six months, she was ill again and needed urgent surgery.
Our older daughter played a significant role in opening our minds to a nutritious and plant-based diet. With my medical training, it was easy for me to understand the benefits. But after we experimented with a new diet for a few months, only then did I realise the practical results on the body, as well as the mind.
During my medical education, I do not recall a great deal of focus on the connection between nutrition and a good diet with healing. As a medical practitioner, I had the knowledge and experience to investigate and diagnose a condition clinically. However, a doctor’s role in the patient’s healing is generally limited to prescribing medications, performing surgeries, and advising the patient on what they should and should not be doing.
My realisation came when the results of our diet experiment reinforced for me the value that a good diet, nutrition and supplements have in the healing and recovery process. This led me to observe the other factors that can affect the outcome of a patient’s condition which are all within the control of the patient and are entirely independent of any medical treatment:
- Trust: How much the patient trusts the practitioner and accepts their advice, partially or fully, will correlate to how much the patient will implement the advice given. Equally, how much the practitioner is trust-worthy in giving the correct diagnosis, in good faith and keeping the benefit of the patient as the priority, correlates to how much the patient will trust the practitioner.
- Determination: The patient’s determination in the process of healing, including trusting the self to get through the healing process and having faith in their own recovery.
- Quality of Thoughts: The types of thoughts and the duration of thoughts the patient is having about their condition and their treatment for recovery.
- Immunity: The current state of the patient’s body and immune system.
- Condition of Gut: The patient’s condition of their gut is a factor to consider because this is where most of the body’s immune system generates. This also includes oral hygiene, as any infection in the oral cavity can deplete the body immune system over time.
- Addictions/Habits: The patient’s nicotine, alcohol and other such addictive habits that can impact on the body’s ability to heal.
- Water Consumption: How much and when the patient drinks water. Drinking plenty of water at the accurate time is ideal, provided there are no other medical restrictions on water intake. Water intake close to and during meal times will dilute the digestive enzymes in the stomach, resulting in poor absorption of nutrition.
- Bowel Movements: Regularity of the patient’s bowel movements. Regular bowel motion once or twice daily will prevent the absorption of waste into the circulation and free up the immune system from having to neutralise the endotoxin released into the body because of waste being absorbed into circulation.
- Levels of Stress: Patient’s diagnosed or undiagnosed level of stress, or even denial of such condition. Because stress is increasing in our world today, it is becoming normalised to a certain extent. However, this type of thinking only entrenches the stress and prevents the patient from having control to remove it. Stress hormones (cortisol) continue to get released and make the immune system weak along with the adverse effects on the other systems of the body (e.g. worse case, diabetes).
From my personal observations in my own private practice, I have seen that many patients do not get better as expected from a medical perspective, because of these contributing factors. Despite the correct diagnosis and the right medical treatment for the condition, these contributing factors significantly influence the patient’s healing process. Incredibly, they are within the patient’s control, but we have forgotten this truth because we have lost our inner power.
Spirituality, and in particular, the practice and the study of Raja Yoga as taught through the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, has impowered my wife and I to regain our inner strength and liberate us from the negative influences of these contributing factors. There are many points of truth in the study of Raja Yoga that have coalesced into a healing package for us, but here I would like to mention a couple:
- Power of Thoughts: We now understand that thoughts are energy and repeated focus on one type of thought creates feelings. Negative and wasteful thoughts are of a low vibrational frequency which do not allow the body to heal at the speed we want. When we become aware of what we are thinking, only then are we able to change our thoughts to a more positive and elevated frequency that is conducive to healing. For example, the energies of happiness and love for everyone are very positive healing energies.
- Meditation: Raja Yoga meditation helps strengthen our inner power and our ability to take control of the contributing factors I mentioned above. Through the understanding that I am primarily a spiritual being or a soul with a body (and not a body with a soul), this alone helps to differentiate my physical body and its condition, from myself and my identity. Then, understanding and connecting with the Supreme Soul or God, through elevated thoughts, is like a natural connection between a child and a loving parent. This is truly a divine healing experience because the highest vibrational frequency is being imbibed by the body during this time.
I have seen the whole spectrum of all of the above factors in my own short journey of this spiritual path within myself and the people I have come into contact with in my personal life and clinical practice.
The benefits of Raja Yoga meditation need only to be experimented with to realise the validity of these factors. Each person will experience different levels of results depending on their intention and determination to follow the Raja Yoga practice, irrespective of the condition of their physical body.
At a time when nothing else seemed to work for us, Raja Yoga has been a gift from God and is continually improving our health and wellbeing.
