Man, know thyself, and you are going to know the gods.
—proverb of the Inner Temple of Luxor, Egypt
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
—Henry Ford
The first year I tried to row for the Canadian rowing team, I was training like a demon two or three times a day. I remember being so tired at night that I was barely strong enough to lift the fork to eat my dinner. Whatever I was doing was not enough, though, because I failed to pass the final test and was cut from the team. I was completely devastated. After a few days of feeling depressed, I realized I was not ready to give up. The problem was that I really felt as if I was at my physical limit. What more could I do?
As I mentioned in Chapter 6, I often felt so nervous before the races that I was drained for the races themselves. I was short for an international rower and the need to outperform taller, stronger athletes meant that I could not afford to waste any energy. It was then that I remembered stories I had read about mothers lifting cars to save their children, and yogis in India not eating for days, or standing on one leg for weeks. If I could learn to focus my mind like that, I thought, I would be able to row faster. My rational mind told me that these stories of extreme human performance through deep mental focus were probably nonsense, but I was willing to try if they would help me win. I decided to seek out a yoga teacher.
The problem was that I did not know anyone who taught traditional yoga. These people, I thought, were what I needed to control my mind and help me do the rowing equivalent of lifting cars. Yoga was not as popular back then in the mid-1990s as it is today. The few teachers I did know focused on physical postures and stretching rather than on mind over matter. Eventually, my mother (who was into that kind of stuff) put me in touch with a traditional yoga instructor in Montreal named Dr. Madan Bali.
I was intrigued when I heard he had worked with the Montreal Canadiens professional ice hockey team a few years earlier, at a time when they were the best team in the league. We spoke briefly on the phone and set up an appointment to meet the next day. When I got to his place, my first reaction was surprise at its modesty. The small living room of his apartment in downtown Montreal doubled as his yoga studio. I remember the smell of curry being cooked in the kitchen, which was separated from the living room studio only by a thin, beaded curtain. He clearly was not in it for the money.
We sat down together and I fired a battery of skeptical questions at Dr. Bali. How do you know it works? If it is so great, why doesn’t everyone do it? Is it scientific? What do you mean we only use 2 percent of our brains? Can we really rewire our brains and our DNA? Where did you get your PhD? Dr. Bali answered all my questions patiently, and his friendly manner disarmed me. It was hard to continue my aggressive line of questioning when he was being so kind, patient, and informative. He told me about endorphins, about the body’s ability to change, about the damage caused by the fight-or-flight response, and about the power of the mind over the body.
Eventually I ran out of questions, and although I did not believe it, I wanted to believe what Dr. Bali said about the mind controlling the body. If I could control my mind, I could improve my rowing performance. I was silent as I thought about these things. He smiled and told me that the first class was free so I could try it and test for myself whether my mind felt calmer. I was still very suspicious, and I even wondered whether he was planning to hypnotize me and turn me into a cult member. But the offer of a free class, combined with my desperation to win races, won out against my skepticism. I decided to give it a try.
It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Dr. Bali blew me away. He was already seventy years old and could do as many leg lifts and push-ups as I could, and I was in world-class shape. More than that, I was so relaxed at the end of the session that I almost fell asleep. When I sat up, everything seemed clear. I felt deeply focused. If I could learn to control when I felt relaxed and to focus so well, I thought, I would save energy and win more races. So that is just what I did. I learned his routine and practiced yoga. Eight months after that first yoga session, I made the Canadian rowing team. But I’m not telling this story because of me. I am telling it because of Dr. Bali.
Now at ninety-three years young (as he likes to say), Dr. Bali’s schedule includes teaching about forty hours a week, traveling to faraway places like Indonesia to give yoga courses, and taking care of his family. He always has a smile on his face. He took care of his wife, who was very ill, until she passed away in 2016. His many students plague him with their trials and tribulations on a daily basis and he listens carefully and offers them good advice. I am sure he has physical and emotional aches and pains; however, he chooses to be positive and not let these things get in the way. That means doing exercise and interacting with people, which benefits his health. This, in turn, allows him to continue exercising and interacting. It is a virtuous circle. He says his daily practice of yoga keeps him young and healthy.
A skeptic might say that Dr. Bali was born with good genes, and that is why he is so healthy and happy at the age of ninety-three. To them, his state has nothing to do with yoga. It is true that Dr. Bali was born with great genes. I know this because of what he told me about a faded tattoo he has on his arm. I asked him what it was and he said it was his name, “M. Bali.” I asked him why he had it. He replied that as a Hindu during the 1947 partition of India he had survived multiple attempts on his life as he escaped to Delhi. He thought he might not survive and wanted to make sure that anyone who found his body would recognize him so he could have a proper burial. He survived hard times that might have killed a weaker person.
Dr. Bali is not absolute proof that his lifestyle and attitude are what keep him going. That would require an impossible randomized trial in which his health outcomes were measured against those of a cloned version of him engaging in some tricky-to-design placebo version of traditional yoga. Such a trial would be impossible, yet at the same time, you would be hard put to find someone working full-time and taking care of people at ninety-three years old who is not doing yoga or something similar. His story—together with the science presented in this book—suggests quite clearly that genes are not the whole picture. Dr. Bali’s lifestyle choices must play an important role in his health and vitality.
In a way, this book is a scientific answer to the barrage of questions I fired at Dr. Bali when I first met him. My studies and other studies show that relaxation reduces stress and improves health; that positive thinking activates the body’s inner pharmacy to reduce pain, depression, and anxiety; that good social networks make you live longer; and that the care of an empathetic doctor can be just as effective as a blockbuster drug. These things might even be able to change your genes and your brain. Beyond that, the health of the different parts of your body are connected, the health of your mind and body can’t be separated, and your overall health is linked to the people who surround you. The high-quality evidence presented here means that the mind-body connection can no longer be viewed as fuzzy, feel-good stuff: it is hard science.
I like yoga and meditation, but you don’t need to be into yoga or meditation to benefit from what I’ve written. I’ve provided more “neutral” exercise options that can be equally beneficial. By engaging with the exercises I hope that you have become the main character of the book and have experienced the science of self-healing for yourself. I hope you now know you’re not a mindless machine damned to sit back and pray for medicine to cure you of the many common ailments for which you currently seek medical attention.