Yogic Understanding of Stress, Body and Diabetes

Stress and its role in Diabetes mellitus

• The word "Stress" was defined by Hans Selye, a physician and endocrinologist who instigated stress research, as "the non-specific response of the body to any demand".
• The increased demands of the modern society lead to difficulties in coping with their situations and ultimately results in chronic stress.
• Stress involves the Central nervous System and activates behavioural and physiological response patterns.
• When a situation is perceived as stressful, the sympatho-adrenal system and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis becomes activated, causing sympathetic activation, catecholamine release, Vagal withdrawal, cortisol secretion, leading to release of various pro-inflammatory cytokines, causing insulin resistance and Type ll Diabetes mellitus.
• Stress is a response and not the actual situation. What we need to learn is, "I cannot change the situation but can change my response pattern - kartum, akartum, anyatha kartum'.
• To get angry, not to get angry or change the anger into pardon and love (kshama) is the capacity that is inbuilt in human system and we have to nurture this.

A schematic chart of how the stress can cause Diabetes

Effect of Yoga in addressing stress

• The regular practice of Yoga will have a positive effect on our body as well as mind.
• It has got the capacity to reverse the stress reaction or it can at least reduce the impact of stress.
• Yogic methods can culture the emotions, develop strong para-Sympathetic system, increase the stress tolerance level and ultimately reduce the activation level for the stressors at the brain level.
• In this way, Yoga can directly or indirectly play a role, both in the prevention and management of Diabetes mellitus.

Five aspects of human existence (Panchakośa viveka)

• Our personality is not just a physical body that we are; it is made of 5 aspects -

  

  the Annamaya kosha, Pranamaya kosha, Manomaya kosha, Vijnanamaya kosha and Anandamaya kosha.
• In Anandamaya kosha we are absolutely healthy; there is absence of all miseries; we are blissful. We are in the purest knowledge; complete freedom; perfect and total health and absolutely no illness because it is a state where there is no activity and you are in pure blissful awareness that 'my existence is nothing but that of the universal consciousness' . You are in that quiet, calm, blissful state. This we all experience as when we wake up in the morning on a good holiday without any worries.
• Then  we enter our vijnanamaya kosha.

• We all have our thinking going on all the time. We all have 2 minds, one is the lover mind that goes on Craving, asking for things, desiring and goes on changing called the manomaya  kośa (san kalpa vikalpatmakam manah).
• There is also a deeper aspect of our mind which says what is right and what is wrong. When a person is tuned to the vijnanamaya kosa he will be acting in tune with cosmic laws, in tune with nature - no desires and therefore no nature, no disease.
• In the manomaya kosa which is the body of will, the emergence of likes and dislikes starts. The persistent, long standing emotions, the stresses, called ADHI begins in our manomaya kosa.

Stress the seed of disease

• Type 2 diabetes which is mainly lifestyle born is called as samanya adhija vyadhi.

• When you face too many demanding lifestyle situations, we go on resending with emotions-then go on suppressing them - long standing this becomes a habituated pattern of response. You get stuck in this response pattern, knowingly, suppressed or expressed. This is what the habituated lifestyle problem is.
• Therefore all this problem of mind body disease is adhija vyádhi or diabetes which is the lifestyle problem is also in the mind.
• Therefore the problem at the manomaya kosa in the form of conflict between vijnänamaya koša and manomaya kosa, shows up in Pranamaya kosa and annamaya kosa as speed. All adhija vyadhis, non-communicable diseases, (lifestyle diseases) are nothing but uncontrolled excessive Prān a resulting in long standing imbalance that settles down as violent inflammatory activity in annamaya kosa.
• So, the whole problem is nothing but uncontrolled speed at the mind level in which we are stuck and lost control.
• You are what you think you are. Yoga is basically to reduce the speed and work with the mind.
• In Bhagvadagita, Krishna has elucidated about this in a beautiful verse
  dhyāyato viśayān pumsah...... bhuddhināśat Pranaśyati (chap2,62).
• Thus, we have understood that even diabetes is a mind-body disease and the sages have been able to give a reversible mode of the mechanism of how the speed at the mind has descended to cause inflammation, which results in diabetes.
• There are prescribed practices for different levels to reverse this.

Source : Yoga based life style module for Diabetes