Street at Central Park West.
Featuring Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Sandra Amrita McLanahan, Nischala Joy Devi, Dr. Timothy McCall and Michael Lerner, all leading luminaries in the fields of natural health and preventive medicine who were deeply influenced by Swami Satchidananda’s teachings, the event will be hosted by Swami Ramananda, president of the Integral Yoga Institute of San Francisco (and formerly of New York IYI).
The all-day celebration will include two panel discussions on the emerging field of Yoga Therapy and also feature the Enlightened Vegetarian Fair and Integral Yoga Expo. Yummy vegetarian and vegan samples and tastings will inspire you. You’ll also meet and learn from many innovative Yoga teachers who have adapted Integral Yoga to serve a variety of populations and health conditions.
Come and learn how to maximize your own health and wellbeing and that of your clients and patients. You will have a wonderful and enlightening day!Tickets and more information are available at www.iyiny.org
Swami Satchidananda and Integral Yoga: A Revolution in Healthcare
His Holiness Sri Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga®, is one of the most revered Yoga masters of our time. He dedicated his life to peace—both for the individual and for the world. He blended the physical discipline of Yoga, the spiritual philosophy of India, and an innovative interfaith approach that promoted harmony among all faith traditions. By making Yoga accessible to millions, he helped launch and shape the modern Yoga movement that has since become a global phenomenon.
Swami Satchidananda made far-reaching contributions to the field of health and complementary medicine. From the start of his service in the West, he steadfastly promoted vegetarian diet, stress reduction through the Yoga practices and philosophy, and living in harmony with nature. Swami Satchi-dananda fully supported the use of holistic and natural remedies. Yet, at the same time, he was supportive of the positive aspects of allopathic medicine and always spoke about the great advances it had brought, particularly for acute problems.
Swami Satchidananda’s ideas and ideals were radical at the time—chief among them the notion that disease was essentially "dis-ease," or disturbed ease. The chief factors responsible for those disturbances included: non-vegetarian diet, unhealthy habits like smoking, drinking, illicit drug use, wrong, sedentary life-style and stress. He taught that treating illness from a purely allopathic approach put undue focus on symptoms without going to the root cause of disease. He gave the analogy that treating symptoms alone was like cutting the wires on a home smoke alarm. If you cut the alarm wires and go back to sleep, the fire may take your life. He would often say that the doctors performing bypass surgery were only "bypassing" the real problem which would recur unless properly addressed. These words were to foreshadow important changes in Western medical approaches to heart disease that Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Sandra Amrita McLanahan, among others, were to bring.
A number of Swami Satchidananda’s students were working in the medical field and were focusing on integrating his ideas and Yoga teachings into their own practices. They also wanted to share those same teachings with the medical world at large. Because of the growing awareness of the health benefits of Yoga, Swami Satchidananda was asked to speak at a wide variety of medical institutions.
In the mid-1970s, Swami Satchi-dananda spoke at the National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins Medical Center, Baylor College of Medicine, among other places. He often spoke about natural living and how we fall sick when we don’t live according to nature. Dr. Amrita Sandra McLanahan remembered one of these talks when Swami Satchidananda said, "The root cause of all illness is selfishness." And, she also recalled that, "You could have heard a pin drop. The only sound was that of jaws dropping. Sri Gurudev was not talking about selfishness in moralistic terms but that sense of separation and isolation that makes you separate from everyone and your essential nature."
Dr. McLanahan remembers teaching Dr. Mamet Oz his first Yoga class. Now, Dr. Oz is a leader in the field of complementary medicine. At Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, Dr. Oz has a groundbreaking program where he practices Yoga with his patients before and after they undergo heart surgery and he finds it to be the most powerful of all the alternative health interventions.