Mental Health Impact of the COVID Pandemic​ - Sadhguru with Medical Experts​

00:38 - Good morning. Speaker (Bala): Namaskaram Sadhguru.

00:40 - Sadhguru: All the doctors… (Overlapping conversation) Speaker (Bala): Welcome all to this…

00:42 - Sadhguru: All the doctors… All the doctors, am I looking crazy enough (Laughter)? Speaker: Very nice (Sadhguru laughs).

00:53 - Sadhguru: Am I looking like a client I’m asking (Laughs).

00:58 - Please, please go ahead. Bala, I’m sorry (Laughs).

01:06 - (Speaker Bala introduces panelists and talks about mental health pandemic).

01:12 - Sadhguru: Namaskaram. (Speaker Bala continues to introduce panelists) Sadhguru: That’s wonderful.

01:15 - Namaskaram Murali (Laughs). Speaker Dr. Murali: It’s an honor, great honor to be here with all you, such distinguished experts.

01:19 - (Speaker Bala continues to introduce panelists) Sadhguru: Namaskaram.

01:21 - I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. (Overlapping conversation) Hey it’s a long thing, I didn’t realize you have such a long citation (Laughs).

01:28 - Sorry. Speaker Bala: Welcome David.

01:30 - Speaker (David): Yes. Thank you. Sadhguru: David, namaskaram.

01:33 - You’re… You’re close by, hmm, in Nashville (Laughs).

01:35 - Speaker David: Yes, so far, not so far, but nice to be sharing time and space with you here today.

01:41 - (Speaker Bala continues to introduce panelists) Sadhguru: Namaskaram maa.

01:43 - (Speaker Bala introduces himself) Sadhguru: Namaskaram.

01:45 - Speaker (Bala): Sadhguru, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic and visionary.

01:48 - Named one of India’s fifty most influential people.

01:51 - Sadhguru’s work has touched the lives of millions of people worldwide through his transformational programs.

01:56 - He has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan, India’s highest annual civilian award accorded for exceptional and distinguished service.

02:00 - An internationally renowned speaker and author of The New York Times bestseller – Inner Engineering: A yogi’s guide to joy.

02:07 - Sadhguru has been an influential voice at major global forums including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and the world president’s organization addressing issues as diverse as socioeconomic development, leadership and spirituality.

02:17 - He’s also been invited to speak frequently at leading educational institutions including Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Wharton and MIT among others.

02:20 - More than three decades ago, Sadhguru founded Isha Foundation – a nonprofit human service organization with human well-being as its core commitment.

02:25 - The foundation is supported by over eleven million volunteers in more than three-hundred centers worldwide.

02:32 - Namaskaram Sadhguru. Sadhguru: Namaskaram.

02:34 - (Speaker Bala welcomes all. Speaks about mental health, some of the mental health statistics in USA and suicide) Dr. Murali: Thank you Bala for that wonderful introduction.

02:42 - You’re absolutely correct. We are in the midst of two pandemics – as you point out COVID and the other is social inequities, both of which have a very big impact on our mental health.

02:52 - In fact, I refer to the COVID pandemic as perhaps the greatest psychological experiment that has ever been done on humans in our lifetimes.

03:02 - It’s the first time that eight billion people and 1. 3 billion children have been issued stay-at-home orders.

03:08 - As you point out, over hundred million people have lost jobs, maybe even more than that.

03:13 - And there’s countless people who have suffered health issues and loss of loved ones and many people have not even been able to be at funerals when their loved ones have passed away.

03:24 - But at the same time, there’s a lot that is unknown.

03:29 - Yes, there is the possibility of a mental health tsunami, but we also have to be cautious that we don’t yet know what the scope and size of that will be.

03:37 - There are conflicting opinions still as to whether it will be a mental health tsunami or a ripple because humans have a tendency to adjust to transient stressors, and it depends on how long the COVID pandemic is going to last and how many waves there are going to be, and how well we respond to these pandemics.

03:57 - Now I think there are some lessons we can learn from our infectious disease colleagues.

04:01 - When we talk about COVID, you know, everyone is now familiar with the term, “We need to flatten the curve. ” What we are talking about that is to take proactive measures, social distancing, wear a mask, contact tracing.

04:14 - So I think we need to think about our mental health in much the same way, and I think Sadhguru has referred to this elegantly in many of his talks.

04:24 - It’s not about being reactive. Currently society is reactive when it comes to mental health.

04:30 - We need to be proactive and predictive. So what do I mean by that? By proactive, we need to build resilience, inner resilience.

04:38 - We need to build social and emotional strengths through our networks.

04:40 - We need to build our… the way we react to stressors, and we also need to build our immune resilience, and all of these are tied together.

04:52 - And I will get into that. And the second thing, when I say predictive, what do we do with COVID? I think right now the focus; we need to test more people.

05:04 - We need to catch them early before they become really ill.

05:07 - We need to sort of make sure they get the best possible care.

05:12 - We still don’t do that in mental health. There’s an acute… acute shortage of psychiatrists, of counselors, even in the richest countries around the world.

05:19 - In the US, seventy-seven percent of all counties lack psychiatrists and the child psychiatry shortage as Dr. Appa Reddy will point out is even more acute.

05:27 - So could we use digital tools? Could we train lay workers? Could we come up with other solutions that can sort of replace this sort of the unmet need in the system for qualified professionals? And how do we build the capacity? So fighting COVID at the infectious disease level is all about building capacity, how can we build the capacity at the mental health level? And I’m going to talk a little bit about how technology tools, especially smart phones, smart watches may be very helpful for early detection when we don’t have other tools to help people.

05:57 - So let me get back to the first one – how do we build resilience? So we know…

06:02 - I’m just going to talk about immunity first, because we all know that stress is linked to cortisol, our stress hormones, and we know that when stress hormones go up, it depresses your immunity.

06:15 - People don’t realize that there could be a direct connection between stress, immune function and our human behavior, which is the third piece.

06:24 - And I’m going to tell you what I mean by that.

06:28 - There’re some very interesting studies that have come out, where they injected people with a very low level of a toxin to induce low levels of inflammation, much like what COVID might do, and people who are asymptomatic or very mildly infectious.

06:47 - And then they did FMRI scanning of their brains to see how their brains react to familiar and unfamiliar faces.

06:54 - And what they found was that if you don’t have low level of inflammation, then you recognized your friends as friends and you responded to familiar people in nice, comfortable ways.

07:08 - But if you had marginally elevated levels of inflammation in your body, you saw familiar people as threats.

07:14 - You are much more likely to be divisive, much more likely to recognize friends as not being friends.

07:24 - So there is a way that low levels of stress and inflammation affect not just our physical health, but the way we interact with people around us.

07:33 - And is there a way to break the cycle? Because you can… stress can induce either a positive cycle or a negative cycle.

07:41 - The positive cycle of stress is yes, inflammation.

07:44 - It sort of makes you divisive. It has damaging health effects on your heart, on your brain, on your cognition, on your sleep.

07:55 - Uncertainty breeds anxiety. But on the other hand, if you can defeat that, then you’ll lead to a positive cycle where you’re able to cope with stress and you’re able to cope with uncertainty, because uncertainty is one of the things that our brains are most vulnerable to.

08:11 - And that is something I would love to get Sadhguru’s opinion on.

08:17 - Why is the human brain so vulnerable to uncertainty? Why does it breed anxiety? You know, it’s almost like the favorite of a horror story writer – they love uncertainty, they love building up the tension so that it drives you crazy and that is exactly what the COVID virus is doing because we don’t have good solutions.

08:37 - It’s infecting our minds. And so how can we overcome that and that is one area.

08:40 - Now I know that a couple of weeks ago we celebrated the International Yoga Day.

08:46 - And I know that you know, Sadhguru spoke at the event.

08:51 - Now Yoga and meditative practices actually are a amazing tool to build resilience both at the emotional level and at the immune level.

08:58 - Many of us don’t think of Yoga and meditative practices as a tool to boost immunity.

09:02 - There was a recent study that came out where they reviewed fifteen published trials of meditative practices and Yoga, and they showed that they boosted protective chemicals that are anti-inflammatory, and they reduced levels of pro-inflammatory chemicals that we call as cytokines, and within one hour of starting Yoga practices, hundred-and-eleven genes were changed.

09:21 - The expression of hundred-and-eleven genes, many related to immune function and inflammatory functions were changed.

09:26 - And for one week, just one week of practice produced noticeable, noticeable, noticeable benefits.

09:31 - People think you have to practice three years, four years, five years to produce big changes.

09:38 - No, you can see short-term immediate effects within even a week of practice.

09:43 - And the first generation of Yoga studies on mental health were not that well done.

09:48 - They were not high quality trials. They were small, they were not adequate controls.

09:53 - But now we have come to the second generation of Yoga studies on mental health and some of which we led and some of which others have led.

10:01 - There are over one-hundred good quality randomized control trials.

10:05 - These are the highest quality trials involving more than 100,000 participants in cumulative across all these studies.

10:11 - The biggest effects that you see with Yoga are on stress, depression, anxiety, sleep, even some types of cognitive improvements.

10:17 - And in many of these studies, Yoga was better than a waitlist control or no treatment.

10:23 - And in some of these studies, Yoga was as good as a prescription medication for milder forms of mental illness.

10:29 - So clearly now, I think we have robust, robust, accumulating evidence that yes, Yoga can help treat people with milder forms of mental illness such as depression, anxiety, sleep.

10:39 - And the last point I want to make is in terms of neuroplasticity, and again I think David is also perhaps going to touch on this.

10:46 - There are now emerging studies showing that Yoga has both structural and functional effects on brain circuits and brain regions.

10:53 - So one of the areas that’s of interest to me is the aging brain.

10:59 - We know that as our brain ages, there is shrinkage of various regions in the brain especially the memory centers, the frontal lobes that are responsible for executive decision-making, which is so important during times of uncertainty.

11:15 - And experienced Yoga practitioners have less age-related shrinkage of these critical brain regions, again suggesting that there are potential neuroplastic effects of Yoga on our brain.

11:24 - So I’m going to stop there with that, and I really look forward…

11:30 - I mean, I would love to get you know, Sadhguru’s opinion on, are there specific…

11:35 - there are so many types of Yoga and meditative practices.

11:39 - Are there specific types of practices that you think might help us with immunity? Of course, I’m not saying that Yoga is a cure for COVID or a replacement for a vaccine, but to boost baseline immune function and baseline resilience, are there specific types of Yoga practices that you think are particularly strong for them? Sadhguru: Hmm.

11:59 - See what I have to say may sound a bit tangential though various things that you have said is very true but you’re speaking a certain language – the language is considered scientific.

12:07 - But please pardon me if I say something which is not right, because you must understand I’m not educated, so I speak the way I speak, okay (Laughs)? So, see we are… we are trying to have a keyhole vision of everything.

12:21 - We are looking at bits and bits, inflammatory markers, the chemical changes, neuroplasticity.

12:26 - The yogic sciences don’t look at things like this.

12:30 - We look at the human being as an entirety. What happens in my little finger inevitably happens in my brain, all right? What happens in every cell in my body inevitably happens in my brain.

12:42 - First of all, in any of the yogic texts or any of the yogic lore there is no mention of brain.

12:48 - So what do you do with somebody like me who doesn’t have a brain, who just has a turban, all right? So what do you do with me? Because we do not recognize brain as a very significant part of human ecology.

13:01 - We see… ‘Mind’ means we say Manomaya Kosha – which means the entire body is a mind of its own.

13:07 - There is one layer of body which is doing mental functions on various levels.

13:11 - This I would say a very skewed level of significance to the brain, has essentially come because cultures which recognize human thought as the highest possibility in human life, which…

13:21 - this… these kind of conclusions have come because societies were so dogmatic, that they wouldn’t allow you to think straight.

13:26 - They wouldn’t allow you to think for yourself because somebody up there will think for you.

13:33 - So when they broke away from that and people started thinking for themselves, they felt so much si… kind of liberated from the dogmatic existence that they had, they started giving unnecessary levels of significance to human thought and emotion.

13:41 - In the yogic sciences, we don’t pay heed to your thought process, because we see your thought process as just recycling of the little data that you have.

13:50 - But what’s happening in every cell in the body is a phenomenally more complex mechanism, phenomenally more complex activity than what is happening in terms of, you know, thought and emotion circulating in your head.

14:03 - So the… in terms of memory and in terms of intelligence – both ways – every cell in your body carries more memory than you can ever carry in your brain and more intelligence in terms of sophisticated and complicated activities that every cell in the body is doing.

14:19 - So saying that… having said that, so there is a mind across the body.

14:24 - As there is a physical body, there is a mental body, there’s an energy body, there’s an etheric body.

14:32 - So depending upon your access that you have found to these four or five different dimensions of bodies or the alignment of these first three bodies, the physical, mental and energy body, your mental health is decided by how well aligned these three dimensions are.

14:52 - Your physical body, your mental body and your energy body, if they’re properly aligned, this means only then you find access to the fourth dimension of the body which for lack of English words, we call it etheric.

15:08 - But it is actually called as Vigyanamaya Kosha.

15:11 - To explain Vigyan, I mean three of you are from Indian background, so you…

15:16 - Generally, the word ‘Vigyan’ is used as science.

15:19 - Vigyanam or Vigyana means science. Vigyan means Vishesh Gyan.

15:24 - That means, that dimension of perception, which you cannot have through your five senses – that means that dimension of perception that you cannot see, that you cannot hear, that you cannot smell and taste or touch.

15:37 - When you perceive that dimension, then we say it’s Vigyan.

15:40 - So this is a dimension within you, which is moving from physicality to a non-physical state, because we see mind also as a physical thing.

15:50 - See, as… if I wish I can… I can throw a thing at you.

15:56 - Similarly I can throw a thought at you. So we treat thought as a physical process, emotion as a physical process, because thought and emotion have a physical existence.

16:10 - Now that you can measure it on whatever kind of instruments you guys have… have, obviously it’s physical.

16:16 - When you can measure something on a physical parameters, you know, physical instrument, obviously it subscribes to physical parameters, and it is a physical thing.

16:25 - Mind is physical because it has a chemical and electrical background to it.

16:29 - So we don’t see mind as a separate mechanism, brain as a separate mechanism.

16:34 - The neurological system as all of us know is right across the body.

16:38 - And everything that happens in every cell of this system has an impact on our mental health.

16:44 - First of all, what is mental health? Right now…

16:46 - I’m sorry if I say something abrasive, please pardon me.

16:48 - I am not intending to offend anybody. But for me, it sounds ridiculous that people are going about making… being stressful, being anxious as normal things.

16:55 - It is not normal. When you were a five-year old child, joy was normal, isn’t it? When did it…

17:01 - When did it so happen that stress became normal, tension became normal, anxiety became normal, being depressed became normal – slowly this is a new normal we’re establishing.

17:08 - This new normal is completely away or deviant from the natural existence of a human being.

17:13 - So essentially, let me put it in my own experience because I am neither qualified in scriptures nor in modern science.

17:20 - All I know is, I know this piece of life (Referring to oneself) absolutely, from its origin to its ultimate and that’s all I know.

17:29 - I’m speaking from this context. It so happened one day I suddenly realized that if I don’t mess with my mind, I’m always ecstatic.

17:38 - I’m just dripping ecstasy, simply because I don’t put my hand into my mind.

17:43 - So once I realized that I really thought, “This is it” (Laughs).

17:47 - I was twenty-five years of age at that time.

17:51 - On that day, after a few weeks of experimenting with it and I saw every time I just… don’t touch my mind, I’m just overflowing with ecstasy.

18:06 - Then I made up my mind. In (Laughs)…

18:10 - I made a plan for the world. On that day, the population was about 5. 6 billion people.

18:17 - I made a plan that in two-and-a-half years’ time, I will make the entire population ecstatic.

18:24 - I thought I have discovered something. Well, it’s only later I realized in the tradition, there is so much talk about it.

18:31 - Till then I had no clue about any tradition.

18:34 - All I knew was, I have hit a goldmine. If I just take my hand off my mind, I’m just bursting with ecstasy.

18:43 - I actually sat down and made a plan – in two-and-a-half years, I will make the entire world ecstatic, who wouldn’t want it, I thought.

18:52 - (Laughs) Now nearly forty years, look at me (Laughs).

18:55 - We’ve touched a few million people, but that is not the entire population.

18:59 - But it’s… slowly I discovered people are so invested in their miseries.

19:04 - Initially I thought, “Who would not want to be ecstatic?” But people are so invested in their miseries, they are not going to give it up (Laughs), because they have been socially taught misery will produce results.

19:20 - They think anger will produce results, anxiety will produce results – a whole lot of people are writing books how you can use the energy of anxiety into a creative process, energy of anger into a creative process, resentment into a creative process.

19:39 - All the best for you if you want to do everything from an unpleasant source within you, all the best.

19:47 - Fundamentally, if you really look at yourself, you are neither joyful, nor painful, nor miserable, nor anything – you can make yourself anything you wish.

19:55 - It is just that human beings have given up this choice, as if they have chosen to go back in their evolutionary process.

20:05 - The significance of being human is just this.

20:08 - See, this is the only creature that you refer to as a being.

20:13 - You don’t call a tiger a being, an elephant a being, an ant a being, because they are all creatures of compulsive instinctual reactions.

20:23 - This is the only one which is capable of a conscious response to everything that happens within and outside of us.

20:33 - So this knows how to be – that is a reason why (Laughs) we have called this a being.

20:41 - But how far away from that have we gone? Humans know how to be? They’re the only ones who don’t know how to be.

20:48 - It looks like the other creatures know… a rat knows how to be a good rat, an elega…

20:55 - tiger knows how to be a good tiger, a human being doesn’t know how to be a wonderful human being, this is the only problem you’re facing.

21:14 - Actually, there is only one problem on this planet – human being.

21:22 - Have you seen any other problem, I’m asking? Nobody has come to you with any trouble, isn’t it? This is the only trouble – human being.

21:32 - Our problem essentially how I see it is, see (Laughs), I’ve said this in many different ways.

21:41 - But you know in the evolutionary process, from… from a goat to a giraffe, from a pig to a rhinoceros, something, something like this, it was taken millions of years.

21:51 - But anthropologists say that from a monkey to a man it happened rather too quickly.

21:57 - So quickly they are (have?) been looking for a missing link which they have not found yet.

22:01 - So in a way, as all of you know, the DNA difference between a chimpanzee and us is only 1. 23%.

22:07 - 1. 23% is not much of a difference. So physiologically we are that close to a monkey.

22:13 - But in terms of our intelligence and awareness, we’re worlds apart from a monkey.

22:21 - So in many ways, our problem is just this – we have not learned to handle our own intelligence.

22:30 - You can give it any number of names. You can call it tension, anxiety, stress, depression, this, that, whatever.

22:40 - Essentially, our intelligence has turned against us.

22:43 - Why would our own intelligence turn against us? Somewhere we don’t know how to handle it.

22:48 - We do not know how to manage our own intelligence.

22:53 - As all of you know, those of you who are working… all of you, all three of you who are working in these areas, Bala will give anesthetic but you guys know if we remove half our brain, everybody will be peaceful.

23:16 - Yes or no? Right now being peaceful seems to be such a big challenge.

23:22 - If you take away the possibility of being human, peace will happen.

23:29 - No problem. So today people are going about talking as if being peaceful is the highest goal in your life.

23:38 - Well, if you remove half your brain, you will be peaceful.

23:41 - An earthworm is peaceful. Nothing wrong with him.

23:44 - He’s a wonderful creature. He’s even eco-friendly, which you’re struggling to be (Laughs).

23:49 - So what I’m saying is essentially human problem is, human faculties are so many and so profound that human societies have not invested in learning to handle our own faculties.

24:01 - If your thought and emotion happened just the way you want, would there be any of these problems, I’m asking? Forget about the other dimensions of life.

24:10 - Just thought and emotion, you know how to make it happen.

24:14 - Your thought happens the way you want, your emotion happens the way you want, is there any psychological issue, I’m asking? Reddy Garu is talking about intellectual, you know, lack of development or what is…

24:23 - what’s it called, I’m sorry? Intellectual disability.

24:26 - Is that right? Speaker (Bala): Yes.

24:28 - Yes. Sadhguru: Intellectual disability.

24:30 - Well, if we compare ourselves to each other, each one of us are intellectually disabled in some way, isn’t it so? Is anyone…

24:38 - Is there any two individuals who are exactly same level of intellectual capability? It is not so.

24:48 - It is only in a school room unfortunately, we are trying to put every child through the same extruder of intellectual competence, which is destroying (Laughs) human beings in so many different ways.

24:57 - But every one of us is intellectually disabled compared to somebody else, isn’t it? Each one of us, at least me.

25:03 - You… You guys are too educated, (Laughter) you cannot say that, at least me – I know intellectually, what you’re capable of, what somebody is capable… if you and… if you look at it, what a child can do many things you cannot do.

25:20 - This is the reality of our life. So if we want to grade human beings like this, I think it’s an unfortunate process.

25:32 - We are grading human beings who is… who is fit to live, who is not fit to live.

25:40 - I heard that even in many states there are laws, whether this intellectually disabled people should get a ventilator or not if they get infection, the virus infection.

25:51 - That’s a terrible decision to make. But maybe they have to make a decision on some basis they have chosen to make it like this – very, very unfortunate.

26:03 - But that’s the reality of our existence. I’m saying grading human beings like this is not necessary, because I have done this with hundreds of people or thousands of people around me that intellectually they were graded as very low (Laughs).

26:14 - Men… Most of the people who come to me are school… school dropouts, all right? People who are qualified will all go somewhere else.

26:22 - But within six months to one year, they will start doing things with me.

26:28 - They are managing one of the, you know, major organization in absolute efficiency.

26:34 - If you come and see our events, our centers how they are managed, anybody from any major corporations if they come, they see we are better managed than them.

26:46 - But we don’t have any MBA qualified people.

26:49 - We don’t have Harvard Business School people coming and working with us.

26:54 - No such thing. All intellectually disabled people only I have in some way (Laughs).

27:00 - That’s the kind of people I draw, it looks like (Laughs).

27:06 - But they will do a fantastic job, because intelligence is not just in the intellect.

27:12 - Intellect is just one aspect of our intelligence.

27:15 - We’ve given too much significance to it simply because of the type of school education we have created, which is purely intellectual.

27:24 - There is no room for other dimensions of intelligence within you to function.

27:30 - Because of this, we will have to grade human beings.

27:33 - I am asking, do you believe an ant is stupid? Hello? He…

27:38 - He’s very, very smart with his life. He just knows what to do.

27:41 - I wish a lot of human beings if they were as clear about their life as the ants are, there wouldn’t be any psychiatric problems.

27:50 - Really, I don’t think they have a clinic to treat them because they just know what to do.

27:57 - But they are more pre-programmed. Our problem is nature gave us little freedom and we’re messing it up.

28:01 - What humanity is suffering is not its bondage, humanity is suffering its freedom unfortunately.

28:04 - If you want to exercise this freedom in a positive way, it’s important that as a society, not only as individual human beings, as a society we have to invest towards how to harness human faculties which are so many and so profound compared to any other creature on this planet.

28:20 - There is absolutely no focus on that in our education systems.

28:24 - We are focused on how to conquer the world, how to conquer the galaxies, but we are not focused on how to take charge of our own faculties.

28:34 - So now you’re seeing… It is not because of the virus that this is happening.

28:38 - This is happening, virus might have stimulated a little more problems, but half the people who are driving on the street are in some states of misery, that’s what I see.

28:47 - You just stand in any major city in any part of the world and see they’re all driving their dream machines, all right? When I say dream machines, what your parents could not afford, what your grandparents could not afford, you’re wearing, you’re driving and you’re living in those kind of homes.

29:09 - But tell me how many people on the street are driving their dream machines joyfully? Hardly any.

29:17 - So all of them are sick in my opinion. They may not come to the clinic, but anybody who does not know how to be pleasant within himself or herself…

29:31 - It is not even about being pleasant to somebody, being pleasant in your experience of life, in some way a sickness has set in.

29:38 - Whether you are going to diagnose them or not, whether you are going to medicate them or not, that’s a questionable thing.

29:43 - That is decided by the doctors, that’s fine.

29:46 - But anybody who’s walking around joys… joylessly is obviously a sick person.

29:50 - You want it to become a clinical diagnosis, only then you think they are sick.

29:56 - No, the first roots of sickness are already there.

30:00 - It’s like if a tree is standing, if the leaves dry up, we know the tree is getting sick.

30:09 - We don’t have to wait till the trunk dries up to know that it’s sick.

30:13 - Leaves are beginning to go brown, dry up in the wrong season, then we know this plant is suffering in some way.

30:23 - So when you were a child, your face was like this (Gestures) and now it’s becoming like this (Gestures) – that means you’re sick.

30:31 - No, no people say, “This is because my profession,” then don’t do it, get fired.

30:37 - “No, this is because of family,” then why did you build a family, be alone? No because you’re alone you suffer, because you have family you suffer, you don’t have a job you suffer, you got a job you suffer, you’re poor you suffer, you’re rich you suffer – tell me one place where human beings are not suffering.

30:58 - Suffering means sickness, it is. Suffering is a consequence of sickness.

31:01 - Suffering is a surface. There is a deeper sickness within.

31:04 - So the word dis-ease is a very good word. There is no ease in you.

31:06 - So you’re in a state of dis-ease, whether it’s physiological or psychological manifestation, how it’s manifested depends on various you know, genetic and other tendencies and also sociological you know, channels that people are creating for you.

31:17 - In… You will see in certain societies, everybody chooses to get sick in a certain way because it is also a trend, it is a fashion.

31:21 - This may… This will get me a lot of flak I know, because there is a… there is a depression squad in India who are always after me because I said, “Whether you’re depressed or not, is a choice. ” Right now, you might have given up that choice, you might have lost that choice.

31:38 - You may not know how to take charge of this choice, but somewhere deep inside it’s a choice to be healthy or to be sick.

31:45 - If you know how to make that choice, you can be out of it.

31:48 - They’ve been after me for three years saying, “He says depression is a choice, depression happens because of this, that. ” I’m saying the type of chemistry that you carry itself is by choice.

31:59 - What kind of genetics you got from your parents may not be your choice and it is not.

32:02 - But how you make the genetics that you have work within yourself is still your choice.

32:08 - As you were just saying some hundred-and-eleven genes will behave in a certain way with yogic practices, I will tell you every one of your gene expression can be changed.

32:22 - Every aspect of your genetics can be changed to function in the way that you want.

32:27 - The way it is best for this life (Referring to oneself).

32:33 - You can make that happen if only if it’s approached properly, because the word ‘Yoga’ is being used in a very minimalistic way.

32:40 - Twisting, turning in a Yoga studio is considered Yoga.

32:42 - But genuinely if you come to a state of Yoga, which means you have become a… a perforated life.

32:45 - In the sense, when I say ‘perforated life,’ see there are two holes in this nose.

32:50 - Suppose you really make yourself really solid, you will be dead.

32:52 - That’s the only way you can be. It’s perforated.

32:55 - Only because it’s in transaction with the rest of the existence, this is alive in terms of food, in terms of water, even in terms of you know, elemental stuff and even in terms of atomic and subatomic particles, it is in transaction.

33:09 - This is existing in transaction. As all of you know the microbes and stuff, it’s a huge transaction going on.

33:13 - This is a life transaction. You are not an individual like some kind of a concrete ball.

33:18 - You are not that. Unfortunately, one fundamental reason why there is mental health issues in the world on the scale that it is, is, human beings have taken their individual nature too seriously.

33:34 - They don’t have an experience of being a constant transactional process.

33:39 - What is… What is you today is not you tomorrow.

33:42 - What was not you yesterday is you today – just in terms of food that you eat, forget about the experiences and impressions.

33:50 - So this taking individual nature too seriously is the basis of all these struggles that human beings are going through.

33:56 - Yoga means union. That means the individual nature and the… what is called as a universal process in some way, if not absolutely united, at least perforated in your experience, you know that you’re not all contained in this – not intellectually knowing – experientially you know.

34:16 - As Bala was quoting, some studies some time ago, just watching your breath, so many people have changed their lives.

34:26 - Simply because it made you conscious of the perforated life that you are, not a concrete block of life that you are.

34:35 - So those who think they are a complete individual by themselves, this whole trend of individualism is the basis of every psycho… psychological trouble that human beings are going through.

34:47 - Well, it might… you might have genet… genetic predispositions, that’s a different matter.

34:53 - But even if you are predisposed, it does not mean you must manifest that.

34:57 - If you do the right things, you don’t have to manifest that.

34:59 - If I’ve said something very abrasive, please pardon me, please.

35:02 - Speaker Bala: Thank you Sadhguru. So what I’ve learnt is, from Dr. Murali, there is so much evidence for, you know, the interventions.

35:07 - I also enumerated the problem that is out there and Sadhguru concisely says that it’s all within you, the solutions are within you.

35:12 - So I just wanted to show another set of problems that we ran through.

35:15 - So with a few slides, like three or four slides, pardon me for going through this.

35:19 - I’ll go through it precisely just for what it is for.

35:21 - So I just wanted to show like what Dr. Murali was saying, you can see the changes very, very early on.

35:26 - So this is Upa Yoga, this is pre-Yoga. And in the pre-Yoga states, what we did was we just took one company from Canada and gave them a simple exercise with Yoga Namaskar and which can be learnt very quickly.

35:38 - And what we made them do was, do it over a period of five weeks and you can see that all the negative subscale scores.

35:49 - This is measured by profile of mood scores and all the negative subscale scores.

35:51 - As you keep doing it, it keeps going down, that’s the power of this, it keeps going down.

35:58 - So there’s a dose response to it. The more you do it, the better you do it, you can see that.

36:06 - So again, we took another company. This is a computer… software company, and the CEO is very interested in seeing a change in his company.

36:14 - So about eighty participants took part in this.

36:17 - Perceived stress that I mentioned early on, the way people perceive the stress is the most important thing.

36:22 - And you can see that that can be easily marked with the perceived stress score.

36:28 - And we did the waitlisted randomized control trial, Dr. Murali pointed out that the most robust way of doing it, and you can see the group one that is the intervention group, from baseline to week four, their perceived stress score dropped from almost nineteen to eleven over a period of four weeks.

36:46 - That is with Inner Engineering online. Whereas the red group, the first four weeks, they were just control groups.

36:54 - They were doing fifteen minutes of reading.

36:57 - There is a slight drop, but not to the level of what you see in the intervention group.

37:05 - From week four to week eight, the red group basically crossed over to be the intervention group.

37:12 - And you can see suddenly, this group now drops all the way from fifteen to nine.

37:17 - So just with four weeks of Inner Engineering online, and we told those who actually followed this for two weeks and more as compliant participants.

37:28 - So in order to see the benefits you’ve to be compliant, you really have to do the practices.

37:37 - And this is within Inner Engineering practice.

37:39 - This was done by Paul Nelson school from UCSD, Christine Peterson published this and with Inner Engineering you can see the perceived stress score goes down.

37:48 - And for those, the flat line is those who are not doing these practices on a regular basis.

37:53 - This is over a period of six weeks; you do not see a change in the perceived stress score at all.

38:01 - So you have to do that to see a change. The general well-being again, you see that it improves with optimum… that is doing on a daily basis or moderate that is almost three days a week or more than four… more than three days a week.

38:20 - Whereas those who did not do that, they did not see any change in the global well-being scale.

38:26 - Here an increased scale score means a better well-being.

38:29 - And with Inner Engineering practices over three months, like Dr. Murali pointed out, you also saw here the robust cortisol awakening response and there is a three-fold increase in BDNF.

38:41 - In comparison, when you do exercises of moderate intensity, you only see almost forty to fifty percent increase in BDNF, that is brain derived neurotropic factor.

38:49 - Low levels of brain derived neurotropic factor has been associated with many mental states like you know, Alzheimer’s disease or depression, etcetera.

38:56 - So something important to know that you can see large changes in brain derived neurotropic factors.

39:00 - And here with the Inner Engineering practices in a four-day meditation retreat, you can see the depression scale actually before and after meditation goes down, anxiety scale – it goes down before and after meditation.

39:08 - So this was almost in hundred-and-forty-eight participants, so pretty large study there.

39:12 - In over last three years, so we have been trying to do this simple techniques that can be given to people, they can adapt it.

39:20 - What we are having problem with is about one-third of the people actually take it, do it the way it’s supposed to be done and they see the changes, they stick to the practices over long term.

39:33 - Another one-third of the people they’re intrigued enough, but they never really carried on.

39:39 - So you saw those slides where you don’t have the optimal practices, you will not see a change.

39:45 - And so they’re not seeing a change, it becomes cycle.

39:49 - They say, “Oh, I don’t see anything and I can’t do it. ” Another one-third of the people simply don’t bother.

39:56 - So despite all the evidences that we have, there’s a clear problem.

40:00 - There is easy non-pharmacological solution.

40:02 - And as Sadhguru states that all that is within you, how do we make these people comply with these practices? We’re not, you know, there is no one-size-fit-all approach.

40:10 - Everybody has a different way of up taking these practices, we understand that.

40:13 - So a school like Isha Yoga or many other schools have a menu of practices that can be given, people can uptake any one of those and practice it on daily basis.

40:22 - Our struggle is to improve the compliance to make people do these practices the way you’re supposed to do.

40:26 - It could be as little as fifteen minutes. In other study with Isha Kriya, in about fifteen minutes of meditation over almost six weeks, we are able to show gamma waves in people.

40:30 - All that you need to invest was fifteen minutes a day.

40:32 - So despite this, my struggle or I think I’ve heard also discussed with many other people, experienced investigators like David, some people have said that, “You know, people don’t comply with their practices.

40:43 - It’s not simple. It’s not like a pop a pill.

40:48 - It’s not like an on-and-off switch. “ Question to Sadhguru is what can we do to improve the compliance for these people? Sadhguru: Well, I think the pandemic will improve the compliance (Laughs), because I’ve always seen when you know, some doctor gives them a diagnosis that you have a cardiac problem or you have some minor cancer issue, you need to do something about cleansing your system and whatever, suddenly they will start doing it with such vigor.

41:19 - So it’s unfortunate most people are… their sense of well-being is a very low expectation of themselves.

41:23 - Not everybody has a very high expectation of how they want to be, that they must be constant growth and constant improvement upo… upon themselves.

41:33 - That is not a driven force in a whole lot of people.

41:38 - Their whole thing is about how to survive, how to have little pleasures in their life.

41:43 - So because of that, the compliance levels will be low.

41:45 - That is why it is important to teach simpler and simpler practices which are easy to comply.

41:49 - And also compliance goes up when the program is delivered as a powerful experiential process.

41:54 - This is why to teach a twenty-one-minute Shambhavi Mahamudra, we spend nearly thirty-two hours of time, because without the necessary understanding and inspiration, most people will not comply with the practice.

42:08 - Above all, the first time when they go into it, the process of transmission should be such a big experience.

42:17 - When it’s a very big experience, naturally more people will stick to it, rather than they just go and learn something, the possibility of them keeping that up is very, very low.

42:28 - So one important thing is to make… you know, like we always make our programs like a major event in their life that they cannot forget, which is very important for them to comply.

42:40 - Another thing is to bring substantial logical and scientific understanding as to why they’re doing what they’re doing, which is very important in today’s world.

42:51 - And another aspect is to deliver it in as simple a way as possible so that… complexities means people give it up, it must be very simple, easy to fit into their lifestyles, not asking for lifestyle changes is very important.

43:04 - This is what I’ve always noticed. You don’t demand lifestyle changes.

43:08 - Changes will happen with the life that you are.

43:10 - Lifestyle, you don’t try to change because people are so committed to their lifestyle, more committed to lifestyle than life.

43:16 - This is their problem. So we always focus on the life and don’t touch their lifestyle.

43:23 - This way the compliance could go up much more than what it is right now (Laughs).

43:30 - Speaker (Bala): Thank you Sadhguru. I also want to say that one study that we are currently doing is the COVID incidents also, the prevalence of the diseases, symptoms, etcetera, and also their stress levels and other scales.

43:46 - We are doing a preliminary analysis of the baseline data with the IRB approval, and I wanted to say that you know, in about 5000 participants who do Yoga practices, Inner Engineering practices regularly for almost sixty days or so, their perceived stress scale levels was almost eleven, compared to a very high levels of general population, about 2500 people who do not do any Yoga practices, but who are of same age, gender and sex and also from the same geographical distribution, they almost have sixteen – a median scale of sixteen.

44:24 - So that just tells us that during these times people who are very well-prepared like Dr.

44:31 - Murali pointed out are those who are doing some kind of Yoga practices, at least in our study was Inner Engineering practices.

44:39 - I’m sure there are other people who have done other things.

44:44 - So you can only be prepared until we get a vaccine or until we get some kind of treatment, we can only prepare ourselves to face them.

44:54 - Next up I would like to invite Dr. David Vago to talk about his experiences.

44:59 - He’s an integrative medicine specialist and also he’s a meditator himself.

45:03 - So he has great combinations and is also a neurosciences researcher, David.

45:08 - Speaker David: Grateful to be sharing time and space with you Sadhguru and Dr. (Sounds like – Dr. Doraiswamy) Dr. Bala, Dr. Appa Reddy and all of you that are really listening, this is really an unprecedented moment really in history right? That we’re in this global pandemic and as Dr. Bala and Dr. Doraiswamy have already alluded to that, we’re having the effect here is that there’s a profound, negative psychological and social impact that will likely persists for months and years to come.

45:39 - So we’re all really looking for solutions. We’re faced with social isolation, which as we all know as humans is horrible for us.

45:45 - Economic hardship and pandemic fatigue. This is a phenomena where people are tired of taking precautions.

45:50 - So our future is really uncertain every day and you know we… the decisions that we have to make based on uncertainty only contributes to more anxiety.

45:58 - So the question really is what can science and contemplative wisdom help do for us, to help us? You know, my research focuses a lot on how we understand the self from a psycho-social and cognitive neurobiological perspective, and how contemplative practices like Yoga and meditation can change our neurobiology, supporting adaptive health outcomes.

46:12 - We really want to understand how prolonged stress, especially stressors that are on top of our everyday stress, being in pandemic is not normal.

46:18 - So there is added stresses, right. So to the normal stresses in our everyday life that we’re perceiving as stress as Dr.

46:23 - Bala is showing – perceived stress is one of the outcomes that we really focus on.

46:26 - And what my research is showing is that perception really matters.

46:29 - And what one chooses to allow, as you suggested Sadhguru, what we choose to allow into our own mind, mind here or here (Gestures), wherever it may reside, can influence how our whole body responds to these life challenges.

46:41 - And perception at every moment, every moment can make a difference.

46:45 - And Sadhguru I was really… it’s really wonderful to hear how you simplify the problem by saying people are invested in their misery, I think that’s a really great way to articulate what we do with our mind and how we use our mind to produce suffering.

46:59 - And our problem as you say is that we’ve not learned how to handle that… handle our intelligence, our capacity to actually move beyond some of the suffering that we create for ourselves.

47:13 - And you also have mentioned previously that our incapabilities have become our problems.

47:16 - So I wanted to just take this opportunity to maybe provide a framework to explain the timescale by which our perception influences the construction of ourselves, our experience of the world and our health outcomes and longevity.

47:26 - And I will just say as a caveat that the good… there is good news that there is a systematic form of mental training, involving meditation, Yoga, not just the physical postures on the mat, like you suggested also, is that there’s a way of being in the world that relates not only to what you do on the mat, but what you do off the mat that can transform our self and our mental habits in a positive way.

47:53 - So I think that the science, I will say is the current research is in alignment with some of the greatest contemplative and wisdom based traditions.

48:03 - For example, you often quote the Dhammapada, which is some of the best known collections of teachings by the Buddha that describes “Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think. ” And that statement really summarizes what I’m going to now just describe in terms of the neurobiology and that sort of… that… what I call the temporal chronometry, you know, the way that time unfolds in your brain and body as you… when you perceive something, every moment.

48:30 - And the basic idea here is that from birth to the present day, our subjective experience of being someone, our wants, our fears, our values, our expectations, our whole self-identity is continuously constructed through a string of moment to moment processing of selfing – of being a self in the world, and then each moment can be broken down into processes of perception, sensory awareness and cognitive evaluation.

48:56 - All of which happened on a timescale of five-hundred milliseconds or half-a-second.

49:00 - And you can think about what that really means is that we blink every two-hundred-and-fifty milliseconds, every blink right? So almost two blinks of an eye is a moment in which what you’ve perceived in the world is actually creating plasticity in your brain to reify yourself and your mental habits.

49:21 - And it can move in a trajectory of maladaptive selfing or adaptive selfing.

49:26 - So we have… I’ll just briefly say we have eighty-six billion neurons in our brain, we’re born with eighty-six billion neurons.

49:34 - And we pretty much die with about the same number of neurons.

49:37 - It’s really the cell to cell synaptic connections that are made in response to our everyday experiences that construct ourselves that help provide the patterns by which we identify with, and the way we perceive and experience the world.

49:49 - So let’s just take this… unpack this five-hundred millisecond moment, right? You know, this string of five-hundred millisecond moments sustains a cycle of mental habits and dispositions that are self-conditioning, self-perpetuating through repetition and again it reifies our conception of self – coloring our memory for the past or the imagined future.

50:09 - And based on this idea, we can say that you Sadhguru for example have had over three billion moments to become who is speaking with us today.

50:19 - Think of the billions of moments that you’ve had, every five-hundred milliseconds since from birth to right now.

50:25 - Sadhguru: Oh you’ve calculated that number for me (Laughs)? Speaker David: I did.

50:29 - It’s about that. It’s about that, three billion, it’s about that.

50:33 - Sadhguru: So when people ask me my age, I will say three billion milliseconds.

50:37 - Speaker David: Three billion moments. Well, three billion times five-hundred milliseconds.

50:41 - Sadhguru: Okay (Laughs). Speaker David: So one-and-a-half billion seconds maybe.

50:45 - But just like your physical self, your mental self is not a static entity, it’s constantly changing.

50:52 - And what I want to emphasize is that whatever thoughts or emotion that makes up the content of our mind every moment, may have a negative consequence for our health or well-being or positive one.

51:05 - So all these catastrophic types of ways of thinking, feelings of helplessness, “There’s nothing I can do to improve this situation,” “I have no control,” are magnifying the situation or, “It’s so terrible, it’s never going to get better.

51:13 - I feel overwhelmed,” and the ruminations that continue.

51:15 - The rumination is a very key construct here because what it is, is the constant negative thoughts that repeat themselves over and over again.

51:24 - So if you’re putting those thoughts of “I feel terrible, it’s never going to get better,” “I’m overwhelmed.

51:30 - I’m worried this pandemic will never end. “ And I can’t keep these worries out of my mind.

51:35 - You’re feeding the reification of yourself as the worry itself.

51:40 - The worried Dave is now being constructed every moment, every thought that I put in there.

51:46 - So anger, or fear, any sort of destructive emotion is only destructive, because they happen so frequently.

51:51 - And they may put the people around you including yourself at risk for injury or they interfere with your social functioning.

51:59 - But we know, the science shows that these dispositions of destructive types of emotions is the most extensive scientific evidence that these are risk factors for depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease and even shows to speed up the rate of cellular aging at the level of your DNA.

52:16 - You know, it increases the… the risk of dying prematurely of a heart attack.

52:20 - So really what we think and feel every moment, has that kind of capacity to influence how…

52:23 - whether we will be adaptive or have positive outcomes or negative ones.

52:27 - So I’m not going to speak at length here, but I will say that the data from integrative mind and body practices like meditation and Yoga are starting to show very positive outcomes, to show that a systematic form of training to allow us to…

52:43 - I think Dr. Doraiswamy you also said that instead of reacting to the things that happen in our experience – responding, responding in a way where we are doing it with some awareness, with some intelligence in… we’re actually using our intelligence for good, where we don’t just react and go with the mental habits that have been destructive in the past but allow us to get unstuck and not entrenched in some destructive mental pattern and to move beyond that kind of distorted way of seeing the world.

53:09 - This will allow us to move into a more adaptive type of behavior pattern, and we’re now seeing that these biases that we all have, whether they are biases and how we avoid negative things that are happening around us or whether we have racial biases, they’re all informing our present moment awareness and how we see the world in front of us and how we see others.

53:31 - And what we’re seeing in our own data from people who practice meditation and Yoga is that these biases at the two hundred-millisecond level, this is below conscious awareness, is changing.

53:43 - And that suggests and that correlates with the positive health outcomes like perceived stress or well-being or other health outcomes like pain interference.

53:53 - We’re showing that those biases that are changing as a result of these meditation practices are a direct result of the intervention itself.

54:00 - With meaning, the more you practice the meditations, the less biased you have and the more adaptive your mental habits become.

54:08 - So I have two kind of broad questions for you based on what you’ve… the comments you’ve made Sadhguru.

54:15 - You often refer to a universal non-dualistic consciousness that is common across the majority of spiritual and contemplative traditions.

54:21 - This is an experience that you know, has the potential to alleviate all suffering, dissolve all the illusory boundaries between self and others, and unify all sentient beings through a compassionate, calm awareness.

54:31 - And I wanted to ask and I do believe in this, as a practitioner and as a scientist, I just wanted to… just to see if you could respond by saying how accessible or even relevant is this profound experience of non-duality of this consciousness that you speak of? During an unprecedented global pandemic that’s having profoundly negative psychological and social impact that may persist for months or years to come, and I have a second part – I don’t know if you want to take two parts or (Sadhguru laughs)… I’ll just… If you could hold that in mind, if it is indeed accessible, this universal consciousness in…

55:03 - even in times of this added stresses having not enough money to pay our rent, put food on the table, provide safety for our family, can people expect to benefit directly from the prescribed Yoga and other meditation practices and tools being offered through virtual programs because everything is moving virtually, right? So again Dr. Doraiswamy and Dr. Bala have talked about some of the work that they’re doing that is virtual.

55:25 - But can these virtual programs capture the value added through direct experience of a teacher, the sacred space of what you have in a temple or the practice in the context of a community? And I’ll…

55:37 - I’ll just mute myself to your response (Sadhguru laughs).

55:39 - Sadhguru: Thank you for recognizing my intellectual disability, whether I can hold two questions in my mind or not (Laughs).

55:45 - I thought I will le… leave it to Dr. Appa Reddy but you took it up (Laughs).

55:51 - So… (Overlapping conversation) Speaker (David): You don’t give yourself enough credit.

55:56 - Sadhguru: And that’s okay (Laughs). So…

55:58 - See do not look at this as a doctrine. It’s not a doctrine of Advaita, it is not a doctrine of universality.

56:08 - As a doctor, you know today that you have more microbes – bacteria and viruses and other micro-organisms in this body than the cells… human cells that you have.

56:17 - This is a fact. So right now this virus, somehow… it is not against us, this is what we need to understand.

56:24 - The virus is just looking for new habitat because we have taken out, you know (Laughs), in the last fifty years about eighty percent of the vertebrate population on the planet has come down, eighty percent.

56:32 - So those… the virus that was living happily in a pangolin or a bat, don’t have enough pangolins, all eaten up by somebody, don’t have enough bats to fly.

56:44 - So they’re looking for new habitat. Like you know, two-hundred, two-hundred-and-fifty years ago, people who are looking for new habitat came to America, all right.

56:57 - They thought it’s a new world. So all you found was a new habitat, isn’t it? From where you were, you came.

57:04 - Starting with Columbus, millions of people came here looking for a new habitat.

57:08 - I’m sure in the beginning those people who came on the Mayflower and those initial pioneers who came, of the… if hundred people landed, fifty people died most probably.

57:19 - Just the conditions and the difference and whatever else was happening here.

57:25 - I don’t know what’s the percentage, but I assume at least fifty would have died young.

57:33 - They wouldn’t have lived a full life, because the new habitat.

57:37 - So right now the virus has been just looking for a new habitat.

57:42 - It’s not from Mars. It’s been on this planet for always, but it was living within certain limited habitats happily, but as the habitat started shrinking, maybe they want to find a new habitat.

57:54 - Do you want to destroy the habitat in which you live? Only human beings wish to do that, no other creature on the planet wants to destroy the…

58:06 - you know, what is the source of their life.

58:10 - So in many ways, now human beings have become the source for this virus.

58:17 - The new virus that’s come to us. Only thing is they live so vigorously that we experience it as virulence.

58:29 - They’re just trying to live. But we are not able to withstand their vigorous nature of existence (Laughs).

58:34 - Our body is collapsing. That also we know now that if you…

58:38 - your immune systems were… are good, people are going through without any symptoms and they are fine.

58:45 - And there are various other things people are talking.

58:48 - Anyway in another one or two years it will be with all of us and we will all manage to live or some will die, most of them…

58:58 - most of us will live with the virus or virus will learn to live with us.

59:04 - It understands this is a fragile habitat, I need to live little carefully.

59:09 - Like we are beginning to understand (Laughs) now after so many years of existence with the planet – if we go on living like this, planet will get destroyed, our habitat will go.

59:23 - So similarly probably they will realize in their own way.

59:28 - So at a time like this, about psychological problems.

59:33 - What this means is, whenever there is an out… external challenge, whenever there is an external challenge in our life, that is a time that in body, mind, in every other way, your intelligence, your faculties, everything should function… function at its best.

59:50 - But a whole lot of human beings have chosen this path – whenever there is a challenge outside, they become a big challenge by themselves.

59:59 - Whenever there is a problem outside, they will become a bigger problem within themselves.

60:04 - See this may sound very – what to say – not compassionate.

60:08 - Yes, I am not here to show compassion, because I’m interested in solution, not solace.

60:14 - What do you do with solace? With solace you continue with the problem thinking it’s okay.

60:20 - No, no, no, problem must go. What we need for a problem is a solution, not solace.

60:27 - So I am not a solace peddling person, “No, don’t worry everything will be okay.

60:34 - God will take care of you. “ Well, you may go there to him very quickly.

60:41 - If that is your intent, no problem at all. What’s the problem with the virus? If you are so certain that you are going to heaven and it’s a great place, what is the problem with the virus, I’m saying? So I’m saying we have so many lies packed up in our head.

60:55 - We are not willing to face our life as it is.

60:59 - The fact of the matter is, life is the most precious thing we have.

61:03 - There is no question. Whether it’s for me or for the microbe – for both of us, the most precious thing that we have is we are alive right now.

61:15 - So we value that. But the moment you think there is a better place somewhere, you naturally want to go there quickly before me, isn’t it? Hello? If…

61:28 - If there is a really a better place somewhere else, you want to go there first ahead of me before I go and occupy the best accommodation or not? Definitely you want to go but nobody wants to go.

61:50 - So I am saying we need to stop this. We need to stop this means, how we handle our identities, we must look at it.

61:57 - You were talking about biases and prejudices that human beings have.

62:00 - What is the basis of this? The basis of this is just this? See there are…

62:07 - If you will give me a few minutes, is it okay Bala? Speaker (Bala): Yes, Sadhguru.

62:14 - Sadhguru: Because time wise… I mean we’ve still not allowed madam to speak at all, because this will take a few minutes.

62:24 - We look at human mind; the yogic system looks at human mind as sixteen parts.

62:29 - To make it simple, we will look it at… look at it as four segments.

62:34 - These are called Buddhi, Ahankara, Manas, and Chitta.

62:37 - What this means is, Buddhi means the intellect.

62:39 - Right now, modern societies think this is the only thing that matters.

62:43 - Your intellect is useful only if you have a certain amount of data.

62:48 - Without memory, your intellect is useless, absolutely.

62:50 - Am I right because you’re all into neurosciences, I’m asking you? If there is no data somewhere, your intellect is useless.

62:57 - This is just like you brought a new… bought a new computer or a new phone, no data in it.

63:04 - No data, this is as good as a brick. It’s no use.

63:08 - So the same goes for our intellect – without data our intellect is useless.

63:12 - Data is useful. You… How actively and how effectively you process your data, in the school room you will get identified either you’re smart or stupid, all right? So essentially how much data you can hold, is generally considered first rank.

63:29 - If you can hold lot of data and you can put it out on the paper out there, then they say, “You’re the smartest boy or girl here. ” But today we know, a tape recorder or a microchip can hold more data than your entire brain can do.

63:46 - There is so much memory you can store in an inanimate object.

63:53 - So it is… is it smarter than you? I think it is because these days we call phones as smart phones.

64:04 - Why would you call an instrument smart? Because it’s smarter than you obviously.

64:11 - Our idea of smart is somebody who’s smarter than us, isn’t it? So a phone is smarter than us simply because it holds more GB than you hold.

64:21 - That’s all it is. So without data your intellect cannot function.

64:26 - So how does data come into you and where does data get stored? Well, here we are looking at memory.

64:35 - There are eight different dimensions of memory.

64:39 - This is… There is elemental memory, there is atomic memory, there is evolutionary memory, there is genetic memory, there is karmic memory, there is sub-conscious, unconscious and…

64:50 - or articulate, inarticulate unconscious memories.

64:52 - There are some dimensions of memory that you can articulate in the way you live, not necessarily in the words, in so many ways.

65:14 - See your genetic memory you have, some part of it is articulate, certain parts of it is inarticulate.

65:21 - Like this every dimension of memory you have, certain parts are articulate, certain parts are inarticulate.

65:39 - That does not mean they don’t have any impact on you.

65:45 - The very way you sit and stand is determined by this.

65:50 - What… How my skin is today is simply the way it just remembers.

65:54 - The epithelial cells in my body remembers million years ago how my forefathers skin was, nothing has been forgotten here.

66:03 - So there’s an enormous amount of memory in every molecule of DNA or every cell in the body, enormous.

66:11 - Now, all this thing is being processed at some level.

66:15 - Is it happening in the brain? No, it is happening right across the body, which has set up a… a massive chemical factory.

66:25 - The most sophisticated and the largest chemical factory on the planet is right here (Referring to oneself).

66:33 - The question is, are you a great manager of this chemical factory or are you a lousy manager? That’s all it is.

66:45 - For me that is all health and ill-health is.

66:46 - If you manage this well, you’re healthy. If you don’t manage this well, you’re ill.

66:52 - Why it went wrong? Well, there are many reasons.

66:56 - Even if you’re managing a business, why it went wrong is not always because you did something dastardly, all right? It could be because of various reasons.

67:05 - Right now, the virus. It’s like, for your business the situation outside has changed.

67:11 - For your chemical factory the outside situation has changed, the contact and the transactions that you had, which was taking care of not only your economic activity and social activity, it was also transacting various ne… things that are needed for you in the form of food, in the form of microbes, in the form of various other things that were happening with the system, is a little curtailed, not absolutely curtailed, all right? If you…

67:39 - The people are saying, “When we shake hands, we were getting so much microbes and things,” life was happening, you have to just put your hand in the earth.

67:53 - You will get all the microbes you want, you can go and hug a tree, you can get all the microbes you want, you don’t have to go and shake a… shake hands with somebody or hug or kiss somebody else to get these microbes.

68:10 - You can get it in so many ways. It’s all over the place.

68:19 - So leaving that aside, the next part of the intelligence is called Ahankara.

68:23 - Ahankara means identity. This is one area of life that we have completely neglected in the modern societies.

68:30 - Identity means if you form an identity, let’s say right now you know, like you are a man or you’re a woman, this is an identity.

68:37 - The moment you think “I am a man,” you think in a certain way, you feel in a certain way and you have a certain prejudice.

68:49 - Every identity is a certain form of prejudice.

68:51 - “I am an Indian, I am an American, I am black, I’m white, I am brown,” every identity or religious identities, whatever – every identity is a certain form of prejudice.

69:01 - It is just that when you’re in a certain group of people, you don’t realize you’re prejudiced.

69:11 - When you enter other spaces, you realize you’re prejudiced or other people recognize you’re prejudiced.

69:17 - See, the worst kind of racist does not believe he’s prejudiced because he’s very nice to his own kind, all right? He does not realize he’s prejudiced.

69:32 - It’s only other people who are saying he’s prejudiced, because within that little identity what he has, he is quite fine.

69:47 - So whether it is racial, religious, national, gender or family, education, class, creed, you know all kinds of things, caste, whatever kinds of identities.

69:56 - So in India we did one thing. In the yogic culture, we did one thing.

70:02 - Before you start education for a child, because we believed from zero to twelve years of age, nothing should be taught to a child.

70:12 - A child should grow up physiologically, his body and his brain must grow to its full capability.

70:21 - Only after that you give data to the child.

70:25 - Till then he must just play, eat, sleep. This is all he must do.

70:30 - So at eleven or twelve years of age when this happened, the first thing we did was, before education comes, because education is seen as a tremendous empowerment.

70:40 - This empowerment with limited identity is a disaster.

70:42 - See right now, we know how to fuse atoms, we know how to make a nuclear bomb.

70:52 - Well, this bomb in a controlled way is energy for the world.

70:58 - In an uncontrolled way, it’s destruction. Why would I put the bomb on you? Because you…

71:04 - I am not identified with you, you are something else, all right? “I am this country, you are that country, I will bomb you;” or “I am this religion, you are that religion, I will bomb you;” “I am this race and you’re that race and I will bomb you. ” This is all it is.

71:22 - It is the identity. So this identity we fixed at an early age.

71:26 - Before education comes, because education was considered as the greatest empowerment that a human being has and education was absolutely holistic, because of that first thing is to change the identity.

71:39 - The child was made to take a cosmic identity, “Aham Brahmasmi” – that means the whole…

71:44 - my identity with the… is with the whole creation.

71:47 - Without this step, there was no education. This is the way to go forward.

71:55 - We must understand this, every evil that you see on this planet, whether it’s crime or war or every other kind of prejudice and violence that you see is essentially a consequence of limited identity, isn’t it so? If I saw you as mine, I wouldn’t be harming you.

72:12 - I think these three people are mine, those three people are not mine.

72:15 - This is the whole thing, because in… in various ways, starting with family, from there, in so many different ways, various silos of identities we have.

72:22 - So the most important thing is to create a universal identity.

72:25 - Even if it’s not a living experience for you as yet, you set up a universal identity which sets the basis to take you towards that experience, which you are referring to as… like a doctrine.

72:37 - It’s not a doctrine, it’s an inner experience.

72:39 - The next dimension of mind is called as Manas.

72:41 - This is a whole silo of memory. As I said, eight dimensions of memory are there from elemental to the conscious memory, every kind of things that have happened on this planet, even in the form of evolution, in the form of creation in some way is wr… is there within you.

73:06 - It may not be articulate, but it exists. Life has captured the memory of everything that’s happened on this planet.

73:12 - That is how… That is the basis of your evolution, that is the basis of your intelligence, that is the basis of the variety of faculties that you have.

73:22 - Suppose as an experiment – because you guys are always doing experiments – suppose you get ten men or women and feed them, let us say dog food.

73:33 - Do you believe in three months they will become like dogs? No such thing will happen, because there is evolutionary memory here.

73:42 - No matter what you do, this memory is not going to go away.

73:46 - Because it’s not articulate, you cannot interfere with it, it’s solidly there within you, it can’t be taken away from you, it cannot be altered.

73:55 - So you cannot go back, you may behave like one for some time, but you cannot become that, simply because the evolutionary me… memory is solidly installed in you.

74:05 - So this Manas which is the silo of memory and the Ahankara and the intellect are connected.

74:10 - Without these three things… the reason why human intellect has become so destructive, when I say destructive, it is only because of empowered intellect in the form of education.

74:18 - Please tell me on this planet, are educated people destroying this planet or illiterate people destroying this planet? We are today admiring illiterate people as very low carbon footprint, isn’t it (Laughs)? It’s only the educated which are destroying.

74:31 - Education should’ve been the solution. Unfortunately, it is the basis of every problem simply because our identity has not been settled.

74:38 - We don’t have a universal identity; we have a limited identity.

74:43 - As I said earlier, I will stress on this once again, every prejudice, every bias, every crime, every war is a consequence of limited identity.

74:56 - All the negative things we are doing are essentially limited identity.

75:00 - “Me versus rest of the world” actually, this is what most human beings are.

75:05 - Initially, they think “My nation versus your nation, my race versus your race,” but if you really boil them down, you will see “Me versus rest of the universe. ” Me versus universe is a bad competition to get into.

75:21 - Once you get into this mode, you being stressed and anxious is natural.

75:25 - You must be stressed. Otherwise I will be disappointed.

75:27 - What is the point of me doing lifetimes of Yoga to become like this (Laughs) if you do nothing and you’re also like that? No, no, you must understand well-being has to be worked at, it doesn’t just happen, all right? It doesn’t just happen.

75:48 - So the fourth dimension of our intelligence is very, very important.

75:53 - This is called as Chitta. What Chitta means is it’s a dimension of intelligence which is unsullied by memory.

76:00 - The first three dimensions, the power of that is in the memory.

76:06 - But memory is a great possibility. We are who we are – we are talking to each other, we know a language, we can communicate, we can do so many things.

76:16 - We are individual people only because of our memory.

76:18 - But memory is such a tremendous possibility, at the same time memory is also a boundary, isn’t it? You are my friend, how? Because you are in my memory.

76:26 - I look at somebody else. “Oh, he’s a stranger. ” How is he…

76:29 - How did he become a stranger? He’s not in my memory.

76:32 - So memory is also a boundary. So most people never hit the limits of their boundary.

76:38 - This is the reason the longing to go beyond that does not come.

76:43 - Only when you touch the limits of your boundaries, that is when the longing to transcend will come.

76:48 - And transcendence is the only way to transform, there is simply no other way.

76:55 - So Chitta is that dimension of intelligence within you, which is untouched by any kind of memory.

77:01 - In many ways it’s the source of creation within you, because if you eat a piece of bread, it is becoming human flesh and blood.

77:09 - How does this happen? There is an intelligence which is capable of transforming a piece of bread into a human being right there, isn’t it? So Chitta is that dimension – when people touched Chitta, then they spoke certain things which unfortunately people who don’t have a living experience of that made doctrines and dogmas out of that, and that also there are many opposing doctrines and dogmas.

77:33 - When there is no memory, there is no conflict, isn’t it? Suppose you don’t remember a thing and I don’t remember a thing, can we fight I’m asking? No any kind of memory, we cannot even exist.

77:47 - So in a way, Advaita as a doctrine means that you don’t actually exist as an individual.

77:52 - So don’t approach this as a doctrine, because it will be a very negative impact on life.

78:01 - Then people will start saying, “Everything is Maya, don’t worry, nothing will happen.

78:07 - Nothing is real, virus is not real. “ Right now a whole lot of people are arguing, life itself is not real they’re arguing.

78:17 - Well, they’re arguing – that means they’re alive.

78:20 - But they’re denying that, because they got Advaita as a doctrine, not as an inner experience.

78:25 - See what is an inner experience and what is a concept are two different things.

78:30 - So do not conceptualize deeper dimensions of life, because the moment you conceptualize, your conceptualization comes from your intellect.

78:35 - Your intellect functions only with limited memory.

78:37 - That limited memory can never ever grasp that which is beyond memory.

78:39 - So Chitta in… in the yogic culture, in a very mischievous way, the yogis speak among themselves like this, “If you touch your Chitta, if you find access to your Chitta, God will become your slave. ” That may sound very arrogant, but they are not wrong.

78:55 - What they are saying is, the source of creation is, you can play with it.

79:00 - Once you can play with the source of creation, how you are is entirely determined by you.

79:07 - Your very persona is carefully crafted, you can be one-hundred percent yourself but at the same time, you clearly know the boundaries are consciously set up for function.

79:17 - Once there is no need for function, you can just dismantle the whole boundary.

79:24 - So this idea of Advaita is a bad idea, but the experience of Advaita is the ultimate liberation.

79:28 - This differentiation has to be there. Otherwise what is an ultimate experience which is beyond all memory, if you memorize that, that is going to be very negative.

79:37 - And this is one reason philosophies have made people negative; phi… philosophies have made people fatalistic; philosophies in many ways have crippled humanity simply because they assume something which is not yet their experience.

79:47 - You can only… from whe… You can only take the next step from where you are.

79:50 - If you assume something else which is not in your experience, then you will become hallucinatory.

79:54 - So I’m sorry if I’ve said too much (Laughs).

79:58 - Speaker (Bala): Thank you, Sadhguru. Speaker (David): Thank you Sadhguru.

80:01 - Speaker (Bala): Thank you, David. We move on to Dr. Vijaya Appa Reddy, and when I was looking at some of the data at the CDC website, also the NIMH website, I was shocked to learn the suicide as the second most cause for, you know, people dying between… in the adolescent age specifically, right.

80:18 - So I think it’s very important that we hear from this expert who has spent her life lobbying for removing stigma and also removing disparities, Dr. Appa Reddy.

80:27 - Speaker (Dr. Appa Reddy): Thank you Dr. Bala and namaskaram Sadhguru.

80:30 - Sadhguru: Namaskaram. Speaker (Dr. Appa Reddy): I’m truly honored to be… to speak in the presence of Sadhguru and this distinguished panel and greetings to the audience.

80:38 - As speakers have mentioned before, the unique combination of public health crisis due to the pandemic, the economic problems, the isolation and the school disruption has caused numerous problems, unprecedented problems all over the world.

80:46 - It has not spared anyone. In the midst of all this, children and adolescents are usually overlooked.

80:54 - Their problems are overlooked, because adults are so busy with… engrossed in their own problems, because they are depressed themselves.

81:03 - They’re fearful, they’re anxious, they’re worried about their daily bread.

81:07 - So it’s important to keep our children and adolescents and help them.

81:11 - Even infants can react to the chaos that’s going on.

81:14 - We have a whole field of infant psychiatry where infants react to what’s going on and we think they don’t.

81:19 - As far as when you come to older children or young preschoolers or even school age, they can present as very clingy, regression, they can express lot of anxiety.

81:27 - It can be sleep problems; it can be… I’m struggling with my microphone, excuse me.

81:36 - It can be fear, anxiety, depression. With old…

81:39 - With adolescents from age twelve on, they can be left without supervision.

81:43 - So they can be impulsive, acting out, substance abuse.

81:46 - The reas… And the other part of the population is those who already have mental health problems and substance abuse problems.

81:53 - There can be resurgence of both, because this disruption of services, a lot of these children and adolescents get services in school which is disrupted.

82:03 - There may not be alternative services, there may not be enough childcare and we… studies have shown that most of the problems, mental health and substance abuse problems in adulthood start with children… in childhood and in adolescence, and adverse life episodes in childhood and adolescence are one of the most important factor for adult substance abuse.

82:22 - So it’s that important for us to keep our focus on our children.

82:28 - So what do we do? Of course you know, as parents we have children.

82:33 - It’s important that we talk to our children, very clear cut.

82:37 - When they’re younger, you can talk to children from you know, from two years of age if they’re vocal, very clear cut instructions, storytelling, even for simple things like putting on masks or social distancing.

82:48 - You can explain the pandemic in very simple terms.

82:50 - The adaptation, you will have to adapt in a different way.

82:54 - They… you can create your own bubble of two or three families or friends, where with social distancing they can interact with one another.

83:04 - The families can have joyful times, happy times.

83:07 - You can do outdoor activities. So you don’t have to limit your life completely.

83:13 - You can do community service from home. I have a lot of families who sew masks for the community.

83:19 - So life doesn’t have to… You just have to adapt and do things in a different way.

83:23 - So life doesn’t have to come to a standstill.

83:25 - We don’t have to live in fear, we can still live with what… what we have left.

83:30 - As far as grief, if there is a loss of a loved one, which is possible now, the child can… an adolescent will not express it.

83:38 - So it’s important you talk to them, adolescents are very secretive.

83:43 - So this will prevent the, you know, further problems from setting in.

83:47 - If… If there is depression, if there’s resurgence of emotional problems or substance abuse problems or new problems, then it’s important that either if the family can’t deal with it that you get help.

83:56 - Now, in my ex… what I have seen as Sadhguru has mentioned, almost…

84:02 - I live in the deep south and almost every patient I see now, adult, child, even teenager asked me about Yoga, meditation, breathing.

84:12 - So there is a tremendous movement to look inward that it’s not just… they’re not just looking for this pill or an external fix which is a huge movement.

84:27 - Something I’ve tried all these years, suddenly they’re so receptive to it.

84:33 - And of course, they want to start with very simple meditative techniques and simple inward…

84:38 - looking inward. And so that’s been… we were talking about compliance and I think the pandemic has brought on the compliance.

84:46 - I just want to touch a little bit on – since that’s my passion – individuals with developmental disabilities.

84:51 - Major individuals with developmental disabilities as autism and intellectual disability, it can be mild, moderate or severe.

84:56 - And majority of them live in their homes with their parents, and there’s a certain population that live in group homes.

85:04 - And this population is having many more problems because autistic individuals are anxious.

85:08 - They want a certain regiment, they’re rigid in certain ways.

85:11 - And with individuals with intellectual disability, they may have adaptive and social skills but cognitively there are limitations.

85:17 - But as Sadhguru mentioned, individual’s intellectual disability, even with IQ of ten, twenty can be gainfully employed if we open our hearts and our minds to it.

85:26 - And the reason it is a challenge with this population is about fifty percent of them have medical and mental health problems.

85:32 - So it’s… So they’re already struggling with that and then they shut down of programs, counselors and with the pandemic on top of that, we’re seeing a huge resurgence.

85:38 - Sadhguru: Maa can I… can I, can I ask you a question about this Maa? This is something that I’ve always looked at.

85:44 - Why is this intellectual disabilities largely in… in a whole lot of cases are also physiological problems or physical problems happen, what is that mechanism which is making this happen that intellectual disability is translating into some kind of physical disability also? Speaker (Dr. Appa Reddy): Right, inherently they are… a lot of them have physical…

86:05 - they have weakened immune systems. That’s what studies have shown.

86:09 - And they seem to have a lot of congenital defects, whether it’s asthma or cardiac disease or allergies, multiple.

86:15 - So it weakens them medically. And they also have a lot of developmental problems, ADHD, depression, and it’s difficult to say how much of this is the development of the brain and genetics, how much of it is… could be the environment that they are growing up, the challenges that they’re having to face in life, but the end result is that there is a tremendous increase… there’s a tremendous percentage of them who have mental health and physical problems, and as you said they’re very tied together.

86:51 - It’s hard to separate out one from the other sometimes.

86:55 - And there is substance abuse problems in individuals with autism.

86:58 - Again because their social skills are poor and we’re seeing a resurgence of that, because they’re not supervised adequately.

87:04 - In the group homes we see the individuals with intellectual disability or autism or severe developmental problems have tremendous behavior problems.

87:12 - So, my question to you Sadhguru is, and as far as dealing with children, I deal with…

87:17 - from infancy on working with mother-infant diets, to preschoolers to school age to teenagers, and with individuals with intellectual disability.

87:25 - What would you recommend as far as Yoga, meditation and breathing exercises, which go together I know, for individuals with intellectual disability and autism and for children as young as possible? Sadhguru: Maa, as you very well know that this is not just one category.

87:42 - Intellectual disability does not fall under one category.

87:45 - Each individual in that is a separate category by themselves.

87:48 - There are some who are able to take instructions, there are some who are physically able to do certain things that we tell them, there are many who cannot take instructions or even if they can take, they’re unable to do any of those things.

88:00 - So these aspects are there. This you know, thousands of si… cases like this have come to me but generally, what I found was initially we have attempted to do certain things.

88:12 - But I would say just to give some kind of a context, I’m saying let’s say a person who is considered to be intellectually normal, physically normal kind of person.

88:23 - Let’s say if I can teach something to that person in one hour, this may take hundred, two-hundred hours.

88:31 - So the question is always about creating such dedicated people who are willing to spend that much time on one individual.

88:40 - Now, if a normal intellectual person comes, I can put thousand people here and teach all of them – that same thing in one hour.

88:48 - But now if such people come, maybe I’ll have to take only three or four people and then work with them continuously.

88:53 - So we always found it is very, very challenging.

88:56 - So we came up with another alternative for autistic children.

89:00 - I… I don’t have all the medical study things off…

89:03 - off the cuff, but I can send it to you. You can look at it and contact the doc… our doctor who works with this.

89:10 - So when I realized that a whole lot of them are not able to perceive the instruction or translate the perceived instruction into action for some… for whatever their disability is, then we came up with what is called as a Klesha Nashana process.

89:25 - It is a simple… a practice. See this is something that people have not understood.

89:28 - Yogic practices are there for those who are capable of practicing.

89:31 - That also as I said, every human being is in a different level of intellectual capability or disability, each one of us.

89:37 - So what you can teach to one person, another person may not be able to comprehend and practice the same thing.

89:44 - It will take many years for them to come to that place.

89:49 - Some… right away I may teach them something today, but another person will take two years of experience before they come to be able to perceive that.

90:00 - If you teach that dimension to them when they are not ready, it will not only go waste, it is also possible if they simply do it with force, they can even cause damage to themselves.

90:19 - So this is very calibrated kind of process.

90:21 - So there is another dimension to Yoga, which is ritualistic.

90:24 - Yoga is purely about inner experience; it is not a religious process.

90:26 - When I use the word ritual, it unfortunately gets collec… connected to, what to say…

90:31 - a religious process. But I would say all of us brush our teeth in the morning.

90:37 - It’s a ritual that we have taken up in our life that we have to brush our teeth in the morning.

90:43 - There are some people who are (Laughs) not taking up such ritual.

90:48 - It has its consequences. Everybody knows this.

90:51 - From another time if you look a few generations ago, that was the situation and today it’s very different.

90:59 - So we took up that ritual and it works. So we developed certain rituals with which those who are completely incapable of taking instructions or they are not able to translate the instructions into action within themselves, even if you teach the same thing every day, they will do something else, something else – some of the children.

91:23 - So after seeing this, we developed some simple rituals that we perform for them.

91:28 - And (Laughs) you know, this is a totally unexpected result.

91:32 - We did not expect such a result. We…

91:36 - We did this with a certain intent. But the results that came out are quite absolutely amazing and impressive.

91:40 - I… I don’t have all the results, but autistic children have responded to these rituals in a very, very pow… you know, positive way.

91:48 - So translating a practice that you could do from within so that somebody else can do it to you from outside is one possibility.

92:01 - But once again, because you can’t categorize all of them in one category, one… you can’t put all of them in one basket, there is a issue about that also.

92:17 - But it could be done reasonably well, we could categorize them into four, five… you know, segments and try to apply a certain type of ritual to them and it will make a difference.

92:32 - So having said that, well, I feel, the most important thing for a child who has come with such a intellectual disability is a more accepting society.

92:46 - That is what is key to all this. It is just that suppose, let us set a physical standard that we will take an Olympic gymnast and say, “This is the standard human being. ” Then all of us are cripples, isn’t it? Or you say, intellect means you must be like Albert Einstein, then all of us are cripples.

93:02 - So without setting standards, looking at every life for what it is and doing the best that we can do around that is something that has to come into a social fabric.

93:15 - Without that I don’t think there is… any… any science or any Yoga, which is a perfect something for children who have come like this or for any human being for that matter.

93:28 - More accepting human society, more accepting consciousness within the human being is I think the key factor…

93:34 - Then there are many ways in… I think may…

93:38 - I’ve seen some of the parents who have such physically challenged or intellectually challenged children, they have come up with their own wonderful rituals for the children, their own methodologies of their own.

93:50 - I think that’s the only way you can really address that.

93:56 - Though there are some standard methodologies, I think the most important thing is an absolutely accepting human beings and human society is the fundamental to address that issue.

94:15 - Speaker (Dr. Appa Reddy): In a regular population of children and adolescents with no acute emotional issues, how young can we teach them Yoga and meditation? Sadhguru: A very…

94:31 - A very simple form of Yoga could start at the age of seven.

94:36 - We have children’s programs like this – well-structured children’s programs.

94:39 - But there are other ways to teach Yoga when they are two, three years of age.

94:45 - That is simply by using certain sounds. I must tell you from my experience.

94:52 - About maybe sixteen or seventeen years ago or a little more than that maybe, when we first started the Isha Home School, one early morning I went for the… their assembly where children have assembled and they’re all sitting like this (Gestures) in… there we make sure that they sit on the floor cross-legged.

95:14 - All our class arrangements are like this. They have tables, but they sit on the floor because sitting cross-legged has very, very…

95:26 - in yogic sciences, cross-legged sitting and your brain development are very, very connected.

95:31 - So they have to sit cross-legged. But they were all like this, like that (Gestures).

95:37 - I looked at these children and said, “Why are they like broken tops, they can’t sit quiet. ” And I said, “Let’s do one thing.

95:49 - Daily twelve minutes, we will just do the seven notes of music – sa, ri, ga, ma, pa, da, ni, sa. “ In a certain, you know, there are various complex arrangements of that.

96:00 - At a certain level, we will start twelve minutes a day.

96:06 - You won’t believe after two-and-a-half, three months I went there, they’re all sitting unmoving like this (Gestures).

96:15 - This is what it can do, just the sounds. So if you want to start early at three, four years of age, the best thing is sounds without physically doing anything because a child can always do it… overdo it or make an excess out of what is being taught to them, they can do various things.

96:34 - But sounds are safe. You can just play it around them and ask them to repeat that which they love to do, and it will also bring a certain sense of rhythm, their ability to learn language will be greatly enhanced if they understand the nuances of sounds.

96:53 - This is something that’s missing. We’re just teaching language.

96:56 - There is no instruction about the nature of sound and how it behaves within us and how we can use it.

97:08 - If this aspect of sound comes into everybody, they would all pick up any language like that effortlessly.

97:14 - And especially in cultures like this, like United States where people are just stuck to one language.

97:21 - If you want to live in India, you must know at least four to five languages, otherwise you can’t live there (Laughs).

97:31 - It’s… Every few kilometers that you drive, you have to speak a different language.

97:39 - But when you’re stuck to one language, there are lots of studies… we’ve always seen this as Nada Yoga.

97:45 - There are lots of today, you know, modern medical kind of studies, which say that using or… using a whole range of vocabulary or using a whole range of sound systems within you is very key… very significant for your brain development.

98:01 - This is called as Nada Yoga that you use the sound to develop… develop your system both physiological and psychological development.

98:10 - This can be done at the age of two-and-a-half to three itself, it can start.

98:18 - I wanted to ask you one more question and I also have one question for Murali.

98:28 - The question is… see we firmly… we very clearly see, this I know from my experience, we very clearly see till a child is four-and-a-half years of age, the stresses and tensions that the parents go through, particularly the mother directly influence the development of the child.

98:52 - It may not be happening in the child’s presence.

98:55 - Wherever it happens, it impacts the child. This is something we are very conscious of.

98:59 - And you know, we feel that this is something that must be managed.

99:05 - This is why post-pregnancy there was so much protective atmosphere, because when you’re feeding the child, you must be in a certain state.

99:13 - Only then you’re bringing forth a better human being than yourself.

99:18 - Otherwise you will bring so many things. But today in modern life, people are drinking alcohol, they’re smoking.

99:25 - Within few days or weeks, they’re back to work going through all the tch, whatever stresses and turmoils that they’re going through.

99:35 - In your opinion that you have studied this, what do you think is the impact of this, you know, this dimension that…

99:43 - I mean today if you speak about it, you… it looks like you’re talking against women.

99:50 - It’s not about being against women. We need to understand if we look at man and woman biologically, the significance of a woman is, a woman’s body has more, deeper responsibilities of life than a man’s body.

00:06 - Man’s body is designed to protect and procure.

00:10 - A woman’s body handles a whole new creation.

00:13 - Well, bearing a child is not just a simple act of reproduction.

00:16 - This is a whole new creation of a new life within her own system for which her chemical fluctuations are much more than in a man’s body.

00:24 - Variety of fluctuations are there because it has to go through a whole change, which may also work to her disadvantage if she is not in ideal conditions compared to a man, but this does not mean it’s a disability or a disadvantage.

00:37 - Actually a woman’s body is invested with a deeper responsibility of life.

00:44 - We exist here, you and me are here only because of that.

00:51 - Taking that into consideration, the way we’ve structured our society right now – everything that a man does a woman has to do, in this are we losing out something very vital in producing a more competent, more capable and more… better next generation? Speaker (Dr. Appa Reddy): Interestingly, when… infant psychiatry is a field by itself.

01:13 - I have seen that it’s more related to the… when… there have been studies done in mothers who have postpartum depression for example, and some of them are working mothers and some of them are mothers who have chosen to stay home.

01:25 - So it’s the condition of the mother. So it’s not necessarily whether the mother is you know, employed outside the home.

01:31 - It depends on the mental state of the mother.

01:33 - And you can have severe postpartum depression with a mother who is just home with the baby and with the, you know, with the toddler.

01:40 - And then… what they’ve shown is when the mother has severe postpartum depression or substance abuse or any other problem which can happen anywhere in the world, the infant can actually even regress the milestones of the toddler, especially the infant before one year of age can regress.

01:59 - And if intervention is not done in time, the regressed milestones can become permanent.

02:04 - We’ve seen infants who were like ten months, twelve months of age regressed about for… six months and when intervention was not done in time, the delay stayed on.

02:12 - So I would say, it is important to keep in mind the mental status of the mother and the father.

02:18 - Now that the father is… you know, there are postpartum depressions in the father also now, with the modern society moving so fast and which was overlooked in the past.

02:28 - Maybe it was there in the past, but like you said, they were surrounded by grandparents and great-grandparents.

02:37 - So I think it’s more… more than the fastness, what the society does to the mother and the father now, is important regardless of where they work or where they are.

02:48 - Sadhguru: Yes, I did not mean to say only because mother is going to work, I mean to say for some, the family itself is a big challenge.

03:02 - For some, the workplace is a challenge. The idea of keeping a mother in that state when the child is very young or an infant, some kind of protective thing because in a family, people may be conscious that she’s a mother.

03:23 - When she walks on the street, nobody is conscious that she’s a mother.

03:27 - In that context I’m saying. It’s not that the work.

03:31 - Probably a work could be a good oul… outlet for a whole lot of mothers, they may feel better going to work than staying home.

03:37 - That’s a different aspect. I’m not talking about work versus home.

03:40 - I’m talking about as you confirmed that the impact that a mother or both the parents have but essentially mother, what her mental state is not only when she’s with the child, she’s somewhere else, even then there is a parasympathetic reaction in the child.

03:52 - This is what the yogic sciences see. This is my personal experience of watching what happens to certain children.

03:58 - So that how much damage and if we want to create a better next generation, this is a area that we need to pay much attention to.

04:10 - That’s what I meant. Speaker (Dr. Appa Reddy): Yes, absolutely.

04:13 - With, with…At one time, there were more extended families and there was more of a buffer system, you know, for the mother, for the baby, for the child.

04:24 - Now, everywhere all over the world, we moved into you know, just nuclear households or single parent households.

04:29 - And so we’ve lost some of that buffer. And the world has become more complex as we’ve all talked about, the issues have become more complex.

04:37 - And all that can influence, how the mother or the mother and the parent because whatever the parent experiences is going to be transmitted or what’s happening in the world is transmitted to the baby, the newborn too.

04:51 - Speaker (Bala): Thank you all for joining this exciting panel.

04:56 - And I just wanted to summarize that there’s so much of information coming from so many websites and so many organizations and associations.

05:09 - And the best education that I got was from the National Institute of Mental-Health website itself.

05:17 - Very simple things that parents can do or the friends can do to identify things, like for example, what are the warning signs of suicide? You know, this morning I heard a doctor from All India Institute of Medical Sciences committed suicide by jumping out of tenth floor.

05:32 - There are certain things like this just brings this to focus.

05:35 - There are so many other things that goes unnoticed.

05:38 - So at least the take-home messages for some people should be you know, go to the NIMH website and look at what are the things that we can look for, for example the warning signs of the most and the other extreme of the mental health problem which is suicide.

05:56 - And… Murali I think Sadhguru had a question for you.

06:01 - Sadhguru: About this suicide which is becoming a big issue, there are 800,000 people committing suicide in the world that means literally every forty seconds, somebody is taking their own life.

06:11 - In India in 2018, the statistics say 1800…

06:13 - I’m sorry, 18,600 children below eighteen years of age committed suicide.

06:16 - Out of this, some 7200 or four-hundred (7200 or 7400) children were below fifteen years of age.

06:21 - A time when they should be bubbling with life, they’re taking their life and most of these deaths below eighteen are all because of, you know, the force or the demand of education system, most of it – nearly eighty, eighty-five percent unfortunately.

06:32 - So (Laughs) we have a killing education system unfortunately, which definitely needs to be looked at.

06:38 - This extreme step of taking one’s own life comes to a place essentially because we have not differentiated between what is a psychological process and what is a life process.

06:45 - This is the fundamental flaw in the society today that people are mistaking their psychological process to be an existential reality.

06:52 - So psychological process is our drama, we can conduct it whichever way we want.

06:55 - Unfortunately, most human beings are experiencing their psychological process, their complexity of thought and emotion as a reality by itself.

07:03 - Or in other words, we are mistaking the shadow for the real thing.

07:11 - And because the shadow is distorted, we think everything is gone.

07:18 - So this… for this, you need Yoga in the world.

07:22 - I’m glad to hear that even young people in…

07:27 - I don’t know where deep south, I don’t know if it’s Texas or Florida that she was mentioning that even very young people are today looking at more profound or more lasting solutions than… than just taking a pill or taking a drink or doing something else.

07:43 - That is a good sign, but it’s unfortunate it takes a pandemic for people to see that we need to do something about our lives.

07:53 - But whichever way it comes, I think we must make use of it now, particularly for children, teenagers, to set up a more healthy existence for themselves – more healthy psychological existence.

08:10 - If this has to happen, a distinction between what is psychological and what is existential has to arise within oneself.

08:18 - Murali you were saying something about cellular age.

08:21 - Tch I… I would like to understand how do you measure cellular age apart from the chronological age of a person? Speaker (Murali): It’s a great question.

08:33 - We don’t have a perfect answer. I think what I was mentioning was using brain scans, they were able to look at shrinkage of the brain and slow the rate of age related brain shrinkage.

08:47 - So those studies that I mentioned describing the effects of Yoga on the brain were not looking at cellular aging as much as they were looking at the size and shape of specific structures in the brain like the frontal lobe, like the hippocampus that’s involved in memory, etcetera.

09:03 - The way to measure cellular age, of course is… there’s a few different ways.

09:08 - One is you can look at telomeres, which are kind of like the shoe laces that keep our chromosomes intact, and there are some specific enzymes related to the telomeres that change with aging, and some people have shown again that meditation, mindfulness, those kinds of practices can slow aging at that level of the telomeres.

09:24 - So they can keep the telomeres from breaking up from getting sort of frazzled at their ends, etcetera.

09:32 - You can also look at you know, physiological indices of aging such as your muscle strength, hearing, vision, you can look at cardiovascular function, lung capacity, gait and balance.

09:42 - So there are some accepted ten or twelve physiological indices of aging.

09:47 - And you can see if these indices of aging for example, change with exercise or change with Yoga, but we don’t have a perfect a biological cellular clock like, you know, you can’t go to a lab test and say, “I want to know what is my cellular age as opposed to my chronological age,” there is no such test as far as I know.

10:18 - Sadhguru: I happen to… (Overlapping conversation) Speaker (Murali): I haven’t had one (Sadhguru laughs).

10:23 - Sadhguru: I happen… I happened to meet a German doctor who had all kinds of… a house full of gadgets, all kinds of things.

10:29 - I don’t know what he checked in me, because (Laughs) I was kind of obligated to go there.

10:34 - I didn’t want to be there. And he did all these tests and after three days of study, he gave me a report saying my cellular age is twenty-five (Laughs).

10:44 - I don’t know what… what that meant. But I was just wondering, is there any substantive science or it is just the general vitality of the body and mind by which you’re judging or is there any specific indicators which clearly say the cellular age is different from the chronological age? Speaker (Murali): There are some biological markers, but none of them are perfect.

11:06 - They show great variability from person to person.

11:08 - And you know, I’m not sure any of them are really proven to be an aging marker.

11:14 - So you cannot, you know, use a test to predict how long someone is going to live, for example.

11:21 - So we’re very poor… doctors are very poor at predicting how long someone’s going to live.

11:25 - Sadhguru: I will die at twenty-five (Laughs).

11:27 - Speaker (David): Or three billion moments (Sadhguru laughs).

11:30 - Speaker (Murali): Three billion moments exactly.

11:32 - Sadhguru: Oh, I must get that calc… If somebody asks me how old I am, I can say I’m three billion moments.

11:39 - Please update me (Overlapping conversation)… update me every week David, what is the number of moments so that I can tell them the exact age (Laughter).

11:48 - (Overlapping conversation) Speaker (David): One thing to that at least what the data says about how meditation is affecting those brain scans, the morphology of the brain, because we know that it atrophies – after age twenty-one, all of our brains atrophy unfortunately.

12:04 - But the evolved… there’s been about eighty different studies that focus on the actual structure of the brain and in relation to meditation practice.

12:11 - And looking at those correlations, the specific areas of the brain that Murali also mentioned, the hippocampus and parts of the frontal lobe are protected, are seemingly protected by meditation practice.

12:19 - So when you look at the meditators’ brains, the more one meditates, the more… form of meditation that is reported on a cushion, the less atrophy you see in specific regions of the brain that are active while you’re meditating.

12:32 - So those areas that are responsive for say, higher order cognition or meta awareness, awareness of awareness or body awareness in terms of better awareness of what’s happening in the body.

12:41 - Those are the areas like the frontal polar cortex and an area called the insula are very sensitive to the practice of meditation apparently.

12:51 - That not only active while you’re meditating, but they… the meditation appears to be associated with protecting those… the atrophy of those specific regions.

12:59 - Sadhguru: If I can say something about this.

13:02 - See, the English word meditation does not define anything.

13:03 - So right now, tell me if I’m wrong. I…

13:06 - From whatever I had some conversations with…

13:07 - There is a Sardar doctor you know, in Harvard Medical Center, what’s his name? Speaker (Bala): Sathbir Singh.

13:14 - Sadhguru: Ah. When I spoke to him I understood largely, most of the studies that has been done on meditation has been done on Buddhist monks.

13:24 - We need to understand that in the yogic culture, what we teach to monks and what we teach to other people are very different.

13:32 - There are certain types of meditations which only settle you down, settle you down, settle you down into deeper and deeper states of… well, we call this stillness.

13:43 - That is the purpose of that. There are other types of meditations which bring a combination of both stillness and dynamism within you.

13:51 - I think certain unique things have been recorded with the Inner Engineering practices.

13:54 - I think Bala would be more qualified to speak about it than me, about how the dynamics of the brain is much more, at the same time there is a level of stillness within, which I feel…

14:04 - which is actually very important for you to be competent to function.

14:07 - It’s not just about sitting still – that you’re still, at the same time you’re dynamically active.

14:14 - If Bala can say something about that. Speaker (Bala): Yeah, so Inner Engineering practices with the eight-day meditation retreat that happened at the McMinnville, Tennessee, I think in 2018 March, the study was led by professor Sadhasivam from Indianapolis University, and we had done MRIs at both Indiana as well as in Boston.

14:32 - So their set of data was analyzed. And what we found was – this is functional MRI – in a small set of people about I think twenty people or so with controls, pre and post meditation and compare them to controls and what we found was their executive motor network was highly active in addition to all the networks.

14:54 - So what we are finding was all the networks are extremely active.

14:56 - What I heard from other neurocognitive scientists for example, Alvaro Pascual-Leone from neurology, he mentioned that in general, when you do a task, only that particular you know, connection will get active and all the other subside – for example the DMN, the default mode network.

15:13 - Whereas here you found almost all networks including the DMN was very active.

15:18 - So we’re getting some help to write this work.

15:21 - It is mostly a pile of data and we’ll probably expand it on others.

15:29 - So this was highly important for us to know and when we asked Sadhguru, “Why do we see this?” And he was saying that there’s a lot of dynamism that happens.

15:47 - Speaker (David): I could add one other thing about that because the… indeed the data that I talked about – the eighty different studies are very cross sectional in nature.

16:05 - They talk about meditators from all different types of traditions and different practices.

16:10 - We are only now starting to target very specific practices and look at the differences between those practices.

16:16 - And one of the things that is manifesting is network dynamics that I think Dr. Bala is referring to, is the shifting and what we see in meditators in most styles of meditation, most meditators, advanced practitioners usually do different styles of practice, whether it’s a focused concentration practice or an open awareness practice or a love-and-kindness or some other type of meditation – across all types of practices you do see different dynamics.

16:45 - But one thing that seems to be common across all of them is this ability to flexibly switch between different networks in a volitional way and that is very unique.

16:54 - And that usually is indicative of some sort of higher order network like a frontal parietal network, something like this, which is very high-order-cognition, which allows you to know not only where your mind is at any moment, but to flexibly switch and not get stuck in any one particular state.

17:17 - That… Those kinds of dynamics are very unique to the experience one has as a meditator.

17:21 - Sadhguru: If… If all of you together, if you arrive at (Laughs) – for lack of vocabulary I’m saying, suppose you prescribe what is an ideal brain? What should be happening? If it is an ideal, ideal brain, what should be happening? I can send you some people who have such a brain.

17:35 - I can make it like that I’m saying. Speaker (Bala): You know, there are some things that are happening.

17:44 - So I can probably collaborate with David and talk about it in future (Laughs). We’re trying to develop a center and probably it’ll be… which should be much more…

17:55 - Sadhguru: As David mentioned, every aspect of brain activity can be volitional.

17:58 - So if you’ve said, “This is what should be happening,” and what causes it, if you tell me, I will make that happen in… not in one person, in many people.

18:12 - Speaker (David): That’s wonderful. That’s exactly the unique aspect of meditators who have advanced practice to be able to volitionally move between states, because most of us is fluctuating all over and it’s hard to capture you know, what the brain state, specifically during meditation really looks like, because even you know, most meditators are fluctuating at all times.

18:26 - So you’re taking a snapshot and it’s an average of what’s happening.

18:29 - So yes, it’s a… that’s wonderful to have people who can control where their mind goes and to look at how stable it is.

18:37 - Speaker (Bala): Thank you. Speaker (Dr. Appa Reddy): I just…

18:41 - I want to take a minute, Sadhguru. I just want to ask you a question in return for the question you asked me.

18:52 - As far as you know, trying to protect and help our younger population up to age four, of course you have to work with the mother and the father who have emotional problems or substance abuse or problems which can in turn affect the baby or the infant and the toddler.

19:20 - What… Since we can go beyond three or four years of age to… with the child you know, the sounds and all those things.

19:36 - Of course, part of the infant’s problems or toddler’s problems could be genetic because genetics plays fifty percent almost according to the studies in emotional issues like ADHD or depression or anxiety, sometimes it can start really early.

19:52 - What can we… For parents, because they are so important unless they are helped, they can’t help these infants and toddlers.

20:04 - Is there some… a special mode of teaching for their meditation or Yoga where that they interact with their infants and toddlers that you would suggest? Sadhguru: See if…

20:18 - I mean a parent is just another adult human being, all right? If he’s in a state where he doesn’t…

20:24 - there is no anger, agitation, irritation in his day to day life, that is the best atmosphere you can create for a child.

20:35 - It’s not only in terms of social behavior, just what’s happening within you itself, the child is absorbing all the time.

20:42 - Because we know from our experience (Laughs), many creatures – not even human beings I’m saying – children are very sensitive creatures.

20:50 - Leaving them, other creatures like, you know, cobras, various other… especially those creatures who have venom in them, they are very sensitive to your chemistry.

20:58 - Depending how your chemistry is, accordingly they will respond to you, not because of your physical behavior.

21:06 - Similarly, a child is not responding only to your nice controlled physical behavior.

21:11 - He’s… He or she is responding to the very way you are.

21:16 - So, every human being has to work at it. Especially in this country because people are generally going for counseling or consultation before they have children.

21:33 - They’re planning their children, at least many of them.

21:36 - For those people, before you have a child, it is very important that as a parent, these are the things you must do – a simple Inner Engineering process that you must do, must come into the society because without… unless you’re going to offer another life, a fresh life which is better than you – in some way it’s a forward step for humanity.

22:17 - There’s simply no reason to reproduce first of all (Laughs), because we are not an endangered species right now.

23:06 - We are too many. So we can choose whether to have an offspring or not.

23:21 - Only if we are confident that we can give that kind of time and dedication and create an atmosphere where a child will come up in a wonderful way, if we don’t have that commitment, we should not go for it.

24:07 - As… As I keep saying to everybody, if you want to have a child, it’s a twenty-year project.

24:51 - Are you ready for a twenty-year project? Then you go for it.

25:13 - If you’re not ready for a twenty-year project, get a dog (Laughs).

25:21 - Speaker (Bala): Thank you Sadhguru. Thank you Dr. Appa Reddy, Dr. Vago.

25:32 - I think Murali had to leave, he had another meeting and just has been gone.

26:14 - Sadhguru: Namaskaram. Thank you very much for all of you.

26:25 - If I have said something very abrasive to any of you (Laughs), please… because you know, my understanding of life is completely different, because I know only one life – this life (Referring to oneself).

31:11 - I don’t know anything else. So I only speak from this.

32:34 - Thank you very much. Speaker (Bala): Thank you so much.

36:22 - Namaskaram. Speaker (David): Thank you. .