Books About the Healing Effects of Yoga

Integral Yoga Hatha by Swami Satchidananda

Published in 1970 this is one of the first books that helped me to understand what the Hatha Yoga Asanas (Postures) were all about: Not another athletic competition but a healing, spiritual practice.

I appreciated Satchidananda’s advice to be gentle in your practice and to let your body tell you what it was ready to do on any given day, as well as his easy-to-understand writing.

Satchidanada demonstrates the postures and after each pose he explains the benefits and healing effects.

He recommends a program of poses designed to give you the most benefit in the shortest time based both on how much time you practice each day and how long of a period of days, weeks, months, and years you have been practicing. I adopted his program for my own practice and for my students as the core program around which I teach these and other poses.

Swami Satchidananda was a direct disciple of Swami Sivananda, a medical doctor and saint, who wrote close to 300 books.

Swami Satchidananda went on to teach many doctors and therapist, such as the three listed below, Dean Ornish, MD, Sandra A. McLanahan, MD, and Nirmala Heriza, Hatha Yoga Cardiac Therapist.

Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease: The Only System Scientifically Proven to Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs or Surgery

Published in 1990 Ornish’s book broke down the medical establishment’s myth that the only effective treatments for heart disease were drugs and surgery.

Ornish first named his study, “Effects of Yoga and a Vegetarian Diet on Coronary Heart Disease,” but found too much resistance  by doctors to refer patients to anything with weird-sounding words like yoga and vegetarian. So he changed the name to “Effects of Stress Management Techniques and Dietary Changes on Coronary Heart Disease.”

While Ornish does not give the benefits for each yoga posture he recommends, his results are very important to the understanding of the healing effects of Yoga.

In the study at the end of one year on the program, arterial clogging had reversed for 82% of the patients.

Ornish’s program includes not just the regular Yoga postures, but also Yoga diet, breathing, relaxation, meditation, and attitude.

On one interview Ornish made the statement that most people were interested in diet and exercise because they were easier to measure. He said that it was possible that the sense of isolation could be a greater contributing factor to heart disease: Isolation from oneself, isolation from others, and isolation from a higher power.

To me Ornish’s book/research was one of the most important contributions to health in the last century because it proved that you can heal yourself by making healthy lifestyle choices instead of using drugs and surgery.

Cancer researchers have found that Ornish’s program is effective to prevent and reverse cancer. In an article, “Healthy lifestyle triggers genetic changes: study,” a group of men with prostate cancer were put on Ornish’s program and in three months “the activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down…”

Conclusion: While it is true that you can’t change the genes that you were born with, Research like this is proving that you can change the behavior of your genes by healthy life style choices.

Surgery and Its Alternatives by Sandra A. McLanahan, M.D. and David J. McLanahan, M.D.

This is a favorite of mine. Written by a brother and sister team this makes an excellent reference book as well as a wonderful health book with a thorough explanation of preventative practices as well pre and post surgical advice.

Dr. Sandra worked closely with Swami Satchidananda at his Integral Yoga Ashram in Virginia and with Dr. Dean Ornish. In this book she shares her introduction to yoga to heal her back, and her use of yoga meditation to reduce the severe pain of kidney stones.

Dr. David is a surgeon, who has given a lot of his time to serve those who do not have the means to receive good care. He does an excellent job of explaining your options and encouraging surgery in some cases and alternative treatment in others.

How can you make a wise decision when you don’t know your options? This book gives you all the information you need to make the best decision. Over 200 operations are covered along with a summary for each condition under the headings of Prevention, Alternative Medicine Approaches, Conventional Medicine Approaches, and Surgical Approaches.

Under Alternative Medicine Approaches to Hemorrhoids the part of Practice Yoga Daily says, “Sitting for long periods increases pressure in the veins of your anus and rectum, and dries out the stool from the excess heat generated. By turning the body into the various yoga positions, this venous congestion is relieved…The shoulder stand, abdominal lifts, forward bends, spinal twists, and yoga seal are particularly recommended.”

This book is especially valuable now as medical charges continue to rise and as more evidence comes to light of the profit driven influence behind doctors recommending surgery.

An article, “Overtreated: Surgery too often fails for back pain” by By LAURAN NEERGAARD states that “Even though only a fraction of people with back pain are good candidates for surgery, complicated spine operations are on the rise.” And so are the costs and damage done by the surgeries.

As a result of reading Ms Neergaard’s article, I began some research into the questionable conflict-of-interest relationships many surgeons are involved in. This led me to the work of Dr. Charles Rosen who founded the Association for Medical Ethics. On this site Dr. Rosen says, “Unfortunately, there are just too many surgeons who are being paid by the very companies whose products they are using.”

Looks like more than ever McLanahans’ book can be of value to you.

Dr. Yoga: A Complete Guide to the Medical Benefits of Yoga by Nirmala Heriza

Dr. Yoga is a wonderfully organized, clear, beautifully written book on the healing effects of the Yoga Asanas (postures).

This is one of the easiest books to understand and with which to easily find what you need to know about healing your condition.

Sub-titled: A Complete Program for Discovering the Head-to-Toe Health Benefits of Yoga this book lives up to its claim…until you get to “Part Three: Nutrition”, which was not written by Ms. Heriza but by the a hospital nutrition specialist at Cedars-Sinai where Heriza works. Without speculating upon why this was done, I will say it was a mistake.

Here is a book with a foreward by Dean Ornish, M.D., and Medical Consultant Dr. Sandra McLanahan, M.D. neither of whom recommend a diet that includes white sugar, white flour, or alcohol, written by Nirmala Heriza, who has worked with both of these doctors and is a disciple of Swami Satchidananda, and now allows someone who admittedly deviates from the diet the Swami recommends to give the advice on diet and include alcohol, white flour and white sugar in the recipes of a book called Dr. Yoga.

I assume that Heriza doesn’t agree with the diet given by the nutrition specialist. On page 150 in one of the many inspiring Case Study: Physician Testimonies, Dr. Sandra McLanahan, talking about a man who healed himself of  hypertension, says, “He also changed to a vegetarian-based diet, eliminating meat, cheese and sweet drinks. He began drinking only water, eating breakfast regularly and replacing white flour and white sugar with moderate amounts of complex carbohydrates, such as oatmeal and brown rice.”

My advice to you, if you really want to use the Science of Yoga to heal yourself, is to skip “Part Three: Nutrition”, and go directly to the advice of any of the great yogis on what to eat, as reported in the first three books listed above, and elsewhere.

Excluding “Part Three: Nutrition”, this is a very good and useful book and I  would recommend it to anyone.

A Tip

Back when I was trying to discipline myself to practice yoga daily, one of the activities that worked for me the best was to read about the benefits of yoga and the individual asanas. Even when I felt too tired to do anything but lie on the sofa with a book, if I would read about the benefits of a particular posture, I would feel a surge of energy and just had to get up and do it. I aways felt better for it.

This post is a result of a request by musician Peter Berquist for “…book titles that discuss the healing effects of yoga practice.”