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Mumbai’s visual environment is saturated with signs of traditional spirituality
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Are
you feeling depressed? Is your high blood pressure, acidity or asthma affecting your quality of life? Stuck in a job you hate, wondering why you
drag yourself there five days a week?
The
simple solution would be to consult a physician or a psychiatrist. Recent
studies, however, have revealed a trend where more and more people visit
religious places and seek the aid of spirituality in curing a slew of ailments.
Mumbai,
the commercial capital of India, is fast becoming a booming market for saviors
of souls in distress, and a growing number of young new-agers are trying a wide
array of spiritual treatments to cure themselves.
Mumbai’s
visual environment is saturated with signs of traditional spirituality repacked
for this burgeoning audience by a new class of pop gurus. Satsang, or religious
discourses, have become a regular feature of Mumbai’s socio-cultural circuit.
Community halls, public gardens and auditoriums are packed on weekends and
holidays with spiritual seekers.
New
Age Gurus with Professional Academic Backgrounds
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Many new age gurus have a very different academic background
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What
is remarkable about these new age spiritual gurus is their academic
achievement besides their knowledge of human psychology. Most of them
have high academic qualifications and could have secured a lucrative
professional career.
The
resume of Guruji Rishi Prabhakar shows his expertise in the fields of computers,
aeronautical engineering and management. His range of activities include
enlightening people on meditation, raising their consciousness and helping them
lead healthy lives.
Well
versed with both Eastern and Western philosophies, the guruji is a silent
meditator having a large number of disciples. Rishi Prabhakar has chosen the
route of social work. Currently involved with the development of certain
villages in Karnataka, he has been successful in eliminating tobacco and alcohol
addiction from these villages.
Rishi
Prabhakar has also originated a Siddha Samadhi Yoga training programme (SSY): a
14-day programme with a three-hour session every day. The programme, which
involves imparting a meditation technique, claims to have helped people overcome
stress and improve their memory.
Dr.
Jayant Balaji Athavale, founder of the Sanatan Bhartiya Sankruti, left his
lucrative practice as a doctor and established the institution to create an
awareness for India's rich spiritual heritage. His institution holds over 1000
weekly satsangs in its 600 centers in Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Andhra
Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana and Delhi.
The
spiritual meetings held by the Sanastha are also aimed not only at the
dissemination of spiritual knowledge, but also at providing explanations for the
various rituals performed more often without knowledge of their meaning.
Guru
Rajendra Garg, who has been holding Amritvani satsangs in Mumbai, is an
engineering graduate from VJTI. He claims his education has helped him reach out
to people from all backgrounds, young and old, educated and illiterate. "I
try to speak to people in a language that they understand", he said.
Shri
Mataji Nirmala Devi, a graduate of medicine and post graduate in psychology,
developed and promoted a system of meditational practices called Sahaja Yoga.
Rejecting religion as a confining mental construct, she describes Shaja Yoga as
a self transformation technique designed to activate "the energy that
Hindus call Kundalini shakti, Muslims call Ruh and Christians recognize as the
presence of the Holy Ghost." Her meetings in Mumbai and other cities are
reported to attract an attendance ranging between 50,000 and 1,00,000 people.
Religion
Prolongs Life
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Muslims gather for prayer at Shahi Jamaa Mosque
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Research
published recently from the National Institute of Health Care Research in the
USA has established that the odds of survival of people who rated higher on
measures of public and private religious involvement were 20 percent higher than
those people who scored lower on such measures.
The
analysis of 42 research studies investigating the role of religion in health in
which 126,000 people were interviewed has also established that regular
attendance at one's mosque, church, synagogue or Buddhist monastery is related
to a significantly longer life.
Asfaque
Memon, who suffers from mitral valve fibrillation (narrowing of the heart
valve), has undergone open-heart surgery twice. On the third occasion, instead
of surgery, he relied on meditation and prayers. "I offer Namaz
(daily prayers) five times a day and recite the Noble Quran. This gives me peace
of mind and keeps my heart stable," said Memon. "It is now four years
since I was advised to undergo surgery for the third time. By the grace of the
Almighty, today I am stable".
A
recent study from the University of Texas confirmed that long-term survival
after open-heart surgery was significantly linked to positively attaining
comfort from your religion. The authors of the Texas study also suggest that
religious-minded people perhaps suffer from less anxiety about death than the
non-religious, thanks to a comforting belief in life after death, and this in
itself could explain a better mortality.
Cancer
Patients Resort to Spiritual Healing
Faith
does heal, says a group of cancer survivors who continue to lead active and
fruitful lives after battling advanced stages of the disease, not just with
drugs alone, but with prayers and spirituality as well. The survivors, convinced
of the role played by faith and a positive attitude in contributing to their
healing process, have now set up a support group, 'Can Support', to help other
patients overcome their fears and fight the disease.
Among
these survivors, Priyanka developed Hodgkin's lymphoma when she was barely
thirty-one. The cancer was detected at a fairly advanced stage, known in medical
parlance as stage 4. "My first thoughts were for my daughter, then five
years old. Gradually I started concentrating on God. From this stage I began a
process where I became an active participant in my healing process. I then
started curing my own thoughts and concentrating on the positive side of
things," she said. After all, she claims, it is your thoughts that are
eventually having a result on the final outcome of the cure.
"I
saw that people at similar stages of the cancer deteriorated rapidly. The
reactions of different people to chemotherapy are different. The reasons are
mainly the thoughts that need to be channeled to discover your inner spiritual
self and harmonize with it," She said.
In
fact, even a premier medical institution such as the All India Institute of
Medical Sciences in New Delhi is now convinced of the positive effects of
spirituality in healing. The cancer center at AIIMS now regularly organizes 'Art
of Living' courses for patients, as it feels these courses help its patients
better cope with disease.
Professionals
Agree
Many
psychologists these days tend to be less dismissive of belief and faith.
Interestingly, Mr. Ayyar, President of the Indian Psychiatric Society's Western
Chapter says, "during a recent lecture, I found only one self-confessed
skeptic in a gathering of 42 medical practitioners. The rest said they believed
in some higher power.”
"My
own personal experience with techniques like Vipassana has led me to a more
lenient view of spirituality, compared to say, that of Freud or Marx who
described religion as the opium of the masses," Dr. Ayyar adds. "It's
all right as long as it does not harm and doesn't make patients
dysfunctional," says the Mumbai based psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Choktani.
"In fact, general psychiatry tends to be quite liberal these days, using a
variety of traditional and conventional interventions to help patients.”
Eminent
physician and cardiologist Dr. Nadeem Rais concurs saying, "The urban style
of living has led to stress induced ailments. Besides medication, I always
advise my patients to offer regular prayers and meditate, as this has a soothing
effect on the mind."
Donah
Zohar, in her book, 'Spiritual Intelligence: The Ultimate Intelligence',
writes, "Neurologists have identified a "God Spot" in our brain
that triggers our need to search for meaning in life. And with the decline of
conventional religion, we are seeking this meaning in our working life instead.
No surprise, really, when most of us spend more than 40 hours a week
there."
The
British work guru Nick Williams in his book, 'The Work We Were Born to Do' writes,
"As a society we have valued the logic of the head over that of the heart
for a couple of hundred years, and people feel confused because they have
everything that's supposed to make them happy and they aren't happy. They
wonder, 'where else do I look?’”
Spirituality
and the Life Force
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Religious and spiritual interventions can help when all else has failed
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Another
recent study performed by the National Institute of Health Care Research in America involving more that 21,000 representative American
subjects found that those who never attended church or other religious places
had almost twice the risk of death in the nine-year follow-up period, compared
with those who attended more than once a week. This translated into a seven-year
difference in life expectancy at the age of 20 between those who never attend
and those who attend a religious ceremony of some sort more than once a week.
This
is echoed by the cover story in ‘Psychology Today’. The author, David
Relkin, a professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, argues that
contemplation, meditation, prayer, rituals and other spiritual practices have
the power to release the 'life force' at the deepest levels of the human psyche
that secular interventions cannot reach.
Bloom,
A. writes in ‘School for Prayer’, "Meditation and prayer may
also be used in a variety of ways to facilitate therapeutic change. Meditation,
for example, has been found to result in greater relaxation, disidentification,
alertness, awareness, empathy, sensitivity, and openness to change."
Indeed,
new evidence shows that religious and spiritual interventions can help when
everything else has failed. The meaning to life that religions offer and the
sense that all injustice will ultimately be corrected by God, seems to bring
hope in the face of despair and thus in coping with psychological stress due to
various ailments.
The
Art of Living Foundation founder, Sri Ravi Shankar, says, "Every human
being is good. If someone is not behaving well it is because of stress and
ignorance." He added that every incident in life should be treated as a
learning process, even if the experience was bad. You forget the incident but
always keep the lessons alive," he said.
"When
we don't pay attention to matters of the heart, we feel a vacuum in our lives,
also because we are following the mind, which is constantly looking for and
exploring something new," Ravi Shankar said.
Sources:
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Healing Research Volumes I - IV.Daniel J. Benor, M.D
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A. A. Sheikh, & K. S. Sheikh (Eds.), ‘Eastern and Western Approaches to
Healing: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Knowledge’. New York: John Wiley &
Sons.
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Bloom, A. (1980). ‘School for Prayer’. London: Dartort, Longman &
Todd. New York: Phoenix Press/Walker.
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Byrd, R. C. (1988). ‘Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in
a Coronary Care Unit Population’. Southern Medical Journal, 8I (7),
826-829.
M. Hanif Lakdawala
is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai, India. He is the Creative and Research Director with CLEAR VISION, which is involved in producing programmes to create public awareness about different communities and social problems. He is also a visiting faculty member teaching journalism at Akber Peer Bhoy College, Mumbai.
