An Act of Yoga - The Basic Condition for a Happy and Healthy Life

Walter PFLUGER

Impulses-Concepts-Coaching - OD & Strategy, Walter Pfluger - holistics, Germany

*Correspondence to: Dr. Walter PFLUGER, Impulses-Concepts-Coaching, OD & Strategy, Walter Pfluger - holistics, Germany.

Copyright © 2023 Dr. Walter PFLUGER. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Years ago, I once observed a small duckling on an Alpine river during spring floods. The floods had washed her out of the protective nest on the shore into the raging river. The duckling was desperate and turned his head back and forth, looking out for help.

I feared that she would be torn away, becoming a victim of the floods.

The little duckling was rapidly driven along the shore by the raging stream.

At a sudden, it pounced out of the water, quickly flapping with her small wings. It had been able to save herself on the shore.

How did she succeed?

Through an act of yoga, putting her entire will on one point. That was a happy moment for me and for the little duckling.

Annotations
We have to see that we have experienced and will experience such happy moments many times in our lives. Otherwise, the flow of time would have torn us away long ago.

This power of the little duckling corresponds to the concentrated will-power of the freedom-seeking, freedom-wishing, freedom-loving person, who surrenders to nature and obeys the power of yoga.

It is important that we consciously recognize and use this concentrated power of yoga in the future to guide us on the way to personal freedom as the basic condition for a happy and healthy life.

The Will to Freedom and to Life
This short story is inspired by the yoga exercises in the Vedic tradition of Patanjali. He insists on the very principle in the economy of life that asks us to act “anti-cyclical”, going against the cycle and to learn following our own path. Otherwise, we risk being swept away.

Individuation in the tradition of CG Jung requires that we must not swim with the big current and the main-stream. We need to recognize, where the current is going to take us, and then see how we can escape its power to take a leap to the safe shore.

The realization of man in freedom can only succeed if we concentrate our will to jump out of the raging stream of life, and walk our own way of life in freedom.

The conscious recognition of the human will to freedom is the principal goal of yoga and the psychotherapy in the tradition of Freud, CG Jung and Gustav Adler.