“We all have an inner teacher, an inner guide, an inner voice that speaks very clearly but usually not very loudly. That information can be drowned out by the chatter of the mind and the pressure of day-to-day events. But if we quiet down the mind, we can begin to hear what were not paying attention to, We can find out what’s right for us.” –Dean Ornish
Coronary artery disease is actually very simple. It is a wear-and-tear phenomenon that is due to repetitive injury. Imagine a busy road that is used every day by heavily-loaded trucks, cars, and buses in the heat of summer, the freezing cold winter, and the heavy rains of fall and spring. Slowly but surely, the pavement will crack an erode, and if the traffic is not stopped once in a while to allow the damage to be repaired, the potholes will get so bad they can become dangerous causing accidents and injury. In the same way, our arteries are subjected to repetitive injury that ultimately leads to cholesterol narrowings, or atheromatous plaques, which can, over time, lead to a heart attack.
Heart disease can be reversed by restoring the “ease” in dis-ease. Long before the heart attack, the arteries are already in a dis-eased state, or out of balance. It is important to note that before any physical abnormality in the blood vessel, the function of the blood vessel was already out of equilibrium.
The analogy I often use is that when you approach another person with a simple question, if everything is in balance, you will get a polite, informative, and truthful response. That would be “appropriate behavior.” If there are mitigating circumstances in that person’s life that create an imbalance, however, that same question asked exactly the same way might cause the person to be rude, refuse to answer, or even give misleading information. This kind of behavior is dysfunctional and inappropriate because the person was in a state of dis-ease.
If we think of coronary artery disease in this way, we can connect the dots to understand how yoga can reverse heart disease. When we practice yoga, we are in fact modifying our lifestyle in order to retrain our arteries to function normally. This application is what I like to call vascular reconditioning. All in all, understanding the disease process allows you to take meaningful action to affect your own health at a much deeper level. You then have the ability to create an environment in which treatments have the best chance of working, providing not only temporary relief from symptoms but lasting improvements in your health and quality of life.
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