November 1987

Alternative Healing From Affirmations to Yoga

AIDS spins our sense of fear. Fear is a force generated by a chakra (psychic nerve plexus) below the muladhara chakra at the base of the spine. But a new breed of AIDS victims and counselor/healers say AIDS should spin the anahatha heart chakra of love and compassion. Unfortunately, the paranoia is thick. PWAs(person with AIDS-acquired immune deficiency syndrome) fear societal shunning, the pain and what seems an inevitable death. Society fears PWAs, even children. And since it is mostly a sexually transmitted disease, many adults fear the AIDS virus time-bomb may be ticking away in them. Even celibate monks or nuns sequestered away in remote monasteries could acquire AIDS from blood transfusions. The registration form for Satchidananda Ashram in Virginia, USA, asks "Do you have AIDS or ARC-[AIDS related condition]?" Tens of thousands have died worldwide. Hundreds of thousands more unknowingly have AIDS for it takes several years to incubate and become detectable in the human body. It is not, as cultural bias said, a homosexual disease. It is a virus, intelligent enough to live inside the body's immune cells. Thus protected from immune system destruction, it slowly destroys the immune system itself. It open the gate for a phalanx of illnesses that invade the weakened body, leading to death.

Hindus may feel safely insulated from AIDS. They're not. While AIDS is grinding the sexual revolution in the West to a halt, sexual freedom in the East is snowballing. Youth sexual activity is rampant in India and Malaysia, both countries with easy access to prostitution. To deny the spectre of AIDS is like denying the million abortions performed on Hindu women every year.

AIDS became a supercharged word in 1981. Now called by some an epidemic, a plague, it is the focus of huge amounts of medical establishment money and mind power searching for a pharmacological cure. But compared to the 1901 flu epidemic that killed 21 million people, AIDS is relatively contained. More people will contract skin cancer from lying on the beach than will turn up positive with AIDS.

As ugly as it appears, AIDS has served to reawaken and revitalize some old wisdom of the human spirit. More than any other terminal illness, it has catalyzed an abiding awareness of how our karma, mind and spiritual states effect our body. While mainstream science is racing for a drug cure, alternative holistic, yoga and transpersonal disciplines are guiding PWAs into an accepting, perceptive and even correcting mind view of their body state. It's an approach of compassion and psychic wisdom rather than fear and artificial biological tampering.

While only a few alternative healers are claiming remission of AIDS, there are remarkable cases of PWA's diagnosed as long as five years ago, presently glowing with health and vitality-the average survival rate of a PWA is eighteen months. The alternative approach has also paved a way for a graceful, conscious death. Death, being a transition from physical embodiment to an unbroken continuity of mental and spiritual advancement is an important moment. The thoughts and mental conditions held in the mind at the moment of death transition greatly influence where we will function in the astral world and also some characteristics of our next physical birth. Counseled PAWs are approaching death serenely and spiritually.

AIDS treatment alternatives range from affirmations (positive, affirming statements that are impressed into the subconscious mind which controls all involuntary body processes) to body therapy, nutrition, ayurvedic herbology, visualizations (vivid imagery that subconsciously counters the disease) and yoga meditation and asanas. Alternative healing is being offered through a network of centers and health shops, seminars such as Sally Fischer's "The AIDS Mastery Workshop" where if you can't afford the fee, you get in free, and books: notably Healing AIDS Naturally and Psychoimmunity & the Healing Process. Many teachers draw from personal experience. Sally Fischer's 13-year old son cured himself of Hodgkins disease through a combination of alternative healing and allopathic medicine. Louise Hay, healing author and counselor, states she cured herself of terminal vaginal cancer through affirmations, visualization and nutrition. She says, "Our thoughts are powerful tools we can use to create our reality and change our lives. When we think a thought, it comes back to us as an experience. By literally changing a thought, we can change our experience."

Janet Vincent, co-director of the Academy of Natural Healing in Santa Fe, New Mexico, told Hinduism Today: "I have worked with a patient in our local hospice program who was an AIDS victim. I am a massage therapist and touch is extremely important to a person whose body has failed them, and in a society where most people's fears have them keep a goodly distance."

Touch is a key concept. Most people aren't aware that when you touch someone you are transferring into their subtle astral body the pranic and mental contents of your mind and spiritual body. Of course, that can go both ways: positive, healing energy or negative, manipulating energy. Healers working with AIDS patients, whether they work with their hands, crystals or herbs, are conduits for these subtle energies which directly effect the astral body. The astral body adjustments then echo into the physical body.

Many healing teachers correlate subconscious emotional conditions to the mind-cause of AIDS: lack of love or repressed guilt. But Neil Stansky, diagnosed with AIDS 3-1/2 years ago, and now a yoga instructor specializing in teaching PWAs, told Hinduism Today, "I view with suspicion anyone who assigns with certainty a mind/body connection to disease. I do not doubt that one exists, but I find it arrogant that someone could explain my disease with some made-up model and then tell me that I could heal myself by undoing this model."