Exercise daily. Lack of exercise causes fatigue; regular exercise removes fatigue. When you exercise, you expend some energy, but you get back much more- if you don’t overdo it. Proper exercise vitalizes the body; overexercise and violent exercise cause fatigue. The body should be charged with only as much energy as it can stand. For example, 2000 volts of energy sent through on ordinary electric bulb will burn it out, but will not harm a bulb made to stand that much current. Similarly, the body absorbs a beneficial amount of energy from proper exercise, but overexercise causes fatigue because it creates toxins faster than they can be handled by the system.
After forty you should be careful not to undertake any form of exercise for which your system has not been kept properly conditioned. Walking is good, and swimming is excellent; but strenuous exercise should be avoided. It will only cause greater fatigue, because it overstrains the capacity of the body to handle the sudden expenditure of energy. By gradually strengthening your body you can enjoy strenuous exercise, but a person of lifelong sedentary habits should not try to be an acrobat at sixty; he will burn out his system.
Sufficient sleep helps to give energy. I think six or seven hours of sleep is enough. After that you don’t usually sleep; you drug the body. It loses energy instead of accumulating it. Sleep ten hours and you will feel depleted of energy. You won’t want to work the rest of the day; you will just drag yourself around.
Fatigue can also be removed by oxygenation. When you are tired, instead of heading for the kitchen for a snack, go out in the fresh air for ten to fifteen minutes and exhale and inhale deeply, off and on, several times. Don’t breathe hurriedly, or with force, but in a relaxed way, very slowly and deeply. After this time spent in the fresh air, your fatigue will be gone.
If you were to fast a whole day, and every hour get out in the fresh air for about five minutes and do some deep breathing during that time- exhaling poisons, and inhaling oxygen- you would not miss food at all. Because of habit, it may seem in the beginning difficult to feel satisfied without food, but after you get used to it you will find that you have received from the oxygen all the energy you need.
Lahiri Mahasaya and other great masters knew how to operate the law that renders food totally unnecessary in sustaining the body. But he used to say that eating serves a good purpose, for God has created food in abundance and variety, and hunger is part of the plan that keeps the cosmic show going.
Extract from the book “Divine Romance” by Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda.
