A GOOD MARRIAGE

Articles In This Section:

· YOGIS AND SEX

· SELF REALIZATION AND SELF INDULGENCE

· A GOOD MARRIAGE

· DIFFERENT YOGA POSITIONS

· PERFECTION OF SPIRIT

Sex, as we all know, is not all there is to a good marriage but it is one of its cornerstones. A warmhearted partner mated with a cold, unresponsive one may be willing out of loyalty to put up with a physical starvation diet, but is bound to be adversely affected and sometimes even emotionally destroyed. Or else, the marriage itself is destroyed when once the rejected partner, having had enough of indifference, turns elsewhere for affection. Contrary to what many Westerners have been brought up to believe, primness, excessive reserve, overemphasis on decorum (the so-called virtues of the "good" woman) often are not virtue at all but a mask for deep insensibility, for an inability to love and be loved, to give and to share, or even for a need to destroy the mate, castrate him physically, so to

speak, as an expression of hostility to the opposite sex. The sexless male—not as rare as many imagine—is the same kind of emotionally impoverished individual.

Yoga spiritual education frees the student of the straight-jacket of prudishness and of hostility. But long before such emotional growth has been achieved certain obvious changes may be brought about through the daily performance of the proper asanas and mudras. As we have said so many times at various points in this discussion, there can be no underestimating of the interplay of the physical and the spiritual in the human makeup. Therefore putting your physical house in order will do wonders for you in other ways too.

Sluggish sex urges are often traceable to inadequately functioning endocrine glands and a resulting hormone deficiency. The gonads, or sex glands, would be the offenders here. But the gonads, like the other endocrines, are themselves controlled by the pituitary gland which is known to secrete about a dozen hormones that stimulate the proper functioning of all the other seven pair. It may very well be, therefore, that the sexually indifferent person's basic trouble lies in some malfunctioning of the pituitary, a condition which Western medicine would treat by means of expensive hormone injections or equally expensive pills. The Yoga method, of course, is through exercise.

Turn back to the chapter on basic asanas, Chapter XI.

You will find that the Headstand, or Sirshasana (Page 142), if practiced regularly, will stimulate the pituitary gland by sending a vast flow of blood to the head as your body briefly defies the laws of gravity. Thus stimulated, it will then immediately wake up the gonads, which will begin to respond by producing hormones of their own. Needless to say this is not the only beneficial result of the Headstand (its various therapeutic effects are detailed along with directions for executing it) but it happens to be the effect which concerns us here.