Where the bath meets the meal

The bath and the meal must not touch

After bathing in cold water in the morning, breakfast should not be taken for at least forty-five minutes.

The tear ducts, stroked while bathing {{x3}}

At the sides of the eyes there are two small openings, which are called the lacrimal ducts.

From stroking these slowly thirty times daily while bathing, the circulation of tears and the pressure inside the lens of the eyes will be proper, and glaucoma or cataract can be avoided.

Even after glaucoma has come, many patients have already taken benefit from this treatment.

For those from whose eyes water keeps flowing continuously, this too is an excellent treatment.

Slowly, and thirty times, and daily, and while bathing — all four are part of the instruction. It is attached to the bath because that is when it will actually be done; a practice with no fixed hour is a practice that is skipped.

Meditation in vīrāsana

From doing meditation in vīrāsana, concentration power — that is, the power of one-pointedness — increases, from which memory increases.

Children get much benefit in study. It is good for attaining Hari.

Those who get fits: teaching them this āsana, besides their Neurotherapy treatment, will be of much benefit.

Note the words besides their treatment. This is given as an addition to what is being done, for a condition in which nothing is ever to be replaced.

The doorbell

Some people fit musical bells at the door.

If, while one is asleep in the morning, the milkman rings this bell, then on some people getting up with a start, bells begin to ring by themselves in their ears — because the sound of that bell is very sharp.

From this, vertigo — that is, giddiness — can also come.

So in houses one should fit only a low-sounding buzzer, and not a musical bell.

That is a rule about a fitting on a wall, and it is a perfectly serious one. It belongs to the family of rules about how a person is brought out of sleep, which is why it sits beside the darkness at waking and the thirty seconds on the edge of the bed. A body pulled upright out of deep sleep by a sharp noise is doing, in one second, everything the rising rules were written to slow down.

Ask about it. Who wakes you, and how? The answers — a bell, an alarm across the room, a grandchild, a phone on a metal table — are cheap to change and nobody has ever thought of them as medical.

Cramp, and the yawn

On cramps — that is, ainṭhan — coming, from taking both hands above the head and snapping the fingers, the cramps go away. This is a matter of experience.

Likewise, on a yawn coming, from snapping the fingers in front of the mouth, the mouth remaining open, or the jaw getting stuck, and so on, will not happen.

Given as experience, and to be passed on as experience. It costs nothing, it is done in two seconds, and this is a matter of experience is the honest label. Keep the label on it.

Hair dye — the argument in full

Every time hair dye — that is, the means of changing the colour of the hair — is used, whether it be made of mehndi or otherwise, its chemical enters the blood through the pores of the skin, and keeps coming in the urine for at least forty days.

From this dye a kind of cancer can also come.

The reason. All the rubbish of the blood has to be taken out by the kidneys alone. That the dye comes in the urine means that the kidneys are forced — besides their normal work — to do extra, that is useless, work for forty days to remove this dye.

Just consider: those people who for many years use dye every month, or again and again — how much extra work will their kidneys have to do? Then why should they, the kidneys, not become weak? And if the kidneys become weak, why will cancer or other big diseases not come?

Note the form of the last part. It is put as a chain of questions, not as a series of assertions, and it should be given to the patient in that same form — as a thing to consider, in the words it is given in.

This is the rule patients resist most after the food rules, and they resist it for reasons that have nothing to do with kidneys. Meet that honestly. A woman of fifty-five who has dyed her hair every month for twenty years is not weighing a physiological argument; she is being asked to look older in front of people she works with. Say so. I know exactly what I am asking, and I am not going to pretend it is a small thing. Then give the argument whole and let her decide, and do not make her compliance a condition of your attention. A rule imposed on a patient's dignity is a rule that ends the course.

The nerve between the toes

Between the big toe of the foot and the first finger there is a nāḍī, which, if it is pressed, the feeling of viṣaya-bhoga — that is, the fulfilment of desire — is suppressed, or comes to an end.

It is for just this reason that sādhu people used to wear the thumb-pegged khaḍāū — the wooden sandal — from which that nāḍī was pressed, so that such feelings did not come.

Given as the explanation of an old practice, and taught as such.

The Gayatri and its twenty-four syllables

The Gayatri mantra is of twenty-four syllables.

It is said that from pronouncing it purely, the twenty-four valves, twenty-four large nāḍīs and twenty-four small nāḍīs that are in our body — all will open.

Note it is said. The phrase is part of the teaching and is not to be removed. Give the rule with the phrase attached and the student learns something more useful than the rule itself: the difference between what is asserted and what is reported.

One thing about recitation is not merely reported, and it is worth having ready for the student who thinks a counted verse is arbitrary. When people recite aloud at the traditional pace, their breathing settles at almost exactly six breaths a minute — and six a minute happens to be the rate at which the rhythm of the heart and the rhythm of the breath come into their closest agreement, and at which the body's own pressure-regulating reflex works at its most sensitive. The effect is produced by the length of the line. A verse counted in syllables is a breath counted in seconds, wearing other clothes — which is the same discovery the bedtime 4–8–16 makes from the other end.

One leg over the other

Women and girls should not sit or sleep with one leg placed up over the other.

The reason. From sitting or sleeping with leg over leg, a one-sided pull comes on the muscles of the organs below the navel, whose effect will fall on the blood circulation as well. Chief among these organs are the uterus and the ovaries. From the blood circulation in them being spoiled, white discharge, the menses coming early or late, or uterus prolapse and so on can happen.

So everyone should sleep with straight legs.

Until the habit of sitting like that is given up, the suggestion is to keep changing the legs turn by turn at regular intervals, so that an equal pull comes on the muscles of both sides.

Three things in that rule are routinely lost, and each of them is the part that makes it usable.

It ends with everyone. The rule opens by naming women and girls and closes by saying that everyone should sleep with straight legs. Both halves stand. The sleeping instruction is the one that completes Table 2 above, and it applies to the whole household.

It carries its own fallback. Until the habit is given up — the rule does not assume that a woman who has crossed her legs since she was twelve will stop on Tuesday. It gives her something to do in the meantime: change the legs, turn by turn, at regular intervals. A rule that contains its own interim version is a rule that gets kept, and a student who drops the fallback has made the rule twice as hard and half as likely.

It is about a one-sided pull. So the remedy for the interim is symmetry, not stillness. Say it that way across the mat: If you must cross them, do not always cross the same one on top.

The gap between the night meal and sleep

The night meal should be taken by such a time that there is a gap of at least two hours between eating and the time of sleeping — so that the food which has been eaten in solid form becomes thin like water and is digested properly.

If intercourse is performed immediately after eating, then both husband and wife will get a gastric problem — that is, a stomach problem — because the blood which is needed for the digestive system is being used for other functions.

This is one instruction, and it is given here in one piece. Both halves rest on the same reasoning — that the work of digestion is going on for a definite stretch of time after a meal, and that it needs what it needs. The rule of the night meal is also a rule of the bed: it is why a household that eats at half past nine cannot keep the 10.30 rule without moving the kitchen first, and it is the point on which the sleeping rules and the eating rules meet.

Everything about the meal itself — what is on the plate, how it is chewed, when the water is drunk, what is kept away from, what changes in illness — is Food as Medicine, "Food as Medicine". What belongs here is the clock: finish eating two hours before you lie down.