For good mental health, the world needs an Inner Engineering revolution, says Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, adding that daily practice of the Inner Engineering yoga kriya, the Shambhavi Mahamudra, can, in six weeks, make you feel blissed out without any chemical intervention
We are undeniably the most comfortable generation to have ever lived on this planet. But we are definitely not the happiest. Economic wellbeing is a universal aspiration, but if it is not accompanied by consciousness, the consequences for humanity could be dire.
The writing is on the wall. Mental health is becoming one of the most pressing issues on the planet today. According to a recent study by Harvard University and the University of Queensland, one of every two people in the world will develop a mental health disorder in their lifetime. Before the Covid pandemic, 970 million people in the world struggled with mental health conditions. Since then, there has been a 26 – 28% increase in the rates of depression and anxiety. Over twenty percent of the United States – about one in four adults -- suffers from at least one mental disorder in a given year.
The US Surgeon General has declared loneliness a new public health epidemic, saying that at least one in two Americans is lonely. Loneliness, as we know, is just a step away from depression. Every forty seconds, somebody commits suicide on this planet, and twenty more attempt it. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among people aged 15 -29, after road injury. These are staggering statistics. When young people, who should be the very embodiment of exuberance, want to take their own lives, it means that humanity is doing something fundamentally wrong.
How did we arrive at such a catastrophic situation? The reasons are many, ranging from the nature of modern education and the global ecological crisis to the quality of our food and the very atmosphere we live in. Physical ailments will occur in time, but the psychological structure is the first to be affected. The software will always collapse before the hardware.
As religion grows more irrelevant, people will become increasingly disinclined to outsource their happiness to some future promise of heaven. Their quest for instant gratification will lead many to seek substances, whether alcohol or drugs. Several governments are choosing to legalise substances like cannabis in the hope that the mentally agitated will find some balance. However, given the side-effects, this is, at best, a diversion, not a solution.
What then is the way out? When people seek chemical solutions to existential problems, the only way out is to make human chemistry blissful. This is not about changing human beliefs, or attitudes, or ethics. This is about transforming human chemistry. Recent research at the Harvard Medical School reveals that the daily fifteen-minute practice of the Inner Engineering yoga kriya, the Shambhavi Mahamudra, can, in a span of six weeks, produce a seventy-percent increase in endocannabinoids, and brain-derived neurotrophic factors (BDNF). This means that it is possible for individuals to be blissed out with no chemical intervention whatsoever.
The fundamental problem today is compulsiveness: people are driven by their instincts, hormones, thoughts, emotions, social situations. People often ask me, “Sadhguru, aren’t you driven by your mission?” I say, “No. I drive my mission. I am not driven by it.” If you are driven, you are a mere creature. Only if you drive do you become a full-fledged human being.
If we want to avert this impending mental health crisis, we need to mobilize at least two billion people to focus on generating their own inner well-being, even if for just fifteen minutes a day. It is time for individuals everywhere to become the engineers of their own lives. We have the technological capability to reach everyone on the planet today. Let us make it happen.
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