The Body & Longevity

You might expect a book about the eternal Self to be dismissive of the body — a mere shell, beneath notice. The Gītā is the opposite. It is remarkably, almost surprisingly attentive to the ordinary physical body you actually live in, and it gives instructions concrete enough to follow tonight.

When it describes settling into meditation, it gets physical: choose a clean, steady spot, a seat 'neither too high nor too low' (6.11); sit and gather the mind (6.12); and then, the posture itself — 'holding the torso, neck and head erect and still, steady, the gaze quiet, not wandering around' (6.13). Anyone who has tried to sit still knows how exact that is. And it turns to the breath, the oldest anchor there is: some practise 'restraining the movement of the outgoing and incoming breath' (4.29), others sit 'with the gaze held steady, the breath moving evenly through the nostrils, the senses and mind and intellect mastered' (5.27), working directly with respiration to steady the whole system. This is not mysticism. It is posture and breathing — the two things every tradition of stillness, ancient or modern, eventually comes back to.

It ties wellbeing not to intensity but to regulation, which is the more grown-up and more sustainable idea. Yoga becomes 'the destroyer of sorrow' only for the one 'whose food and recreation are measured, whose effort in work is measured, whose sleep and waking are measured' (6.16–6.17). No heroics, no crash diets, no punishing regimes — just the steady middle: 'eating lightly, speech and body and mind controlled' (18.52) is how it pictures the well-kept life, and there is nothing extreme in it. And when it lists physical discipline, it stays humble and doable: 'cleanliness, straightforwardness, moderation, and not harming' the body you've been given (17.14). Nothing there is extreme. All of it is the sort of thing that quietly keeps a person well over decades.

What I find worth holding onto is the attitude the Gītā takes toward the body — neither idol nor enemy. It is not something to worship, preen, and fear the ageing of; nor something to punish, starve, and despise. It is the instrument through which the entire path is walked. A body that is jangled, overfed, exhausted and inflamed simply cannot sit still long enough, or think clearly enough, to find anything worth finding. Real wisdom, the Gītā even says, includes seeing clearly 'the suffering in birth, death, ageing and sickness' (13.8) — not to become morbid, but to hold the body's fragility honestly, and therefore care for it without clinging to it.

So if you asked how to treat your body, I think the Gītā's answer would be refreshingly unglamorous: keep it clean, move it, feed it moderately, breathe, sit up straight, sleep enough but not too much. Not out of vanity, and not out of fear of decay — but because it is the one vehicle you're given for the whole journey, and a well-kept vehicle lets you actually go somewhere.