attachment to objects of pleasure and pain. Non-attachment in turn re-
sults in non-suffering. Well-being and non-suffering are merely benefits
of liberation, similar to the way that physical health is a valuable result of
the physical self-cultivation undertaken to support meditative practice
and attainment of liberative knowledge. The ultimate meaning of healing
in Yoga is the attainment of identity and freedom; relief of suffering is
corollary to this attainment. Relief of suffering and the promoting of
well-being are essential attributes of both religion and medicine, and our
understanding and practice of medicine and the healing arts can be in-
formed by metaphysical insights gained from Yoga- ́sastra ̄. An implication
for medicine is that healing, like liberation, involves more than relieving
impairment and suffering; it means promoting wholeness, integration,
identity, and freedom.
In Yoga, health in the psychophysical domain is subsidiary to the
wholeness and well-being that is the Self’s abiding in its true nature. This
follows from Yoga’s standpoint on the preeminence of puruÓsaover
prakÓrti. The inherent wholeness and recovery of well-being of Self is of
ultimate value. The body is not only impermanent, but even the greatest
physical vitality is irrelevant once attachment to materialist views and ex-
periences is dissolved. Therefore in Yoga, the fundamental meaning of
health is the well-being of liberated consciousness, a state wherein whole-
ness, integration, Self-identity, and freedom obtain, and one attains im-
munity to the vicissitudes of the material natural world and those of one’s
own body and mind.
While medical healing is concerned primarily with the particular ail-
ments of individual persons, the idea of religious health invokes well-
being that transcends the personal. Progress on the yogic path entails in-
creasingly greater well-being, first at the psychophysical level, then
spiritually, as the psychophysical dimension serves its liberative purpose
and is transcended. Ultimate well-being is freedom from all that obscures
one’s spiritual Self. The Self does not require healing, for it is intrinsically
whole and well, and not subject to sickness and suffering. Healing in an
ultimate sense means curing psychophysical limitations, and limited
understandings, that interfere with the recovery of the spiritual Self.
classical yoga as a religious therapeutic 137