irresponsibility for maintaining their own health.^97 In this connection
Åyurveda emphasizes prevention, and the individual’s responsibility and
also powerto cultivate her or his own health. A person living according
to Åyurvedic principles of diet, daily and seasonal routine, and mental at-
titude is probably less likely to develop conditions such heart disease.
Moreover, Åyurveda fosters acute sensitivity to one’s health states so that
symptoms of incipient illness can be addressed in their early stages.
Åyurveda’s notion of equilibrium is dynamic rather than static, and
health therefore is not so much a state, but a force: the power to resist
and overcome threats to one’s well-being. Embodied life involves a dy-
namic tension between health and illness; health is not constant well-
being, but consists in the power to overcome sickness, to overcome one-
self. In his life and thought, Nietzsche valued sickness as well as health,
and counted illnesses among “the great stimulants to life.”^98 In the tides
of illness and health, sickness incites inclination toward life and health,
and saying Yesto being. The great health, Nietzsche says, “one does not
merely have but also acquires continually.”^99 The great healthis great
enough to encompass illness, so that one can go beyond acceptingsick-
ness to affirmingit as a necessary part of life. The T ̄antric notion of ́sakti,
the dynamic aspect of being, conveys the notion of health as a power: the
dynamic force of thriving in one’s Self-nature. Thriving entails resistance
and overcoming of physical and psychological intrusions to the integrity
of one’s being. The practice of Yoga serves precisely to cultivate health
for overcoming physical and mental intrusions that interfere with the full
manifestation of the true Self, which is whole and well. The following
chapter, “Classical Yoga as a Religious Therapeutic,” applies Åyurvedic
concepts of health to reconstruct Yoga’s therapeutic paradigm.
82 religious therapeutics