Question from Paul Harvey

If I may conclude with an awkward question. For somebody reading this interview they would perhaps understand from it that Yoga is not a straightforward means of for this problem this solution.

Yet there are many, many Yoga books already on the marketplace that offer precisely this, almost as a glossy self-help manual with quite specific links between postures and diseases or breathing techniques and diseases, between techniques and illnesses.

What have you to say to the reader with this respect, because there is this large body of, I cannot say evidence of, there is this large body of information that is there. What is the reader to do? With all this what can help?

Response from TKV Desikachar

There is such a large body of information that is there which tells that this disease can be cured by this posture or by this breathing that I wonder if the reader should think why there are more and more people and more and more sicknesses if all these solutions are there.

I think most of the doctors must close their shop, but it has not happened and how many of these authors who have written these things can really honestly say there have been out of these problems they are talking about.

Today if somebody comes to me after how many years now, thirty nine years I have been teaching, if somebody comes to me with all this experience I still do not know the answer until I meet the person, interact with the person I do not know what is possible even if it is a simple headache.

– Extract from Interview with TKV Desikachar by Paul Harvey in 2000
on ‘Science, Medical Conditions and Yoga as a Therapy’.