In my last post, Masahiro Oki’s “Three Principles of Becoming Healthy,” he states the following three things as the principles of becoming healthy as human beings.

1)- In order to improve our ability of maintaining physiological balance, it is important to regulate and enhance our body’s functions by keeping a natural posture at all times, taking a suitable diet, and improving our sensibility through full breathing.

2)- In order to improve our mental stability, we need to improve our understanding of things, develop the right feelings and desires, try to put our mind in a state of relaxation or non-attachment as much as possible, and cultivate the ability to be in harmony with everything.

3)- In order to improve our adaptability in daily life, we need to live a life in an evolved awareness by actively and consciously striving to experience all things, whatever they are, and by improving our ability to maintain harmony.

Oki-sensei continues: …  these are the very devises of how to fully demonstrate the innate work of the life force.

Which of these three resonates with you the most? For me right now, passage 2) resonates the most. Especially the phrase ‘the right feelings’. We normally think, “Feelings come naturally, so how can they be right or wrong? If we say, ‘wrong feelings’, aren’t we judging what we cannot judge, or aren’t we allowing someone or something else to decide whether our natural feelings are right or wrong? This would create tension in our mind-heart.”, don’t we?

And yet, this phrase consists of ‘feelings’ associated with ‘right’. Here I see the philosophy Oki-sensei teaches. They are feelings that arise from the busshō. They are one’s own feelings, not being forced by someone else, and at the same time, they are feelings that develop as one practices on one’s path for the search for truth. They are feelings that come from within and, at the same time, accord with Nature’s law.

Of course, passage 2) resonated with me instantly without needing to analyse as such.

Appointed by Oki-sensei, I came from Japan to the UK in 1984 to do Okido Yoga activities under employment by Okido Yoga UK, then a newly established charitable company. Being a young and inexperienced foreigner, I was put in the position to represent Okido Yoga in the UK. I was also bringing up my children. Financially, mentally and practically I went through a lot of hardships both in my work and personal life. I was always on the edge. The toughest part was to feel inexperienced and unable to fulfil the expectation of my job that was to disseminate Okido Yoga in the UK. Because, in me, Okido Yoga cannot be Okido Yoga if activities aren’t in touch with the philosophical teachings of Oki-sensei. In Okido Yoga, philosophy, methods and spiritual teachings are inseparable. So, knowing that I was not good enough for this, I took as my guide what Oki-sensei told me before I had left Japan, “Create a sincere group, however small.”  Based on this I continued to work, with no big incidents, though Okido Yoga UK did not grow to any significant size. “I’m trying my best” was my excuse and consolation. I worked like this for 38 years and retired from employment at the end of last August.

As the moment passed on August 31^st, I experienced a feeling of release into something big. This feeling grew larger and lasted for several days.

I think this release, or relief, occurred as follows: my mind-heart had been locked up for so long in a feeling of ‘I‘m not good enough but I’m doing my best’. It had me running on adrenaline. At the moment of relief, this immediately switched to a different feeling of “I was able to do this because so many people helped me genuinely.” So, logically my mind-heart had known this. However, I can now say: I had been in a very tense state for many years. I had never or hardly tasted the feeling that appears in Oki-sensei’s passage 2), “Try to put our mind in a state of relaxation or non-attachment as much as possible.” When I had been with pains in body or problems of work, my mind had been occupied with how to remove ‘symptoms’ and hardly looked into how to fully demonstrate the innate work of the life force.

My thoughts go on : ‘Improve our understanding of things’ in passage 2) does not mean that one can read or listen to a description about things. It includes that and more: I think ‘Improve our understanding of things’ means that one comes to realise that things occur based on ‘cause and effect’ relationships in a much wider and deeper scope than one can recognise, and that one comes to accept this realisation with a humble mind-heart. For example, in our daily life and business relationships, when someone fails – without explanation – to do something that they have promised, we often feel frustrated and are unable to truly accept it even though we know in theory that everyone has their own circumstances. How can we accept this and forgive without pretence, or conversely without taking an attitude of “I don’t care”? Without losing our own honesty and inner divinity, how can we happily accept that many more factors are creating our current situation beyond our own reasoning? Often, we may be tight and closed in our own limited reasoning despite that standing in a larger scope might allow us to better deal with things in a clear step-by-step effort. This is our long-term homework on our path for the search for truth. 

What I experienced may sound just like a simple story that I worked hard for a long time and then felt relieved upon my retirement. Or it may be a simple example of mental growth that cannot happen without going through an actual process. But I am taking it as follows:

It was essential for me to learn and improve while sincerely facing all given situations. My experience is stored in the depth of my mind-heart and helping to build my personality even at this moment. In fact, I am willing to bear a perspective a bit larger than before when I do yoga activities and other things from here on. A larger perspective’ for me, a learner of Okido Yoga, comes to mean: taking a viewpoint of ‘how each thing can fully demonstrate the innate work of the life force’……..