Are YOU a Workaholic

Are YOU a Workaholic?

by Keki Sidhwa, N.D., D.O.

Are you a workaholic?” This is an important subject. Many of you may not realize how important it is. Much of my work as a Natural Hygiene practitioner is spent trying to get people to let themselves go, and some of the time it is like prying oysters open with your bare hands. People are so hung up on the issue of control, so rigid and tight, that they cannot open up enough to let go, to relax. Most people feel that if they let go something dangerous will happen to them, and the case histories in my practice are replete with such examples.

A 45-year old executive came to me and said, “If I am myself I will destroy someone, someone close to me. I expect I will act in such a way that they will reject me or disapprove of me; therefore I must not, I cannot, be myself.” Now you can understand, therefore, that the work of a Natural Hygiene practitioner is more than being just a good Hygienist; it is more than asking you to eat lots of carrots or eat your nuts and peas. Natural Hygiene to me is a philosophy of living. It is a philosophy of life — not of eating, not of fasting, not of defecating. It is of everything that is concerned intimately with how we live. The fear of letting go runs like a current under the surface of most psyches.

We have been brought up with too much rigidity, too much control in our lives. Instead of living instinctively as natural man lived, we live in a pattern of chaos. We live in a pattern where we are hemmed in by all sorts of inhibitions, and then we say, “Well, I don’t know, I have nothing else to do but work.” And these people work, work, work, work, until they kill themselves. And so one of the products of enervation, and one of the reasons of enervation in our lives in our modern daily life, is to become addicted to wealth because we cannot let ourselves go. It is only through work that we allow our tensions to depart from our bodies, and that to me is wrong. The price of civilization unfortunately has been repression of natural instinct — natural instinct in every sense of the word. Our natural instincts of eating, drinking, sleeping, exercise, and cohabiting, are suppressed in one way or another, and I think that if we are going to be fully integrated individuals, the first thing we have got to learn to do is to be aware of these tensions within ourselves. If we are not aware of these tensions within ourselves, we will do harm to society. There is a saying, “Lose your mind and come to your senses.” This is quite right. We are sometimes so much caught up with our intellectual brains that our creative ability is put aside. You see, man is a creative animal, and I do not mean only creating another human being, but I mean creativity in the sense that we need to express ourselves. We need to express our harmony which is within us; we need to express the life force, the spirit within us, through poetry, through reading, through playing, through activity. All these things are important ingredients of the Hygienic life.

I think not enough stress is being placed upon play in the Hygienic circle. I have often said eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work and eight hours of play are important to us. We seem to forget the eight hours of play. And what do we mean by play? I mean by play a change from what we are constantly doing — a change of activity, a change of scene, a change of mental attitude, a change of relationships. In other words, most of us in our civilized lives, in this kind of society, are hung up on ourselves. We are more or less caught in the web of thinking nothing but this ego, this I, this me. We have got to think of we — the world, the environment, the population, and then the whole universe. This is creativity, this is play, this enriches your mind and your spirit; it enriches your heart, and, therefore, your health.

Unless we learn that there are these behavior patterns within us to which we must learn to give play instinctively, we will do harm.

We have to think in terms of excessive control, like excessive tension, has its price. That does not mean that we have got to have chaos in our lives, but what I want to try and make you think is that there is a norm, there is a medium line; in other words, not only two extremes. There is a happy medium. So we must not have excessive control; neither must we have excessive tension. The first thing to letting go, to relax, to become creative, is the readiness to do nothing. Many people when they come to Shalimar and I tell them that they have got to fast, they ask, “What am I going to do when I fast?”

I say, “Well, you are going to do almost nothing.”

“Oh, I am going to explode! I must have activity, I must be active and agitated all the time, my brain cannot just look at myself. Look, unless you keep me busy I don’t know what I am going to do.”

I say, “Look, this is the reason why you need to fast, you need to come in contact with yourself; you are afraid to be in the same room with yourself, so therefore you have brought your work, your activity, your friends, your telephone calls, your correspondence — everything that will keep you apart from yourself. Now is your chance to forgo all this. When you are fasting, learn to know yourself; learn to come in contact with your body; learn to appreciate its beauty; learn to appreciate its needs; learn to appreciate its creativity; learn to appreciate its desires; learn to appreciate its warmth; learn to appreciate its way of expression.”

And they look at me and say, “Well, either I am crazy or he has gone crazy.” But somehow they start putting it into practice and they say to me afterwards, “You know, I never thought that I could be at such peace with myself.” Now, to me, that is a great compliment because it means you have found yourself; that means you have created a human being to be reborn within yourself again. This is the purpose also of fasting.

So, if you are a workaholic, if you find that your life consists of nothing but work, work, work, then it is time that you took hold of yourself and said, “Well, what is it? Is it me working or is it because I want to escape from myself that I am putting work between me and myself?” Thus what you call this line of demarcation is to be cut away. When this line of demarcation is destroyed, when the horse and the rider, as it were, become one, it is then that the process of riding is observed by the spectators, who say how wonderful that movement is. And this is what we have to create in our lives and this is what we have to find in our lives — how the horse and the rider become one so that riding becomes automatic. And this can only happen if we begin to put away all these things — our work, our attitude towards work, and the way we do our work.

I think when we start thinking in terms that the world does not run on ourselves, that there are many other people who will still do the work, it is then that we will have the creative pause in our lives that is needed. A poet has said that it is essential for man to find time to sit and stand and stare, and that is important. It is just as important a part of Natural Hygiene as anything else. Fools burn lamps during the day. At night they wonder why they have no light.

This article is excerpted from Dr. Keki Sidhwa’s lecture at the 1976 ANHS Conference held at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.