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Moderation for Health by Paramhansa Yogananda

Everything we eat, think, do, and contact, reacts upon bodily Health.

“In all things, Moderation” we are told. This admonition applies to Health in all its various phases, whether work, rest, eating, recreation. Most of us over-do, at least in one direction. Practically all of us overeat, few, indeed, ever leaving the table with the feeling that more could be partaken of this side of satiety; yet that is one of the chief secrets of maintaining a healthy body, and getting real benefits out of our food.


Others have so great a love, or appetite, for their work that all else becomes subservient thereto, and Health suffers as a consequence. One’s perspective narrows, the sponge of energy is being squeezed dry, when diversity of occupational interests is not being injected into the day’s activities. For the over-conscientious worker, frequent periods of complete relaxation, also some game or other form of amusement, is advocated, to take the attention completely off the work that occupies most of the waking hours.


Then, there are those in whom the play spirit is hyper-developed, play in its myriad forms of pure amusement. While, as already pointed out, it is well to indulge in some form of amusement provided for all degrees of taste and preference, that too taxes our time and energy beyond the beneficial returns realized, if too freely partaken of.


For the one to whom Fate has provided generously in the form of material wealth, and actual physical labor or mental concentration is neither a matter of necessity nor desire, and the day resolves itself into mere ever-seeking diversion (which the Desire Body at one time demanded above all else) the Health will eventually suffer because of the effect of satiation of the senses, over-indulgence of the food and other appetites, useless self-centered occupation, and the retarding of Spiritual progress.


Everything we eat, think, do, and contact, reacts upon bodily Health, and every once in a while it is well to take personal inventory; check up on ourselves, what we are aiming toward, how we are progressing toward that goal, whether at the expense of our Health, thereby “gaining the whole world, but losing our own Soul,” which the physical Body is instrumental to the expression thereof while sojourning on this earth-plane.


Praecepta Lessons, Volume 3 (1938): Praeceptum #56