Yoga

The two yoga postures Aajonus returned to repeatedly across seminars and written materials were the plow and the spinal twist. He described these as the primary tools for relieving spinal compression and back pain, and recommended them as part of any protocol for addressing spine and back conditions.

The plow involves lying on the back, raising the legs, buttocks, and back into the air, and then either bringing the knees to the ears or extending the toes out onto the floor behind the head. Aajonus described this posture as an effective way to elongate and decompress the spine.

The spinal twist he described in specific positional detail. Lying on the right side of the body, the right leg is kept completely stretched and straight. The left leg is bent at the knee, and the left foot is pressed flat against the right shin just below the right knee. The left shoulder and arm are then moved behind the back, twisting the shoulder backward. The instruction is to try to keep the left knee pressing onto the bed or floor while executing this twist. The posture can be done while lying on a bed or on the floor, making it accessible even for people with severe mobility limitations.

He recommended performing these postures two to five times daily in the context of back pain and spinal tension, always after preparatory heat application. The sequencing was explicit: heat first, then stretching. Either a hot water bottle applied to the painful area for thirty minutes, or thirty minutes in a hot bath, should precede any attempt at the postures. The reasoning was that heat relaxes the muscles and makes them warm and pliable, which allows the stretching to work without risk of tearing or further injury. Attempting the postures on cold, contracted muscles was, in his view, counterproductive and potentially damaging.

Aajonus described the combination of hot baths and yoga postures as the approach that allowed him to survive his years of radiation-induced spinal damage. The radiation treatments he had received as a young man had essentially cauterized his spine, he explained, turning malleable tissue into something hardened and rigid, like clay fired in a kiln. This left him unable to sleep more than ten minutes at a time due to the pain radiating from his spine through his thighs, knees, sciatic nerve, and feet. He lived on the floor, having removed most of his furniture, and spent large portions of each day either in a cast iron bathtub or in pain.

The bathtub provided buoyancy that removed approximately eighty percent of the pressure on his spine. He would heat the water, sleep in the bath for an hour and a half to two hours at a time, rewarm the water when it cooled, and repeat. On some days he spent fourteen hours in the bathtub. When he got out of the bath, he performed yoga stretches, primarily the spinal twist on both sides and the plow. The sequence of bath followed by yoga stretching gave him the most functional relief he found during that period.

Over time, this combination of bathing and yoga allowed him to gradually extend the intervals between postures. At his worst, he could not manage more than ten minutes without pain. By age twenty-seven, he had reduced the pain to a manageable level such that he could go forty-five minutes to an hour and a half between yoga sessions, and the postures themselves could resolve a pain episode within fifteen minutes. He described eventually reaching a state where doing the plow and spinal twist every hour to an hour and a half allowed him to sustain bicycle travel across North America.

For people without his degree of damage, he recommended the same protocol for general back tension or spinal stiffness: hot water bottles or a hot bath for twenty to thirty minutes, followed by the plow and spinal twists. He noted that getting into a hot jacuzzi or hot bath causes everything to expand, and once the muscles are relaxed in that way, the stretch yoga will help align the spine without requiring a chiropractor. He described being able to crack his own back into place by getting into the plow and doing the spinal twist, and contrasted this with chiropractic adjustments that put the vertebra back into place but leave the surrounding tissue too contracted to hold the adjustment.

Aajonus described using a specific yoga position to assist with the administration and distribution of enemas. He instructed that after introducing the enema fluid, a person could get up into the shoulder stand, a yoga inversion position, to help the fluid travel through the colon. Alternatively, the person could go on all fours, placing the face down on the floor with hands beneath it, knees on the ground, and buttocks elevated, and then roll the stomach in a belly-dancer motion to move the fluid from the descending colon across the transverse colon and down the ascending colon. He described this process taking three to four minutes before shifting to lying position.

For people undergoing heavy or uncomfortable detoxification processes, he mentioned that yoga postures offered a practical way to manage symptoms without disrupting the detox process itself. He noted that some people he worked with would go into the bathroom during workshop breaks and do yoga throughout a detoxification episode. The movement and stretching served as a way of moving through symptomology rather than suppressing it.

Aajonus situated yoga postures within his broader framework for understanding anxiety and restlessness as hormonal states that require physical discharge. When a person produces hormones for physical activity, those hormones will either be spent through activity or they will express as anxiety, worry, and emotional dysregulation. He explicitly included yoga in the category of exercise that addresses this dynamic, describing hatha yoga postures as appropriate when a person is feeling tight and not wanting strenuous exercise. In that context, yoga functions as the gentler end of the physical activity spectrum, available to people who are not drawn to vigorous movement but who still need to move to discharge hormonal buildup.

He also described a patient who was a yoga instructor as an example in his clinical work with depression and high meat. The instructor was a well-known teacher with DVDs on meditative practices, but she had been on five psychiatric medications daily for twenty-seven years and had never had a functioning relationship. Aajonus noted that she was doing her yoga every day, which he acknowledged addressed her anxiety, but that the yoga alone was insufficient to resolve her depression. His recommendation was that anxiety and depression were separate conditions with different solutions: yoga and physical activity addressed the hormonal restlessness underlying anxiety, while the neurological component of depression required bacterial intervention through high meat. The distinction he drew was functional: yoga postures could regulate the physiological state driving anxiety but could not supply the neurochemical material that depression represented.

Aajonus held a specific and somewhat cautious position on yoga breathing exercises. He described proper breathing as very often the most important exercise, and stated that breathing exercises increase oxygen and carbon dioxide utilization, thereby increasing health of body and mind. To that extent, he was broadly supportive of the concept.

However, his own practice of breathing during exercise differed from what yoga breathing traditions typically teach. He described training himself to breathe very slowly during physical exertion, breathing in and out approximately every five to ten seconds even when running or doing strenuous activity. He explicitly did not hold his breath the way yoga breathing exercises instruct. His stated reasoning was that forceful or effortful breathing exercises the lungs and spends nutrients on the act of breathing itself. He wanted to conserve those nutrients for other functions and reduce the metabolic cost of the breath.

He made a distinction between the yoga breathing practices he did when not exercising, which he used specifically for breath control, and the slow regulated breathing he used during physical exercise. When exercising he controlled the breath by slowing it, not by holding it or performing the disciplined inhalation and exhalation sequences that yoga traditions prescribe.

Between approximately age twenty-seven and his early thirties, Aajonus lived off a bicycle, traveling across North America five times, down into the Yucatan, and up to Alaska. Throughout this period he required yoga postures to manage his back pain. He described getting off the bicycle every hour to an hour and a half to perform his yoga stretches. This was not optional for him. Without the regular stretching intervals, the pain in his back would build to an intolerable level as the vertebral structures pressed against nerves.

He described bicycling every hour to an hour and a half, then dismounting to do the plow and spinal twist, keeping himself elongated so the spine would not grind and crunch. He framed it as the only system that allowed him to tolerate the pain enough to function and continue moving. As he continued eating raw foods and his condition improved, the frequency gradually decreased. After returning from one extended trip, he noted he only had to go into stretches four times a day, which he described as pretty hard but an improvement from the constant hourly schedule.

He also traveled into the Yucatan during winters because the warmth made the spinal condition more manageable. He described living with the Mayan Indians there partly because the climate reduced the pain burden and the yoga postures were somewhat less urgently needed in the heat.

Aajonus spent time living with a yoga ashram community during his early twenties, and during that period the community guided him toward complete vegetarianism. He tried that approach for approximately six and a half years, eating primarily as a fruitarian while living outdoors. His assessment was unambiguous: the fruitarian-leaning vegetarian diet promoted by the yoga community dissolved his tissue and bone, contributed to the development of multiple myeloma, and nearly killed him. He described reaching a state where he was eating only about one hundred twenty calories a day and was getting weaker and more painful while still needing to get off his bicycle every hour and a half for yoga stretches.

He observed that most yoga ashrams he had visited had evolved into lacto-ovo vegetarian diets rather than strict veganism, and he characterized that as a better position than pure veganism or fruitarianism, while still holding that it fell well short of what the body requires. He noted that he knew many people who lived solely on raw eggs and raw milk as their protein source and that this worked exceptionally well for some. But the ideological pressure within yoga communities to move away from animal products, or to maintain an alkaline system, was something he actively pushed back against.

His specific critique of the alkalizing philosophy prevalent in many yoga dietary systems was that forcing blood, urine, and saliva to become alkaline destroys digestive ability by approximately ninety percent. He stated this explicitly in connection with yoga ashrams: "Most of the yoga ashrams I've been into have evolved into lacto-ovo, and that's definitely a better place to be," but the underlying assumption that humans should have an alkaline system was, in his view, simply wrong. Humans have an acidic digestive system, and attempting to override that through alkalizing foods or protocols dismantles the chemistry required for proper protein digestion and tissue building.

He also referenced the Indian yoga masters he had sought out during his years of illness, including Sivananda and Yogananda, as examples of spiritual teachers who claimed mastery but had obvious health problems. He found that every one of the masters he investigated had a health problem, and he used this as evidence that spiritual practice, including yoga philosophy, could not substitute for correct nutrition. The body required physical inputs, not just mental or meditative discipline.

Aajonus described a twenty-nine-year-old man in South Africa who could perform yoga postures of a flexibility and difficulty he had never seen from anyone, including all the practitioners he had encountered over his years around yoga communities. Despite this extraordinary physical capability, the man had no energy until ten, eleven, or noon each day. He would get up at five in the morning for meditation and spend thirty minutes just getting out of bed, dragging himself to the practice.

Aajonus identified this as a nutritional timing problem, not a physical incapacity problem. The solution he proposed was the interrupted sleep protocol: setting an alarm for approximately three hours after falling asleep, waking to eat, and then returning to sleep for another five hours. The difference in energy levels, he said, was astounding. He used this case as evidence that even someone with exceptional physical development and discipline, someone whose yoga practice was phenomenal, could be functionally incapacitated in the mornings because the body was not receiving adequate nutrition during the night healing cycle.

Beyond the case described in the depression section, Aajonus mentioned that a yoga practitioner who trained others in yoga was among his clients, and that the experience of eating clean raw foods had magnified that person's intuitive capacity and ability to work with energy. The person described feeling clearer in mind, which enhanced the yogic training and energy work they did with others. Aajonus did not claim credit for the spiritual or energetic aspects of this but accepted the person's account that dietary clarity supported the precision of their practice.

He also described a famous yoga instructor as a basket case taking seven psychotropic drugs a day, a detail he offered not to criticize yoga practice but to illustrate that the physical discipline of yoga, including daily practice and meditative work, was insufficient on its own to correct severe neurological and psychological dysfunction rooted in nutritional deficiency.