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When people talk about youth, they most often think only of appearance. But youth is not merely a state of the body. It is a state of energy, consciousness, and vitality. And there are at least three ways to preserve or restore this state.
The First Way — Prolonging Youth
This is the most straightforward and materialistic path.
It consists of preserving youth for as long as possible through natural methods. This includes everything that supports a person’s harmony: yoga, physical exercise, massage, proper nutrition, work with consciousness, intellectual activity, and spiritual practice.
Every person is capable of prolonging their youth significantly longer than is commonly believed in modern society.
If we turn to ancient knowledge, we find references to times when people lived ten times longer than they do today. If the average life expectancy today is about one hundred years, then in ancient times people may have lived for nine hundred or even a thousand years.
Accordingly, people also remained young for much longer. Imagine a person who preserves their youth not for fifty years, but for five hundred.
The first path is precisely about this—not allowing vital energy to deteriorate prematurely.
The Second Way — Restoring Youth
This path is considerably more difficult.
It is based on the idea that a person possesses knowledge and practices that allow them to periodically return themselves to a younger state.
Such a person lives an ordinary life. Their body gradually ages, just like everyone else’s. But at a certain point, they perform special practices that may last for weeks or even months, after which rejuvenation takes place.
These may include both profound physiological methods and mystical practices. Some of this knowledge has survived in ancient traditions, including restricted branches of Ayurveda that rarely become available to the general public.
The essence of the second method is that a person seems to turn their age back. For example, they return to the state of a twenty-five-year-old.
Unlike the first path, which still implies that old age will eventually arrive, the second path theoretically makes it possible to maintain youth indefinitely.
Many consider such things legends. However, human history contains numerous accounts of people who possessed such knowledge.
The Third Way — Stopping Age
This is the most difficult path of all.
It does not consist of prolonging youth or periodically restoring it, but of completely stopping age-related changes.
A person reaches a certain age—for example, twenty-five—and remains at that age.
Decades pass. They may be fifty, seventy, or even one hundred years old, yet outwardly they look like the same young person.
Such a state belongs not so much to the realm of physiology as to the realm of spiritual attainments, mysticism, and siddhis—supernatural abilities described in many ancient traditions.
Such abilities are most often associated with profound initiations, the blessing of a great Teacher, or spiritual practices of extraordinary depth.
Of course, this is rare. But rarity does not mean impossibility.
Sometimes we can observe a faint manifestation of this phenomenon even among ordinary people. Surely you have met someone whom you had not seen for ten or fifteen years, only to discover unexpectedly that they had hardly changed.
From the perspective of mystical traditions, this is not coincidence. It is believed that such abilities may result from spiritual work accumulated even in past incarnations.
Author: Sergey Veretennikov.
Fantasy or Reality?
All three methods may seem fantastic to many people.
However, if we look carefully at life, it becomes clear that the principle of rejuvenation exists even at the simplest level.
Let us take an extreme example.
A person with a severe addiction can literally destroy their health within just a few years, to the point that they look significantly older than their actual age.
If youth can be burned away in a few years, then the reverse process also exists—it can be preserved, accumulated, and prolonged.
Our weaknesses steal our youth.
Discipline restores it.
People who engage in self-development, work on themselves, and pay attention to their consciousness and lifestyle almost always look younger than their peers.
Because youth is not a coincidence. It is the result of specific actions.
Why Do People Seek Easy Paths?
Notice that among the three methods I did not mention pills, injections, or surgical operations.
The reason is simple.
Most people do not want to change their lives. They want to keep all their habits, indulge their weaknesses, and remain young at the same time.
But that is not how it works.
Youth requires a particular lifestyle.
It requires the right activities, the right way of thinking, and the right attitude toward oneself.
That is why I constantly speak about sadhana.
Sadhana is not sports and not a set of exercises.
It is a way of life.
It is a way of being.
It includes physical culture, work with consciousness, discipline, ancient knowledge, and actions that have been recommended for centuries by sages and Vedic traditions.
This is what I offer at my Ashram - Announcement - The Benefits of the Shantaram Ashram
Look Around You
Sometimes the best teacher is life itself.
Look carefully at modern society and at people... and you will see not only how one should live, but also how one should not live.
Most people destroy themselves through their habits, their way of thinking, lack of discipline, and constant indulgence of their weaknesses.
A reasonable person is capable of seeing this and making a different choice.
There is no need to immediately strive for great mystical attainments.
It is enough to begin with the first step.
Add one right action to your life.
Then another.
And another.
Gradually, a person begins to free themselves from the power of their habits, becoming stronger, freer, and younger.
Then paths that once seemed impossible open up.
And who knows—perhaps one day you will discover that youth is not an age of the body, but a natural state.
Author: Sergey Veretennikov.
