On some days, Raghupati Yogi would ask me to sit still and be very peaceful, to meditate on stillness, peace and tranquility. Then after ten minutes, he would suddenly tell me to stand up and run around the entire temple as fast as I could!
He would make me bend this way and that way. In the temple where he would teach me yoga, there were twenty to thirty pillars. He would make me climb every stone pillar and come down. Also I had to use only one hand to climb the pillars and come down!

Understand, doing asanas for solving a disease is not the purpose of yoga!

I would ask him why he was making me climb all the pillars, because I couldn’t find any books or any sutras saying climbing pillars was a part of yoga!

He said a beautiful thing, ‘For whatever purpose you bend your body or move your body, that memory and idea will become completely inserted or completely recorded in your body and mind.’

It was a very shocking revelation!

He said, with any intention that you move your body, bend your body, or make your body active, that intention, that purpose, will be recorded into your body, that samskara will start expressing in your body. Understand, he means that the way in which you bend, in which you stand up, or the method by which you do asanas, all these things are not too important. It is the intention that is important. If you have an intention to have health, and move your body in any way with that intention, health will simply happen to you!

Today, especially in the West, there has been too much connection of disease and asanas – for this disease, you have to do that asana, for this problem you have to do that technique. Understand, doing asanas for solving a disease is not the purpose of yoga! When you think of a disease and do yoga with that thought in your mind, you are actually pushing the imprint of the thought of that disease into your system!

Raghupati Yogi says that any asana practised, or any physical movement practised for some purpose with some intention, will create that effect in your body. He says that this is possible even with ordinary sitting. If you strongly believe that by sitting you will have health and you just sit for health, simply you will see health happening in you.

Understand, your body itself is made out of your memory. Your mind, what you think of as you, makes up the building blocks of your body. In any way that you move the body with the faith (cognition) that a particular thing will happen in you, it will simply start expressing in you. Every memory is recorded in your muscles. So when you change the memories, you can change your system also. Your system can and will respond to the memory you create. This is how the transformation in the body-mind happens through Nithya Yoga.

The inner space is cleansed first so that the mind falls in tune. Then the body follows as the physical movement is done with the intention. The intention gets inserted into the very muscle memory and cellular intelligence. ‘We are what our perceptions are. As are our perceptions, so become our actions. As are our actions, so becomes our destiny.’ This is not a quote from the Upanishad, but from ‘The Biology of Belief’, a recent book by Dr Bruce Lipton, a cellular biologist who has presented a new theory on how cells behave. We have all been taught that we behave the way our genes are designed. Dr Lipton, after his research, says the opposite – our genes are designed the way we behave!

There have been many recorded incidents of the ability of intention and visualization actually resulting in the intention becoming physical reality itself! For example, people have cured their own fatal diseases like cancer or overcome tremendous physical handicaps by pushing their limits and going beyond what they thought was their capacity. These things have happened through the power of intention which transforms basic cellular memory. This ancient truth is now being proven with the support of modern scientific findings. It has been found that whatever we think deeply and continuously has a profound effect on us physically, mentally and spiritually.

source: Living Enlightenment