Kundalini Yoga Meditation: Techniques Specific for Psychiatric Disorders, Couples Therapy, and Personal Growth

The information in this book is helping me recover from a serious trauma I had 3 years ago. I bought the book for the PTSD treatment plan. I decided to start with only one of the PTSD protocol techniques as the full set of 8 exercises was overwhelming to me. The one I picked was the Gan Pattee meditation which was described as helping to cleanse and remove trauma from the body and mind. That sounded very appealing. ;-)I'm so grateful to report a big breakthrough after 5 days of doing it. The first time I tried it I felt my neck and jaw muscles soften for the first time in 3 years, and felt noticeably more calm and clear-minded. This is after one 11-minute practice of it. The next four days I felt good after each daily 11-minute session but the results weren't as noticeable. On day 6 my knotted up small intestines and muscles unwound for approximately 3.5 hours and I am feeling, thinking and looking much, much better. I estimate 30-40 percent of my trauma is gone. (See Peter Levine's books for a description of how trauma is the undischarged energy and chemicals of emotions generated during a high-stress experience, stored in the gut and muscles.)By comparison, before this the only thing that I'd made real progress with was David Bercelli's trauma release exercises for 1 year and Richard Miller's Yoga Nidra relaxation CD's for 6 months, and neither of them helped me as much, even over much longer periods of time. HeartMath and 2 years of mindfulness meditation helped calm me on the surface but without deeper effects. EMDR and traditional psychotherapy had no noticable beneficial effect for me. So I encourage others enjoy the benefits of these beautiful kundalini yoga practices and to feel better soon.Doing only the one Gan Pattee meditation from this book helped me significantly more than anything else I've tried from Eastern/Western medicine in the last 3 years. I'm confident I can fully recover and even be better than before as I continue practicing kundalini yoga. I could not have said that until I discovered this book.

There have been two major stumbling blocks to Western therapists who want to integrate yoga into the treatment of psychiatric disorders. First, while the ancient yogic tradition offers experientially proven techniques for dealing with psychiatric problems, there is still a lack of depth in experimental data to back yoga's claims. Second, yoga techniques tailored to specific psychiatric disorders have not been readily available to Westerners.This book, Kundalini Yoga Meditation, takes a bold step toward removing both those obstacles. The author, David S. Shannahoff-Khalsa, is both a highly respected researcher and a highly trained Kundalini yogi. He and his University of California associates have taken yoga into the laboratory, using advanced brain imaging techniques and the study of mind-body rhythms, to scientifically explore the effects of Kundalini yoga on obsessive compulsive disorder, and to demonstrate how it can impact other psychiatric conditions.In addition to this scientific evidence, Shannahoff offers 64 disorder-specific Kundalini yoga techniques and protocols, step-by-step instructions for treating everything from anxiety and depressive disorders, to impulse control and eating disorders, to sleep disorders, chronic fatigue, attention deficit disorders, and trauma.Though directed primarily at psychotherapists, this book is also extremely valuable to two other audiences: yoga therapists and the informed layperson suffering from these psychiatric conditions. Yoga therapists can add the 64 techniques to their healing toolkits, while using the compelling scientific data to help dispel resistance from skeptical clients.For those suffering from these disorders, the simple yogic exercises offer alternative therapies that cost nothing to explore, without the side effects of pharmacological solutions.Shannahoff recognizes that exhaustive experimental proof for the wide range of yogic methods found here still lie in the future, so he posits that the best proofs currently available for therapists, and for the rest of us, still reside in personal experience. He offers us all the tools needed to make our own inquiries and come to our own conclusions.

I was introduced to this type of Yoga by a friend's daughter who is an instructor. As I live too far away, I ordered the book from Amazon so that I could do the movements at home.I have bipolar disorder & there are very little natural remedies for the condition & the psychiatrists do so love to pump us full of drugs....lol

El autor emplea el rigor científico de su experiencia como psiquiatra, su experiencia con el Kundalini Yoga y las experiencias de los pacientes para ofrecer una obra muy útil para el desarrollo de terapias específicas para una gran variedad de síndromes crónicos o puntuales, que afectan a una parte importante de la población occidental.Sería bueno que se tradujera al castellano y que un buen equipo de psicólogos y psiquiatras comenzara un estudio sobre la eficacia del Kundalini Yoga en el ámbito psiquiátrico.

Ein Buch, das es auf den Punkt bringt und sehr schön deutlich macht, dass man westliche Wissenschaft und östliche Erkenntnisse in der Praxis fruchtbar und ohne Zusammenstösse zusammenbringen kann wenn nur der Wille da ist! Empfehlenswert für all jene die sich für die Anwendbarkeit der yogischen Erkenntnistradition in wissenschaftlich geprägten Umgebungen intressieren und die einen wissenschaftlichen Schreibstil nicht scheuen. Ein Muss für Therapeuten, die ihren Patienten das Ruder selber zurück in die Hand geben wollen anstatt diese steuerbar zu (be)halten.

Excellent