Burns, Douglas M. Buddhist meditation and depth psychology. The Wheel, no. 88/89. Article
available online: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/bps/wheels/wheel088.html.
Busch, Colleen Morton. It’s cool to be grounded [Teen Yoga Influences section]. Yoga Journal,
Jul/Aug 2003, p. 99.
“Yoga created a ‘total turnaround’ in Matt Harris’s life. Suffering from chronic depression and
social anxiety in his early teens, Harris tried yoga at his therapist’s suggestion. ‘Within four
months,” says Harris, ‘I was off medication, which was just taking away my symptoms
temporarily. Yoga helped me figure out what was going on underneath it all. It showed me what
was right with me rather than what was wrong.”
Butler, Katy. On the borderline: How a Zen-friendly psychologist revolutionized the treatment of
patients once thought hopeless. Tricycle, Spring 2002, pp. 47-49, 98-106.
On Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy, “now widely believed to be the most
effective way to treat people... diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. The term
borderline... has become a code word for clients whom many therapists avoid because of the
pity, anger, hopelessness, and fear they can arouse in those who try to help them.”
Linehan describes borderlines as having “no emotional skin,” and she felt that standard therapy
“repeated the pain of the invalidating family when it offered insluting interpretations, ignored
cries of distress, or inadvertently rewarded tantrums or suicidality with extra attention or
hospitalization. In an unconscious echo of the Buddhist notion that there is no fixed and
permanent self, she wrote that borderline individuals did not have fixed, deficient
‘personalities’—just huge but remediable deficits in life skills.” She thus paired therapy with a
weekly “‘skills training’ class that blended Western assertiveness training with Eastern
mindfulness. Her manual for the classes (vetted, she says, by two of her Zen teachers) includes
mindfulness exercises and lengthy quotations from Thich Nhat Hanh on ‘washing the dishes just
to wash the dishes.’”
See also Linehan’s Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder
(Guildford Publications, 1993).
Byramjee, Dominique. Yoga as psychotherapy. Vaghul, N. Karma upga amd the managerial
ethos. Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram Darsanam, Feb 1994, pp. 24-25.
Campbell, Debra Elise, and Kathleen A. Moore. Yoga as a preventative and treatment for
depression, anxiety, and stress. International Journal of Yoga Therapy, 2004, no. 14, pp. 53-58.
Author email: [email protected].
Abstract: With the dual aims of better understanding the contribution of Yoga to positive mental
health and exploring links between yogic philosophy and psychological theory, researchers at
Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, conducted a study on Yoga as a preventative and
treatment for symptoms of mental illness. The Yoga classes were designed as a six-week program
incorporating breathing techniques (prânâyâma), exercises for strength, vitality, and flexibility
(âsanas), guided relaxation (yoga-nidrâ), and meditation. The aim of this process was to enhance
self-awareness, encourage the perspective that emotional states are somewhat transient, and
encourage a self-accepting and calm attitude through concentrating on synchronizing gentle