Yoga for Depression: A Compassionate Guide to Relieve Suffering Through Yoga
More than 25 million Americans are treated with antidepressants each year, at a cost in excess of $50 billion. But the side effects of popular prescription drugs may seem nearly as depressing as the symptoms they’re meant to treat. Veteran yoga instructor Amy Weintraub offers a better solution—one that taps the scientifically proven link between yoga and emotional well-being as well as the beauty of ancient approaches to inner peace.
Addressing a range of diagnoses, including dysthymia, anxiety-based depression, and bipolar disorder, Yoga for Depression reveals why specific postures, breathing practices, and meditation techniques can ease suffering and release life’s traumas and losses. Weintraub also reflects on her own experience with severe depression, from which she recovered through immersing herself in a daily yoga routine.
Yoga for Depression is the first yoga book devoted exclusively to the treatment of these debilitating conditions. Amy Weintraub will help readers see their suffering and themselves in a vibrant new light.
When you step onto your Yoga mat, you are reminded of that wholeness, and the practice clears a pathway through your symptoms to the ground of your being, that which is your natural state. “Depression,” says international Yoga teacher and psychologist Richard Miller, “Is the feeling of separation from self.” The underlying yogic approach to treating depression is “informed by the knowledge that there is no separation.” The therapist “stands firm in the truth of oneness.” In other words, Yoga begins, not with the question—what is wrong with me? But what is right with me?
Here in the West, we are accustomed to thinking of mental health from the perspective of illness—how best to understand and treat our symptoms. But we practice Yoga as preventative and positive medicine. Just as the immune system is strengthened against the common cold and other viruses with daily practice, the emotional body is strengthened as well. The highs, the lows, the extremes of all the emotions are brought into balance by the practice. In every stage of Yoga, you will find relief from obsessive negative thinking. When you are first learning a pose and moving into it, you cannot possibly obsess about what you should have said in the meeting this morning. To learn the pose, your mind must focus on the details of alignment. Later, when you’re in the pose and you allow your mind to become absorbed in the sensations in your body, you are very far from your everyday troubles.
What the Experts say:
Yoga for Depression is a godsend
Yoga for Depression is a godsend: beautifully written, medically accurate, and very practical. I highly recommend it!
Weintraub has written…
a sensitive, intelligent, painstaking exploration of the deeper psychospiritual issues that make up the complex experience of depression.… What is most impressive about this text, though, is not how much she knows but the way she conveys what she knows, the innate qualities she brings to her writing: her steadfastness in encouraging the reader, her agility at drawing on ageless yoga texts, her insights into the problems of the self and the conditions in modern society that exacerbate them.
Highly recommend it
Heal yourself with Yoga For Depression. I absolutely love this book and highly recommend it.
Her insights are inspirational
Amy Weintraub’s work is some of the most important in our world today for helping humanity understand more deeply the significance of the mind-body connection. Her insights are inspirational for yoga teachers and all readers.
Integrating the mind and the body
This is a book about integrating the mind and the body, about using movement to mend oneself; in a world obsessed with psychopharmacology, reading it was a refreshing reminder that, in some cases, the tools we have to cure depression reside not in a pill, but in our own bodies, if we are willing to try.
Belongs in the hands of every person
Yoga for Depression belongs in the hands of every person who experiences depression and in the library of every therapist who works with people suffering from depression.
Comprehensive and totally inspiring
In the compassionate voice of someone who definitely knows the territory of depression, Amy Weintraub presents Yoga science and personal stories, research results and poetry, and practice instructions that are genuinely interesting in this very readable book that is both comprehensive and totally inspiring.
An astonishingly comprehensive guide
Yoga for Depression is an astonishingly comprehensive guide to the art and science of Yoga. Herein lies a Yogic blueprint for how to be a human being, written by a compassionate and generous teacher.
A beautifully written encyclopedia
This is truly a beautifully written encyclopedia of yoga for depression. It is rare to find such a generous soul, willing to embrace all approaches to yoga, unbiased and yet having intelligent discernment and advice for those searching for help. In Yoga for Depression, Amy offers many guidelines and solutions through yoga, to both those who suffer from depression and to yoga teachers working with them.
A self-aware, self-creating path
With clarity, compassion, and the courage of a person who has lived her own story all the way through, Amy Weintraub offers readers a self-aware, self-creating path through the darker thickets of a life. Her specific, gracefully presented suggestions for joining breath, body, movement, and mind bring one of the great wisdom traditions into a newly useful context, an essential means for renewing and reawakening contemporary life.
Inspiring and trustworthy guide
If you are looking for an inspiring and trustworthy guide to heal into a whole new life, look no further.
Brilliant and comprehensive book
In a clear, direct and grounded approach, this brilliant and comprehensive book offers guideposts for those seeking to reclaim their birthright of joy.
This book belongs in the hands of every person
Amy Weintraub’s Yoga for Depression offers us a powerful and comprehensive guidebook that provides the reader with a precise path for healing from depression. This book belongs in the hands of every person who experiences depression and in the library of every therapist who works with people suffering from depression.