Take the natural path to mental wellness

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.

by Stephen Cope

Depression appears to be a universal human experience. We are fortunate, then, to live in a time when being depressed no longer marks us as flawed, or possessed, or sinful - or even separate from God. Depression marks us only as human. We are, as Kierkegaard said, "the animal who suffers."

But what is this particular suffering of depression? The conventional wisdom holds depression to be a mood disorder: "I'm depressed. I'm out of sorts. I'm sad." But I think most of us know that it's a much more complicated animal. It shows up in vastly different ways - not just as a bleak mood. It shows up in our self-defeating and addictive behaviors. It shows up in our thoughts as negative self-talk. It shows up in the very way we perceive ourselves, others, and the world. It even shows up in the health of our immune functioning.

No. depression is not just a mood disorder. Oftentimes when we're depressed, in fact, we don't even feel depressed. Indeed, we may feel little of anything at all. Most of us know this territory, don't we? Moving through life as in a trance? "It's too painful to look. Too painful to feel." We run to the TV, or for a pint of ice cream, or to the mall. How can we shut life out? In fact, this experience of alienation from life is really the heart of depression. Depression manifests as our inability to be present for the experience of life. At its root, depression signals a difficulty with Being itself.

Emily Dickinson, who wrestled magnificently with depression, got the tone of this suffering just right:

There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - across - upon it -
As one within a Swoon
Goes safely - Where an open eye-
Would drop him - Bone by Bone.

Let's face it: Life is sometimes almost too difficult to bear. And so most of us spend some part of our energy avoiding Being - avoiding the anxiety, the pain, the sheer sensation of it all. And in these times we may enter the trance of depression about which Dickinson writes.

Because we've studied depression so intently over the past two decades, we now know that many of us live most of our lives mildly depressed. Separated - if you will - from our own (dare I say it?) Life Force. Afraid of really living, we make deals with ourselves in order not to feel, not to live. We make compromises that keep us at arm's length from life - secluded from the raw ups and downs of being human. Psychologists may call these deals pathological solutions. They may show up over time as "symptoms."

But there is good news! It turns out that the wish to be also marks us as human. 'The wish to live fully - even in the face of certain death. In fact, for some of us, the effort to become fully alive may be- more impor-tant than survival itself. Most of us long to give up our compromises and our deals, to be fully present for the experience of life. But how can we do it? How can we learn to bear what Jon Kabat Zinn called the "full catastrophe of life"? Is psychotherapy enough? Are pills enough?

Emily Dickinson wrote poetry in order to live. For her, art was medicine - and taking a daily dose was literally a life-or-death affair. What do we do to wrestle with our problems with Being? What medicine do we take? For medicine, of some kind, I think, will be required.

© 2003 by Amy Weintraub.

Tags: Yoga, Depression