Sacred Therapies: The Kundalini Yoga Meditation Handbook for Mental Health

344 Pages·2012·3.52 MB·English

by  David Shannahoff-Khalsa

This book is dedicated to
Raj Yog Guru Ram Das, my Guru in the Divine;
Raj Yog Yogi Bhajan, Master of Kundalini Yoga, my Spiritual Teacher in the
Divine;
David and Sarah Shannahoff, my parents in the Divine, for their lifelong loving
support;
Pierre Henri Lallouette (in the Divine) and Monique Lallouette, for making my
life so much more pleasant with their perpetual care and love;
And to My Great Golden Sons,
Bubba, Patrick, and JJ, for their endless love, devotion, and playful affection.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
CHAPTER 1 A Brief Introduction to Kundalini Yoga Meditation
CHAPTER 2 Treating Anxiety and Generalized Anxiety Disorder
CHAPTER 3 Treating Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder and Obsessive
Compulsive Spectrum Disorders (Trichotillomania and Body
Dysmorphic Disorder)
CHAPTER 4 Treating Phobias
CHAPTER 5 Treating Panic Attacks and Panic Disorders
CHAPTER 6 Treating Acute Stress Disorder
CHAPTER 7 Treating Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
CHAPTER 8 Treating the Abused and Battered Psyche
CHAPTER 9 Treating the Major Depressive Disorders
CHAPTER 10 Treating Grief
CHAPTER 11 Treating the Bipolar Disorders
CHAPTER 12 Treating the Addictive, Impulse Control, and Eating
Disorders
CHAPTER 13 Treating Insomnia and Other Sleep Disorders
CHAPTER 14 Treating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
CHAPTER 15 Treating Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and
Comorbid Disorders (Conduct Disorder and Oppositional
Defiant Disorder)
CHAPTER 16 Treating Dyslexia and the Other Learning Disorders
CHAPTER 17 Treating Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders
CHAPTER 18 Treating the Personality Disorders (Paranoid, Schizoid,
Schizotypal, Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic Narcissistic,
Avoidant, Dependent, and Obsessive–Compulsive Personality
Disorders)
CHAPTER 19 Treating Autism and Asperger’s Disorder
References
Index
Acknowledgments
F
irst and foremost, I want to thank Guru Ram Das for his guidance and
blessings, for many of the insights that have helped to construct some of the
multipart protocols in this book, and for several of the individual techniques for
treating psychiatric disorders. I am deeply indebted to Yogi Bhajan, my spiritual
teacher, for his spiritual guidance, for most of the techniques in this book, and
for the other teachings that have made my scientific work and this book possible.
I want to thank Floyd E. Bloom, MD, for his efforts as my first scientific
collaborator on yogic research, when we were both at The Salk Institute, and for
helping to launch this work and make it a respectable and important scientific
endeavor that has now led to new and important insights for treating and
preventing psychiatric disorders. His active participation inspired many others to
collaborate in the early phases of my career. I am truly grateful for the many
years of his support and guidance that have followed. He gave me the idea of
establishing a nonprofit foundation to help fund this work, and he committed to
serve as the first vice president on the board of directors and first scientific
advisor in the early years of The Khalsa Foundation for Medical Science. I am
also grateful to Drs. David Schubert, Tony Hunter, and Walter Eckhart, who
gave me many years of institutional support at The Salk to help establish my
scientific career. I am indebted to Sheldon S. Hendler, MD, PhD, for his role as
my first scientific mentor and for facilitating my initial engagement at The Salk,
his role as a vice president of The Khalsa Foundation for Medical Science, and
his sage advice over the last 42 years.
Many others have been instrumental in the scientific and clinical work that
have now made this book possible. They include Michael G. Ziegler, MD, for
nearly 20 years of collaboration on pioneering physiological studies in his
laboratory and at the General Clinical Research Center at the University of
California, San Diego (UCSD). F. Eugene Yates, MD, University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA) made critical contributions to studies on multivariate
physiology that have led to new insights for defining psychophysiological states.
The late J. Christian Gillin, MD, Department of Psychiatry, UCSD, made
substantial collaborative efforts toward novel insights for sleep medicine and
psychophysiological states. Liana Beckett, MA, MFCC, Department of
Psychiatry, UCSD, invited me to collaborate using Kundalini yoga meditation
techniques for my first clinical trial in treating obsessive compulsive disorder
(OCD). Saul Levine, MD, Departments of Psychiatry, UCSD and Children’s
Hospital, San Diego, was instrumental in helping to obtain and conduct a study
funded by the National Institutes of Health for our first randomized and
controlled clinical trial for treating OCD.
I want to acknowledge Christopher C. Gallen, MD, PhD, for his collaboration
on the second OCD trial, for study design and professional guidance throughout,
for his invitation to employ magnetoencephalography (MEG) for studying
patients with OCD and healthy controls, and the study of the OCD breath
technique when he directed the MEG lab at The Scripps Research Institute. I am
grateful to Leslie Ellen Ray, MA, MFCC, for running the control group in the
second OCD clinical trial, and to Barry J. Schwartz, PhD, when at Scripps, and
John Sidorowich, PhD, UCSD, for collaboration on the second OCD trial. In
addition, I am grateful to Henry D. I. Abarbanel, PhD, formerly director of the
Institute for Nonlinear Science (INLS), UCSD, for providing institutional
support and a most wonderful, open, rigorous, creative, and productive
atmosphere in which to conduct much of this scientific work. I want to thank my
other colleagues in the BioCircuits Institute (formally INLS), UCSD, Drs. Jon A.
Wright, Roy Schult, Evgeny Novikov, Barry J. Schwartz, and Matthew B.
Kennel for collaboration on pioneering MEG studies. I thank Drs. Luigi Fortuna,
Maide Bucolo, Manuela La Rosa, Mattia Frasca, Francesca Sapuppo, and
Federica Di Grazia at the University of Catania in Sicily, Dipartimento di
Ingegneria Elettrica Elettronica e dei Sistemi, Catania, Sicily, for their enduring
and creatively collaborative efforts on MEG signal processing for the study of
yogic meditation techniques, normals, and patients with OCD. I am grateful to
Stuart W. Jamieson, MB, Head of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery,
UCSD, and B. Bo Sramek, PhD, Czech Technical University Prague,
Department of Mechanical Engineering, for collaboration on yogic techniques
for altering the cardiovascular system and for novel work on defining
hemodynamic states. I thank Brian Fallon, MD, Columbia University,
Department of Psychiatry, and New York State Psychiatric Institute, for inviting
me to present at a 2003 symposium on OCD at the Annual American Psychiatric
Association (APA) Conference. This event led to my teaching APA full-day
courses on Kundalini yoga meditation techniques specific for treating some of
the psychiatric disorders that are now included in this book. There are many
other scientific collaborators and support staff who have helped to make this
work possible over the last 34 years, and I am grateful to all of them for their key
roles.
I especially want to acknowledge, with deepest gratitude, Dr. Mona
Baumgartel and Mr. John DeBeer for providing financial support to The Khalsa
Foundation for Medical Science every year since its inception in 1984. Their
generosity has made the continuation of much of this work possible. I also
acknowledge Dr. David Schubert and Susan Frazar for their generous
contributions that have helped to support my presentations for the APA
meetings. In addition, I want to thank the Fetzer Institute, the Waletzky
Charitable Lead Trust, Earl Bakken, and the National Institutes of Health for
funding some of the scientific studies that have helped lead to the successes in
my career.
And last but not least, I am very grateful and indebted to my editors at W. W.
Norton & Company. I want to especially thank Deborah Malmud, vice president
and director of Norton Professional Books, for her continued interests and
creative insights that have led to this new handbook format. I am also very
thankful to Vani Kannan, Associate Managing Editor, to Libby Burton, Assistant
Editor, and to Ben Yarling, Editorial Assistant, for helping to make this book a
reality.
Preface
T
he intent of this book is to simplify the presentation and combine the protocols
from my first two books published by Norton on the use of Kundalini yoga
meditation techniques that are specific for the treatment of psychiatric disorders.
This handbook now combines all of the previously published disorder-specific
multipart protocols along with some updates for a few disorders so that they are
also now more accessible to the public. This convenient handbook includes
protocols that cover all of the major and common psychiatric disorders as they
are recognized today. In addition, the critical definitions, diagnostic criteria,
diagnostic features, and associated features and disorders are included to give a
clearer and more in-depth perspective on each disorder for the public and the
nonmedical professional. We reproduce here the formal descriptions for these
criteria with the express permission of the American Psychiatric Association
(APA). These definitions, criteria, features, and lists of the commonly associated
disorders are the result of the intense work over many decades by the esteemed
members of the psychiatric community. This critical information has been
previously published in the key APA text known as the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text-Revised (DSM-IV-
TR; (APA, 2000). Although a fifth edition (DSM-V) is expected to be published
in May 2013, most of the disorders covered in this handbook are likely to remain
intact in the DSM-V, with some minor changes for diagnostic criteria and
perhaps some changes in coding and group associations. At this time the DSM-V
is still a work in progress. The psychiatric experts tasked with this update are
considering additional ways to help clinicians identify the symptoms and
severity of mental illnesses, such as using dimensional assessments, that can
help to better evaluate patients on the full range of symptoms they may be
experiencing. This is expected to be the biggest and most important change for
the DSM-V. These dimensional assessments will help clinicians rate both the
presence and severity of the symptoms, such as “very severe,” “severe,”
“moderate, or “mild,” and this new information can also aid in tracking the
patients’ progress in treatment. The dimensional ratings will also provide a more
comprehensive view of the patient than giving only a primary diagnosis. These