Yoga of Recovery

NIMH “reorienting its research away from D.S.M. categories”

Yoga of Recovery — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:08:19 +0000

The creators of the D.S.M. in the 1960s and ’70s “were real heroes at the time,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Broad Institute and a former director at the National Institute of Mental Health. “They chose a model in which all psychiatric illnesses were represented as categories discontinuous with ‘normal.’ But this is totally wrong in a way they couldn’t have imagined. So in fact what they produced was an absolute scientific nightmare. Many people who get one diagnosis get five diagnoses, but they don’t have five diseases — they have one underlying condition.”

from NY Times article “Psyhciatry’s Guide is out of touch with Science” by Pam Belluck and Benedict Carey

Patients with mental disorders deserve better. NIMH is looking to Transform Diagnosis and has launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system. Read more from NIMH here

The Creation of Disease

Yoga of Recovery — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:27:27 +0000

The free market is not very good at distributing compassion, nor is it particularly good at deciding whose suffering deserves recognition…

in a free-market economy anyway, it’s not such a good idea to let the people who profit from disease define it.

Read article from Gary Greenberg here

DSM diagnoses are not real diseases, but rather constructs …

Yoga of Recovery — Tue, 07 May 2013 11:08:41 +0000

Gary Greenberg’s recently published book “The Book of Woe: The DSM and The Unmaking of Psychiatry”, is said to be a powerful critique of the entire DSM methodology. Greenberg is a practicing psychotherapist who has been referred to as “The Dante of our Psychiatric age,” by Errol Morris, and blogs about the DSM for the New Yorker. With The Book of Woe, written during and after his own participation in the revision process of the DSM-5, Greenberg doesn’t just paint the DSM as irrelevant, but as an arbitrary and totalitarian influence in the treatment of mental and emotional distress. Greenberg makes an unsparing case against the DSM’s hold on the naming rights to our psychic suffering.

Here is a very interesting article from the Fix on what Gary has to say about the new DSM

The narrative of human lives is more or less absent in healthcare economies …

Yoga of Recovery — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:47:53 +0000

We live in an age that pays lip service to history, yet which continually undermines the ties we have to the past. The narrative of human lives is more or less absent in healthcare economies, where symptoms are seen as problems to be treated locally, rather than as signs that something is wrong at a more fundamental level. If the constellation of the manic depressive includes a difficulty in integrating a part of his or her history, society’s neglect of this dimension can only make things worse.

I enjoyed this article, read more

here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/26/human-touch-in-bipolar-times

Darian Leader’s Strictly Bipolar is published next month by Penguin

June 12, 2013: Boston, MA

Yoga of Recovery — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:14:49 +0000

Yoga of Recovery evening workshop

Wednesday 12 June, 2013:

Kundalini Yoga Boston
186 Hampshire Street
Cambridge MA 02139

info@kundaliniyogaboston.com

Please sign up in advance. Call 617 868.0055

Where Are the Jobs in Yoga Therapy?

Yoga of Recovery — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:20:19 +0000

This is a key question for our emerging field and a focus of the work of IAYT. In my view, the answer is a function of how safe, competent and effective we are AND how well Yoga is integrated into conventional health care.

At SYTAR 2013 we try and answer this question three ways

Morning sessions presenting where and how Yoga is actually being integrated into major hospitals and health care clinics.
Afternoon sessions that provide training and continuing education in the competencies expected of Yoga therapists (Yoga of Recovery presentation 2pm Saturday) and
Many opportunities for personal contacts with your peers from all over the world.

Click here to enter the complete conference website and to register.

Early bird rates are available through April 12. A $100 discount is offered to current IAYT and NAMA members and an effective discount of 10% for a multiple-conference registration is built into the rates as well.

Data has the power to inform. Story has the power to transform

Yoga of Recovery — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 23:38:39 +0000

THE STORIES OF ADDICTION

By Jim Jensen, LAC, LCPC

In less than a generation we have gone from a community of fellow alcoholics sitting together in church basements sharing stories, to licensed professionals sitting together in hotel conference rooms sharing studies on the neurochemistry of addiction.

One invites questions. The other stands at the door handing out answers. One engages the brain. The other engages our imagination, emotions, and spirit.

Read more on Focus Treatment Centers website here

What is the difference between being an addict and being a human being?

Yoga of Recovery — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:08:12 +0000

I always enjoy Susan Cheever’s articles for “The Fix” -

“At a popular center for meetings in New York City on most days of the week, an addict can get 12-step help for spending, under earning, sexual compulsiveness, cocaine, co-dependency, crystal meth addiction, debting, overeating, surviving incest and problems with addicted family members. The miracle of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is that they often work when nothing else does. Although few of the more than 50 12-step programs for other addictions are as organized or as effective as AA, they seem to have a good effect on the people who attend them.

Yet their proliferation raises a larger question: What is the difference between being an addict and being a human being? Everyone has some kind of problem. Can a 12-step program help every problem?

Although addictions vary in intensity—some addicts are more addicted than others—there is a difference between an addict—someone who cannot stop—and someone who is not addicted. It is also true that many addicts can switch substances if they need to. “High-functioning alcoholics” are often people who also have other addictions, such as money, food and pills‑all kept more or less in check by spreading the addiction thin. Recovery author Patrick Carnes, PhD, who put sex addiction on the map, calls this “bargaining with chaos.”

In many AA meetings members talk about drug addiction, eating disorders and struggles to stop smoking. Although all addictions are the same in some ways, it is deeply reassuring and comforting to sit with a group of people who have exactly the same problems as you.

Weight-loss surgery doesn’t fix the insides of a person

Yoga of Recovery — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 01:23:14 +0000

In my experience this is also what I have seen -

“Weight-loss surgery fixes the outside of a person, but not the inside. While it can reduce the harm of obesity, it leaves the needs driving your addiction untouched. So if food has always been your drug, and stomach-minimizing surgery abruptly denies you your fix, you turn to other drugs. Alcohol, being legal, is the most available, but patients can take their pick among the panoply of addictive substances.”

Get people hooked on … The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

Yoga of Recovery — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 23:20:49 +0000

This article is adapted from “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us,” which will be published by Random House this month.

Michael Moss is an investigative reporter for The Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for his reporting on the meat industry.

Here are some parts that struck me …

Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight million Americans.

Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’ Plenty of guilt to go around here!”

… the food industry already knew some things about making people happy — and it started with sugar.

… pioneering work on discovering what industry insiders now regularly refer to as “the bliss point” or any of the other systems that helped food companies create the greatest amount of crave.

“sensory-specific satiety.” In lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more. Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.

… the powerful sensory force that food scientists call “mouth feel.” This is the way a product interacts with the mouth, as defined more specifically by a host of related sensations, from dryness to gumminess to moisture release. These are terms more familiar to sommeliers, but the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.

… top contributors to weight gain included red meat and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and potatoes, including mashed and French fries. But the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,” Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a craving for more.

Calendar/Schedule at a Glance

Yoga of Recovery — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 21:51:46 +0000

Calendar/Schedule at a Glance

I thought this dated list with location information might make it easier to find the best time/offering for you to join us.

Details are found under the Retreats or Workshops or Training Certification pages.

Date	Event	Location
April 14 – 23, 2013	YoR for Counselors 10-day Training Certification	Paradise Island, Nassau, Bahamas
April 25 – May 1, 2013	YoR 7-day retreat	Paradise Island, Nassau, Bahamas
May 2 – 4, 2013	Yoga Vacation Program for all guests led by Durga Beyond Addiction: Overcoming Compulsive Behaviors and Cravings	Paradise Island, Nassau, Bahamas
May 9 – 19, 2013	Yoga & Ayurveda Certificate Course, 10-day Training Certification	Paradise Island, Nassau, Bahamas
Saturday June 1, 2013	YoR meet up, 2-9pm	Grass Valley, CA
June 12, 2013	Evening public workshop	Kundalini Yoga Center, Boston, MA
June 13-16, 2013	IAYT’s 5^th Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR) – “The Front Line of Yoga Therapy”	Boston, MA
June 20-23, 2013	YoR 4-day retreat	Yogaville, Buckingham, VA
Tues, June 25, 2013 6.30 – 8.30pm	Evening public workshop	Integral Yoga Center, NY
Weds, June 26, 2013 7.30 – 9.30pm	Evening Satsang Talk	Sivananda Center, NY
June 27 – 30, 2013	3-day YoR Retreat	Woodbourne, NY
June 27 – July 7, 2013	YoR for Counselors 10-day Training Certification	Woodbourne, NY
Saturday, July 20, 2013	YoR meet up, 2-9pm	Grass Valley, CA
Saturday Aug 3, 2013	YoR meet up, 2-9pm	Grass Valley, CA
August 4 – 14, 2013	YoR for Counselors 10-day Training Certification	Grass Valley, CA
August 16 – 26, 2013	Yoga & Ayurveda Certificate Course, 10-day Training Certification	Grass Valley, CA
August 29 – September 2, 2013	Labor Day – Vedic Knowledge Integration Forum with Swami Sitaramananda, David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri), Yogini Shambhavi, Komilla Sutton, Amarananda Bhairavan	Grass Valley, CA
Sat Sep 14	YoR meet up	Grass Valley, CA
Sep 15 – 20, 2013	Ayurveda Detoxification & Rejuvenation Retreat	Grass Valley, CA
Sep 25 – 26, 2013	Inner Peace Yoga Therapy Training	North Carolina, US
Sep 29 – Oct 6, 2013	YoR for Counselors 7-day Training Certification	Yogaville, Buckingham, VA
Oct 29 – 31, 2013	Inner Peace Yoga Therapy Training	Mount Madonna, CA
Mar 26 – Apr 6, 2014	Yoga & Ayurveda Certificate Course, 12-day Training Certification	Cu Chi, Vietnam
June 26 – 29, 2014	YoR 4-day retreat	Yogaville, Buckingham, VA
June 29 – July 6, 2014	Ayurveda Foundations 7-day Certificate Course	Yogaville, Buckingham, VA
Sep 7 – 14, 2014	YoR for Counselors 7-day Training Certification	Yogaville, Buckingham, VA

The “Drinking Mirror”, a new phone app

Yoga of Recovery — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 22:41:25 +0000

A new phone app shows the effect of drinking alcohol on a person’s facial appearance. The “Drinking Mirror” is designed to make people aware of the physical toll of heavy alcohol consumption. The app, which is free until March, is available for Android and iPhone users. You can upload or take a photo of yourself, and enter information about your drinking habits. The app shows them how their face might age if they continue to consume alcohol at their current rate, by adding weight gain, dull skin, wrinkles and red cheeks.

The app is part of the Scottish government’s “Drop a Glass Size” campaign, launched this month.

It is also available on the web here

Read more about the Visible and Inivisible Effects here

and remember YoR teaches Ayurveda for addictions – we specialize in REJUVENATION!

June 27 – 30: Upstate New York, USA

Yoga of Recovery — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:53:18 +0000

(Retreat fee $225 plus 3 nights accommodations $55-$140 per night, arrive afternoon June 27, leave afternoon June 30)

Web: sivananda.org/ranch
Email: yogaranch@sivananda.org
Phone: 1-845 436 6492

The Yoga Ranch is located 100 miles from New York City, on 77 acres in the New York Catskills. A shortline bus from Penn Station takes you there in just over one hour from NY city. There are two guest buildings; one is a turn-of-the-century farmhouse, the other a small 1920′s hotel built by the original owners as a place to provide fresh air for their NYC neighbors. Most accommodation is in simple shared rooms or single rooms, with separate, shared bathrooms. Several small apartments with private bathrooms are also available. Tenting is also welcome.

WHO says more than 350 million people worldwide have depression …

Yoga of Recovery — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 08:18:53 +0000

and predicts that by 2020, the disorder will rival heart disease as the illness with the highest global disease burden.

The evidence is that both our genes and our early childhood experiences contribute …

governments should consider screening adolescents to try to reduce the number who go on to suffer major and recurring bouts of depression…

‘Early screening in the service of early intervention to try to prevent later mental health problems undoubtedly has allure,’ said Felicity Callard of London’s Institute of Psychiatry.

‘But to grow up with the knowledge that you are ‘at high risk’ of future mental health problems can affect the very way in which you grow up – and thereby… embed a sense that you are mentally vulnerable, with potentially untoward consequences.’

Virtually Anorexic – Where’s The Harm?

Yoga of Recovery — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 05:17:40 +0000

Thousands of young girls are using dangerous ‘pro-ana’ websites that encourage users to ‘starve for perfection’.

“Thinspiration” – where images of celebrities such as Victoria Beckham and Keira Knightley are used to idealise a certain look.