Tag: Yoga Psychology

You Are Neo

“You take the blue pill. The story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe…whatever you want to believe. “You take the red pill, and you will see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember. All I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” – Paraphrased from the movie The Matrix You’ve seen the now classic scene (and if you haven’t then you should watch it at least twice before returning to this...
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You Are a Flowing River

“Don’t push the river; it flows by itself” Fritz Perls The self is fluid, and constantly changing, said learned Eastern philosophers of yore. Your thoughts come and go, emotions change, and although you think of yourself as the same person across time, actually you are never the same. In fact, in some ways, you have no self at all. Now, this may sound nihilistic to many people. But, as it happens,...
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Kill Your Darlings

William Faulkner famously advised writers to edit fearlessly, to remove particularly those sentences that they loved.  Faulkner knew that the narrative and cohesiveness of a novel is ruined by sentences that are incongruent, no matter how beautifully written. Kill your darlings, he said.  If Faulkner were a psychiatrist, he would have said the same thing in psychotherapy. The goal of all growth oriented...
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New Year’s Renewal

Forget about resolutions you are not going to keep. Try renewal instead Depending on your perspective,  Time is infinite and multidimensional. Or Time is linear (with a past, present, and future) and finite. Our calendar, our clocks, hours minutes, days, years  – these are constructs, we made these to organize our world, so we can make appointments, and meet and do business and ensure an efficient usage...
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The River

When you find yourself, you will not find an object. You will not find something that you can point to and say, “This is who I am.” When you find yourself, you will find a flowing...
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Expansion

All of us have an “internal subjective space”, the world of our internal experiences – of thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and the interpretations of these perceptions. Usually, people know where this internal space begins and where it ends – their “ego boundaries” are said to be intact. (I should emphasize that the word “ego” means very different things in western psychiatry and in yoga...
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Freud Meets Patanjali: Integrative Psychology Part 1

(Excerpted from my Medscape.com Blog for physicians) In this series, I hope to demystify and destigmatize eastern approaches to psychological health. To most western trained physicians, eastern conceptualizations of the body and the mind must seem like superstition or conjecture. The recent wave of new age commercialization of these ancient concepts has not helped. “Mind, Body and Spirit” is a...
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