Yoga for Depression
By: Amy Weintraub
This book is written by an author who is suffering from depression herself and started practicing yoga on a daily basis which began her road to recovery. Yoga for Depression goes into a lot of detail in the philosophy of yoga that may not be relevant to PRP use, but there are a lot of great stories of people’s journey through their recovery that may be able to help to give some of our higher functioning clients hope. This is also a great resource to use for teaching clients’ deep breathing exercises. Anyone who is interested in yoga can benefit from the various examples of exercises throughout the book.
Chapter 1: This chapter lays the ground work for the organization of the rest of the book. It discusses the author’s journey to recovery as well as:
What’s Wrong with the Medical Model?
The Science of Positive Mental Health
Two Yoga Strategies for Depression (willful practice and self-study)
Getting Started
Finding a Teacher
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Chapter 2: This chapter goes through a variety of mental illnesses and their symptoms as well as the benefits of yoga for each of them. There are great success stories in this chapter as well. The mental illnesses discussed are:
Grief
PTSD
Dysthymia
Bipolar Disorder
Major Depressive Episode
This chapter also has a great way to visualize deep breathing that may help clients better understand how to breath deeply by presenting how to do it in this manner (found on page 53).
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Chapter 3: This chapter goes into great detail on how yoga works. I found the exercises at the end of this chapter to be some that I am currently using in the yoga class and some that I may incorporate at some point.
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Chapter 4: Again this chapter uses a lot of yoga terminology which is not helpful for our clientele.
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Chapter 5: This chapter talks about the importance of breathing in yoga. It does a great job of explaining the importance of listening to your body when practicing yoga as well (page 98-99). “You are an individual with a different body, a different set of life experiences, injuries, and abilities than the twenty-something or the sixty-something practicing next to you. You can hurt yourself in Yoga if you push or strain or forget to breathe. Relax into the pose by breathing deeply, using micromovements to move in and out of your body’s full expression of the pose”. I like this passage because it is important to constantly remind the clients while in yoga to not push too hard or they will injure themselves.
