Paper short abstract:

This paper examines yoga-inspired therapies for treatment of mental health problems. By emphasising patients’ focus on self-knowledge, these novel forms of therapy promise a transformation of biomedical understandings of mental illness.

Paper long abstract:

Although the mainstream association with yoga in the western world is that with super-flexible bodies, the discipline’s foundational text, Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras, purports the principal focus of the practice to be stilling the modifications of the mind. Yoga, alongside other Vedic scriptures such as Samkhya and Dharma, sees individuals as being caught up in webs of behavioural and thought patterns created through attachments to sensory experiences and the material world. These citta vritti or mind complexes, however, can be alleviated through exercise in attention to one’s thoughts, bodily movements, breath and, generally speaking, self-study and self-knowledge. Traditional yoga texts inspire new treatment models developed in clinical psychiatric settings of the National Institute for Mental Health and Neuroscience (NIMHANS) in Bangalore, South India. In this paper I discuss the limitations and possibilities entailed by such attempts to combine yogic and biomedical concerns, knowledge and practice. Yoga-based therapy, I suggest, could be seen as contributing to the anticipated transformation from evidence-based medicine to individualised treatment. This is taking place through the emphasis on patients’ awareness and self-knowledge as well as on the necessarily temporal and processual nature of wellbeing that yoga promotes. With regards to the above, and following Ingold’s approach to landscape and dwelling, I explore how modern therapeutic applications of yoga invite us to reconsider mental health as a fundamentally environmental concern.