David Shannahoff-Khalsa - Sacred Therapies: The Kundalini Yoga Meditation Handbook for Mental Health

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.

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 Childrens 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.

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