Bo Forbes - Yoga for Emotional Balance Simple Practices to Help Relieve Anxiety and Depression

Forbes clearly and compassionately explains anxiety and depression and helps readers understand the process of healing. We can all benefit from these teachings.

LA Yoga

This book is excellentits timely, clear, and full of tools for creating emotional balance. I particularly love the restorative yoga sequences. They are close to miraculous, and everyone can do them.

Lilias Folan, PBS host and author of Lilias! Yoga Gets Better with Age

Forbes has crafted a knowledgeable, realistic guide to addressing the physical and psychological aspects of anxiety and depression, explaining how we can use the body and mind in concert with each other to heal. To her credit, Forbes grounds her ideas and recommendations in sober observations (as both a therapist and a yoga teacher), scientific literature, and a bodhisattvas compassion for human suffering. If youre struggling with anxiety and depression, this book could point the way to wholeness and well-being.

Yoga Journal

Bo Forbes has written more than just a book. Shes put together a step-by-step prescription that can be tailored to individual needs for the effective relief of the common modern-day maladies of stress, anxiety, and depression.

Richard Rosen, author of The Yoga of Breath

Yoga for Emotional Balance teaches restorative poses and simple breathing techniques that, when practiced regularly, can put you on the path to feeling better.

Timothy McCall, MD, author of Yoga as Medicine

[A] unique synthesis of yoga and psychology... this important contribution to the field of integrative emotional healing is informative for teachers and therapists, yet accessible to the lay person.

Yoga International

Bo Forbes brilliantly illuminates the fact that your body can be depressed or anxious as well as your mind. This is good news, because the habitual postures and movements of anxiety and depression can be corrected through the practices she describes, leading to dramatically improved mood states. Highly recommended!

Andrew Weil, MD

Yoga for Emotional Balance reveals, with humor and delightful examples, the enormous potential of restorative yoga for creating a rich and bright emotional world.

Richard Freeman, author of The Mirror of Yoga

I am very pleased to give my highest recommendation to Yoga for Emotional Balance. What shines through most clearly on every page is Bo Forbes voicedown-to-earth, knowledgeable, and above allcompassionate.

Leslie Kaminoff, co-author of Yoga Anatomy

Yoga for Emotional Balance unpacks the complexity of the mind-body relationship in an accessible and practical way, illustrating the power of yoga to create physiological and psych-emotional change. Bo Forbes book is full of stories, processes, and insightleaving the reader with a roadmap to emotional balance.

Gary Kraftsow, author of Yoga for Wellness

Bo Forbes voice throughout this book is consistently inviting and gracious, deeply and confidently knowledgeable. Readers will feel hopeful as soon as they start to read this book, even before beginning to practice the remarkably accessible exercises.

Sylvia Boorstein, author of Happiness Is an Inside Job

This is precisely this kind of clear, accessible instruction that will catalyze both the lay and scientific communities to take these practices more seriously and explore their impact.

Richard J. Davidson, professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, and director of The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, University of WisconsinMadison

Bo Forbes has shown us a path to emotional balance that is located right here inside our bodies! I noticed more trust in my inner capacity for healing after reading this book.

David Richo PhD, author of When the Past Is Present

After reading Bo Forbes book, I was eager to practice deep relaxation immediately! Highly recommended for all levels of yoga students.

Judith Hanson Lasater, PhD, PT, author of Yogabody: Anatomy, Kinesiology, and Asana

Written with insight, elegance, and wit, this book is a must-read for yoga teachers, therapists, students, laypeople, and anyone looking for alternatives to modern methods of healing.

Edwin Bryant, professor of Hindu Religion and Philosophy, Rutgers University

ABOUT THE BOOK

Emotional balance is within your reachwhen you cultivate the intelligence of both your body and mind. Bo Forbes, a psychologist and yoga teacher, presents an integrative approach to healing anxiety, depression, and chronic stress. In this book, she offers some of her most important teachings and practices, including:

• restorative yoga sequences designed to balance anxiety and lift depression
• breath- and body-centered exercises to calm your mind and energize your body
• simple ways to understand your emotional patterns
• an overview of the three main obstacles to emotional well-being
• five tools for building emotional balance

Rooted in classical yoga yet supported by psychology and science, the techniques in this book will help you create progressive and lasting change.

BO FORBES, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist, yoga teacher, and integrative yoga therapist whose background includes training in biopsychology, behavioral medicine, and stress management. She is the founder of Integrative Yoga Therapeutics, a system that specializes in the therapeutic application of yoga for anxiety, insomnia, depression, immune disorders, chronic pain, and physical injuries. Forbes conducts teacher trainings and workshops internationally, and writes frequently for magazines such as Yoga Journal, Body + Soul, and the International Journal of Yoga Therapy. For more information, visit her online at boforbes.com.

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YOGA for

Emotional Balance

Simple Practices to Help Relieve

Anxiety and Depression

Bo Forbes, PsyD

Photographs by

Thibaut Fagonde

SHAMBHALA

Boston & London

2011

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2011 by Bo Forbes

Cover photograph Margaret Singer

Cover design by Kathleen Lynch/Black Kat Design

Photographs 2011 by Thibaut Fagonde

Special thanks to Manduka who generously supplied the yoga props in this book. www.manduka.com.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Forbes, Bo.

Yoga for emotional balance: simple practices to help relieve anxiety and depression / Bo Forbes.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2324-2

ISBN 978-1-59030-760-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. YogaTherapeutic use. 2. Anxiety. 3. Depression, Mental.

I. Title.

RA781.7.F67 2011

613.7046dc22