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YOGA AND MENTAL HEALTH Dr. Karel Nespor
My first encounter with yoga took place when I was eleven. At that time, an American yoga teacher visited Czechoslovakia. She was over seventy years of age but, despite this, was able to perform yogasanas which were too difficult for many young people to do, including me. During my medical studies I encountered the publications of Bihar School of Yoga and, in 1977, I started correspondence with this organization. We have exchanged many yoga related papers and publications since then. Much later I was able to visit the headquarters of Bihar School of Yoga in North India, and to receive training there. Yoga interested me so much that I decided to take part in its medical research.
In the late 1970's I worked for one and a half years with a team of researchers in Czechoslovakia which investigated the neurophysiological aspects of various yogic practices. I had the privilege to meet Professor Dr. Bhovadar and to publish one paper with him. Since 1979, when I started work at the Psychiatric Hospital in Prague, I have used yogic techniques on many mental patients together with more conventional mental health approaches. I hope that my experience will increase the interest in yoga research and the use of yoga in the field of mental health. There are many different yogic techniques which may or may not be suitable for people with different mental health problems. I will try to summarize shortly which techniques and approaches have proved useful to me and to my colleagues.
It is not uncommon to find that psychosomatic patients are unwilling to accept the mental aspect of their problems, but they emphasize its physical causes. That is why intervention both on a physical and mental level is more likely to be accepted by them than psychotherapy alone or treatment with psychotropic medication. Correctly and gently practised, hatha yoga, yogic physical exercises, are useful. These physical exercises also have these mental health components: global and
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