Some Good Yoga and Meditation Techniques for OCD, Anxiety and General Peace of Mind

Kundalini yoga works great for OCD and for just anxiety in general. I believe it works for other anxiety disorders, but I’m not sure it’s been documented well. The following Kundalini yoga technique has been documented well for OCD. I doubt if it’s all that useful if you don’t have the illness. Kundalini Yoga Therapy for OCD 1. Sit up very straight and tall. 2. Try to clear your mind. 3. Hold right nostril shut with a finger. 4. Breathe in slowly through left nostril for 15 seconds. All the way in, as deep as you can go. Fill your lungs completely to where they feel as if they will pop. 5. Hold breath for 15 seconds. No inhalation! 6. Release breath slowly for 30 seconds, continuing to hold right nostril shut. No inhalation! Release breath completely to where your lungs are utterly empty and you are almost starving for breath. or: 7. Release breath slowly for 15 seconds, continuing to hold right nostril shut. 8. Then hold breath after exhalation for 15 seconds, continuing to hold right nostril shut. This one is difficult because you’re basically out of breath for 15 seconds. Repeat. Good idea to do it for up to 30 minutes a day if you can. I wish there was something to add to it, but I can’t think of any. Notice that each breath takes a full one minute and that you are breathing in and out through only one nostril. Our average breath lasts only maybe 5 seconds or so. So you are breathing 20 times slower than you normally do. Kundalini Yoga Therapy for Anxiety 1. Sit up very straight and tall. 2. Try to clear your mind. 3. Hold right nostril shut with a finger. 4. Breathe in slowly through left nostril for 15 seconds. All the way in, as deep as you can go. Fill your lungs completely to where they feel as if they will pop. 5. Hold breath for 15 seconds. No inhalation! Continue to hold right nostril shut. 6. Switch finger to left nostril and now hold left nostril shut. Release breath slowly from the right nostril for 30 seconds, continuing to hold left nostril shut. No inhalation! Release breath completely to where your lungs are utterly empty and you are almost starving for breath. or: 7. Release breath slowly for 15 seconds, continuing to hold left nostril shut. 8. Then hold breath after exhalation for 15 seconds, continuing to hold left nostril shut. This one is difficult because you’re basically out of breath for 15 seconds. This is one is basically 30 seconds in with the left nostril, then 30 seconds out with the right nostril. This should work well for anyone who wants to calm down or mellow out. You don’t need to have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. There are some other parts of this therapy dealing with some weird concept called “chakras,” which I don’t understand, but I don’t think you need to deal with your “chakras” for this therapy to work. You can also do meditation. I prefer what I call Zen meditation. I have no idea if I am doing this correctly or not, but this is how I do it. You can do this any time, but I often do it at night before I go to sleep while lying in bed. It’s often said that you have to sit up straight to do this, but I don’t think that is necessary. Simply try to clear your mind of all things except for one thing. I use, “Om,” but you can use any mantra you like. “Om” is a mantra. You just try to fill your mind with “Om,” the thought of Om spreading out across your mind and consciousness and blottiong out all other things. You will find that other thoughts are constantly trying to invade your mind. There is probably no good reason to think about any of these thoughts at this time. So just try to dismiss them or push them towards the outside of your mind so they are smaller. Imagine that your thoughts are like a gigantic sunrise or sunset spreading across your entire mind from top to bottom and left to right. All of this should simply be “Om,” possibly lit up in some bright color or scenery. The other thoughts, as they come in, just push them to the periphery of this brilliant OM sunrise, to where they are smaller and less prominent. Just keep on moving away from them. Your mind will resist this on various levels. My mind is furious and insists that it has many important things to think about! Why waste time thinking about “Om” when I could be thinking of this or that (what or what?) and solving this or that problem (what or what problem?) or learning this or that? I figure that’s all nonsense. Most of my thinking seems to be a complete waste of time. I would call it mental masturbation, except that jerking off is a lot of fun. Most of my thinking is just stupid and pointless. It may as well not even be there. You learn nothing by thinking. You only gain knowledge via observation and input. With no input, there is no learning. By thinking, you can work with stuff you already know to try to make more sense of it, but you learn nothing at all. Sure, you can go over memories by thinking, but those memories will be there whether you think about them or not. Summary is that most thinking, at least the kind I do, is not only a waste of time. It’s actually harmful. Meditation is just about shutting off your mind your mind for a bit. I have found it very helpful for OCD. It also works great for concentration. When I meditate while listening to talk radio broadcasts, I follow the broadcast a lot better because my mind wanders less. Anyone could benefit from this. You don’t need to have an anxiety disorder diagnosis.

Some Cognitive-Behavioral Techniques For OCD Patients and People in General

I have OCD, but I don’t talk about it much on here because no one wants to hear about it, understandably. If you want to know what it is, check out Wikipedia. I am a “pure O” obsessional. That is, I have no compulsions. Instead, my mind just goes around in idiotic circles a lot of the time, and I worry about all sorts of stupid shit. I also spend a lot of time trying not to think about various things, or trying to stop unwanted thoughts that keep popping into my head. Personally, I have found that cognitive techniques don’t work very well unless I am good and medicated on a good OCD drug. I take an SSRI called Lexapro, but there are many others out there. In general, you need an SSRI. SSRI’s sort of suck, but so does OCD! Pick your poison. If x dose does not work, you may need to go higher. Non-SSRI antidepressants, Lithium and Depakote, and antipsychotics are generally useless for OCD. I don’t think anti-anxiety drugs like Ativan and the Valium type benzodiazepines work very well either. Many if not most psychiatrists and psychologists do not understand this illness very well. I have a number of patients who I work with online, and they are always getting misdiagnosed by docs. Typically misdiagnoses are anxiety and depression, or simply no diagnosis at all. Many times they are given 3-4 different drugs all at once. Psych drugs are very nasty, and you need to be on the minimum number of drugs. The trend of polypharmacy so in vogue by psychiatrists nowadays is downright sick and almost evil. Furthermore, it’s stupid and pointless. These guys are nothing more than pill-pushers anymore, and it’s the more the merrier with them. Many psychiatrists have a poor understanding of drug interactions. I have had to warn a number of patients of drug interactions due to the drugs that their moron doctors put them on. I really don’t understand why these docs are so stupid about this stuff. You really need to be very aggressive with psychiatrists and psychologists. If you don’t like them, just pull up your tent and move along. Be assertive to the point of demanding with them, and don’t back down. Don’t treat them like they are Gods. I’m a horrible patient, but at least I know what I’m doing. You understand your body, and you understand your illness. Don’t let some silly clinician misdiagnose you on the grounds that “they are the experts and you are not.” Read up on your illness, and read up on your meds. One fascinating thing about OCD patients is that most of them are intelligent, often highly intelligent. The illness seems to be directly related to intelligence. One interesting finding via MRI on OCD patients is that they have more brain cells and more connections than non-patients. Upshot is as we might expect. They think too much. Anafranil remains the gold standard for OCD drugs, but it’s pretty nasty. It’s an old, dirty drug with lots of side effects. Nevertheless, nothing helped me like Anafranil. I could not have gotten my Master’s Degree without it. Second line are the other SSRI’s which all seem to be about as good as each other. It seems like cognitive stuff doesn’t work until you are on the drugs. Otherwise you’re too crazy with OCD to utilize cognitive stuff. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is the therapy of choice, and there is much material online about this. I’m not going to bother going on about it. However, I will say that it’s a good idea to confront the thing that you fear. In my case, there were a variety of situations that I feared, all revolving around a common fear, that, honestly, is ludicrous (And that I will not discuss.). I conquered the fear at at least one level by simply throwing myself into the situations that set off the fear (or the obsessive thoughts really). I plunged into the deep end of the pool so to speak. For a while there, the thoughts just poured into my brain like a river so I could barely even think straight. The general tendency in situations like this is to run, to get out of there. But the truth is, “You cannot run from your fears.” If you run from them, you will never get over them. Avoidance makes OCD worse. So you just throw yourself into the feared situation, and stay there while your mind is being overrun by horrible thoughts. Don’t leave, just stay and let the thoughts “flood” into your mind. I call this technique “flooding.” After a while, you simply get sick and tired of being anxious, and the anxiety starts to go down. Your mind realizes it can’t run away from the feared object, so it just accommodates itself to the feared situation and learns to get used to it. This is how all of us overcame all of our fears in childhood and hopefully even in adulthood. You can’t stay anxious forever. After a while, the brain says, “I give up. Fuck it. We’re gonna stay here and handle this.” In behavioral terms, this is called “extinction.” The fear is “extinguished” through prolonged exposure. If you get good and stabilized, there are some Kundalini Yoga* techniques you can do. One is alternate nostril breathing. Hold down one nostril and breathe through the other. First breathe through the left nostril and then breathe out through the right. Inhale as slowly as possible and exhale as slowly as possible. Cycles should be on the order of 45 seconds to 1 minute if you can. This is ok for OCD, but it’s mostly an anxiety reducer that works well for anyone. A specific one for OCD is left-nostril breathing. Hold the right nostril down and breathe in and out through the left nostril. Once again, cycles should be on the order of 45 seconds to 1 minute if you can do it. Another thing you can do is meditation. This works well if you are already pretty stabilized and want to get better. Focus your mind on one particular spot and just stay there. Think “nothing,” “nada”, “ommmm,” or whatever you want. Try to empty out your mind as much as possible from your obsessions. If an obsession comes, mark it as an “irrelevant thought,” and just move back to your focus. This method enables you to keep most of the irrelevant thoughts (obsessions) out of your head. This method is best described as cognitive shifting. Research has shown that in OCD there is reduced ability to engage in cognitive shifting due to dangers with meditation, but I’m not really worried about them too much. In conjunction with meditation, I would recommend studying Zen Buddhism. I studied it for many years, and for a while, I got very, very good at it. The ultimate book ever written on Zen is An Introduction to Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki. One thing that Zen teaches you is to only think about whatever you need to think about. There’s no need to think about 1000 things at once. When you clear your mind, you will only think of necessary or important things, and extraneous or irrelevant thoughts will become infrequent. The person living in Zen simply lives his life with a clear mind and few thoughts. He doesn’t analyze his behavior. He just lives and acts naturally. He accepts his true feelings as they come to him. Once you start endlessly analyzing all of your thoughts and feelings, you’re on the road to nowhere. Just live and act naturally and don’t analyze. If you’re sweeping the floor, think about sweeping the floor. If you’re washing the dishes, think about washing the dishes. These techniques work not only for OCD patients, but for anyone else as well. Meditation, Zen and yoga are great for anyone. Try them out! *There are supposedly some risks with Kundalini, but I am not worried about them. I’ve been doing Kundalini for years, and nothing bad has happened yet. Sometimes it’s a bit weird though. You can get transported back in time to “previous selves” and “previous eras.” You have to be able to handle stuff like that.

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