Thursday, 21 May 2026 A forty-five-year-old mother had been in generalised anxiety disorder for eight years when she came to me. Two prior courses of therapy. One course of an SSRI. A meditation app on her phone with a four-hundred-day streak. Her sleep had returned to baseline. Her appetite had stabilised. Her panic frequency had halved. And by every standard she still recognised, she was unwell. I asked her one question at the second session. "What does your therapy ask you

Tuesday, 19 May 2026 A fourteen-year-old came to my consulting room three days before her board examination. Her first sentence was specific. "I can hear everything in the room. I cannot stop hearing." She described, in detail, what her senses were doing without her consent. The pen-tap of the student two desks away. The clock. The proctor's footsteps. The breath of the girl behind her. The smell of the room before an examination begins. The visual scan of who had reached pag

By Devdarshan Bastola | Anandoham Health | May 14, 2026 A young medical intern — twenty-four, two years into a high-pressure hospital posting, living far from family — sat opposite me after six weeks of what she described as "useless" therapy with a previous clinician. She had been offered good, evidence-based cognitive work. She had followed the homework. Nothing had moved. Her description was precise: "I could see what she was trying to do. I just couldn't believe it would

By Devdarshan Bastola | Anandoham Health | May 12, 2026 A client in her late twenties — only daughter, recently broken off an engagement — sat across from me and said something that I think describes most therapy honestly: "I keep doing the same thing. I keep choosing the same kind of person, the same kind of job, the same kind of avoidance. I can see the pattern. I just can't stop being the pattern." She was not asking for insight. She had insight in surplus. She was describ

By Devdarshan Bastola | Anandoham Health "If I accept where I am, I'll never change." I have heard a version of this sentence from almost every high-functioning client I have worked with. It is the unspoken rule of achievement culture: dissatisfaction is the fuel, and contentment is the enemy. But there is a second misunderstanding, quieter and more damaging — and it comes from inside the so-called spiritual world. It is the idea that santoṣa means feeling content when things

By Devdarshan Bastola | Anandoham Health | A client once said to me, after two years of CBT that had helped her "manage" her anxiety without ever resolving it: "I can name what I'm feeling. I can challenge the thought. I can even breathe through it. But the thing under the thing — that's still there." She was describing, in plain English, what Patañjali described in the Yoga Sūtras between 200 BCE and 400 CE: that suffering has a layered architecture. Symptoms are the surfac

Thursday, April 30, 2026 Every clinician who has worked with chronic anxiety, compulsive behaviour, or treatment-resistant depression knows the same frustration: the client can execute the behavioural plan for three weeks, and then the system resets. The avoidance returns. The scrolling returns. The withdrawal returns. We call it "relapse." The client calls it "I guess I'm just like this." Patañjali, writing the Yoga Sūtras somewhere between 200 BCE and 400 CE, addressed thi

Tuesday, April 28, 2026 A client walked into my office and said, "I don't even know who I am without my anxiety." She had done four years of good CBT work. She had clean language for her thought distortions. She could list her triggers. What she had not yet been asked in any therapy was the quieter question: Who is the one noticing all of this? This is not a philosophical tangent, and it is not a replacement for the excellent CBT and schema work that preceded it. It is a ques

By Devdarshan Bastola | Anandoham Health | April 23, 2026 A fourteen-year-old girl was brought to me last year. She was losing thirty-minute blocks of time. She would step into an autorickshaw on the way to school, and the next thing she would remember was being at the gate. Her parents were afraid she had a neurological condition. She did not. She had exam-anxiety so severe that her consciousness was dissociating around the trigger. She had just changed schools, had a histor

By Devdarshan Bastola | Anandoham Health | April 21, 2026 A woman walked into my clinic last year with three years of generalised anxiety, a daily mindfulness practice, and a question she could not answer: "Why is it not working?" She had done the eight-week Mindfullness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course as well. And yet her nervous system was still braced against a catastrophe she could not name — the fear that if she died, what would happen to her mother. When I sat wit