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

What does absolute truth have to do with mental health? Explore how the Vedic concept of Satya and the epistemology of perception reveal the roots of psychological suffering — through the lens of Dev's Vedic Therapy.

What is the Atma and why does it matter for mental health? Counselling psychologist Devdarshan Bastola explains the Vedic concept of the witnessing self and its clinical relevance to anxiety, depression, and psychological suffering.

Why does psychological suffering persist even after therapy? Explore how Dev's Vedic Therapy reveals what conventional psychotherapy cannot address — through Avidya, Klesha, and the Bharatiya knowledge tradition.