As mentioned earlier, as individuals coping with day to day stressors, we may need to learn and raise awareness of different techniques for managing and maintaining mental health.

 The Yoga Way

Yoga offers comprehensive solutions for managing this negative mental health. Before discussing how to manage, we must first understand the beginning of negative conditions in the mind. According to Yoga, all negative emotions take root from an issue present in the subconscious. But how does this matter enter the subconscious?

The basic cause of this is attachment. We humans develop attachments to persons, things or emotions. This attachment raises desires and expectations. These desires ultimately lead to tensions, frustrations and conflicts. This affects the ego, which feels insecure. As a defense mechanism, the ego represses such emotions into the subconscious so that the mind is peaceful again.

However, these repressions are not dead. They are after all repressed feelings. They remain active in the subconscious resulting in the negative emotions we talked of earlier – anxieties, depression, aggression and fear.

The solution lies in preventing the build up or birth of such repressions and then also addressing the existing repressed clutter to gradually take it out of the system.

Yoga has techniques of  'Pratyahara'  that  work both as a preventive and a curative. 'Pratyahara' literally means dissociation or withdrawal of sensory awareness from the external world.

The practitioner is guided to become a 'witness' to observe and analyze the inputs and the workings of the mind. You are encouraged to internalize all your awareness to observe the happenings by detaching  the 'I' (ego) while sitting quietly or lying down in a secure environment. By developing "the witness" attitude, the ego is separated, so it does not feel insecure. As a result, the need for repression goes away. The subconscious is not fed with the negative input and this prevents build up of anxieties, insecurities and fears. The mind does not then find a place or need for such negative feelings and they are purged away.

By doing this the mind then becomes gradually unburdened, creating a clean slate for fresh positive thoughts. Mental quietness and peace replaces the clutter and chaos. When the mind is at peace great progress and healing can be achieved.