Path to the Soul
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Jungian psychoanalyst “offers a Hindu spin on therapy, challenging readers to rethink childhood conflict and marital strife in terms of karma and dharma” (Publishers Weekly).
Path to the Soul provides an important evolutionary leap in the rapidly evolving understanding of our psychological and spiritual essence. Drawing from Hindu and Christian spiritual wisdom, biological medicine, psychiatric technique, and over twenty-five years of clinical experience, Dr. Bedi has created a highly effective and integrated treatment approach to problems associated with both medical and psychiatric illness. He explains the Hindu concepts of maya, karma, and dharma, and builds a bridge between psychological disease and our intrinsic hunger for spiritual union. Each symptom is seen as a crucial whisper from our soul, and if we understand its message, it can lead us to psychological balance.
Dr. Bedi guides us through the process of Kundalini diagnosis, showing how the use of life events, medical or psychiatric symptoms, relationship strengths and problems, and life goals and aspirations can help us determine our dominant and auxiliary chakras. Since our chakras are focal points where physical, emotional, developmental, and spiritual forces intersect, they provide a paradigm that usefully links physical, psychological, developmental, and spiritual dimensions. He explains how he has successfully helped many patients correct imbalances by learning to access and strengthen this energy.
Throughout this book there are numerous examples of how Dr. Bedi’s patients have discovered what each individual eventually has to recognize; that our fulfillment, satisfaction, wholeness, and harmony can be reawakened when we touch the spark of divine light glowing within.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bedi, a Wisconsin-based psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst, offers a Hindu spin on therapy, challenging readers to rethink childhood conflict and marital strife in terms of karma and dharma. Bedi's discussion of chakras--the seven energy centers said to exist in each person--illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of his approach. The first chakra, located in the perineum and ruled by the god Ganesha, governs people's sense of emotional security. For example, Paul, a client of Bedi's, has unstable romantic relationships. Bedi traces his problems to the first chakra, and suggests that Paul's recovery necessarily involves "correcting imbalances" among his chakras. That's an intriguing theory, but Bedi is so vague and his prose so confusing ("When he first came to me, Paul was stuck in the pignali nada of the root chakra, which manifested as untempered masculine enterprise") that readers may never quite understand just what the chakra has to do with their love lives, or what they should do about it. Meditate on the chakra? Draw a picture of the chakra? Pray about the chakra? When Bedi does give straightforward guidance, it is banal: when trying to overcome problems in relationships, for example, people should "identify" the qualities in others that they like and dislike. Bedi's claim that Hindu spiritual disciplines can augment traditional therapy is suggestive, but readers will have to go elsewhere to deduce the mechanics of integrating the two.
