Some people come to therapy with a practice already in their life: a mantra, a teacher, years with the Gītā or the Upaniṣads. They want a psychologist who takes that seriously and can work inside it.
A common reason people write to Dev: they have studied these ideas for years and find they cannot apply them when life becomes hard.
Devdarshan Bastola is a psychologist (GMBPsS) trained in the UK, with over nine years of study in Vedānta and Yoga. The sessions are ordinary psychological work first: understanding what is happening, how it began and what keeps it going. The tradition comes in where it helps: the Gītā on action and its results, Patañjali on the afflictions of the mind, prāṇāyāma and meditation taught step by step.
Who comes
- People who know the teaching and cannot live it when things go wrong
- People for whom meditation has stopped working, or never worked
- People whose earlier therapy helped the symptoms and left the larger questions alone
You do not need to be Hindu. Nothing devotional is asked of you.
