The yogic principle of releasing craving and aversion toward emotional states, enabling DBT practitioners to tolerate distress without amplifying dysregulation through resistance.
Vairagya, often mistranslated as detachment, means freedom from desperate grasping or rejecting. Emotional dysregulation frequently intensifies when individuals resist painful feelings—anxiety about anxiety, shame about anger—creating secondary suffering. Patanjali's vairagya teaches that emotional pain becomes dysregulation through our relationship to it, not the feeling itself. A person with anxiety who practices vairagya stops fighting the anxiety, stops judging themselves for having it, and paradoxically finds it more tolerable. DBT's distress tolerance skills implicitly teach vairagya: acceptance and commitment practices like "observe your thoughts like clouds" or "name it to tame it" reduce the struggle against emotion. Vairagya is not resignation but radical acceptance—the willingness to feel difficult emotions without needing to change them immediately. This shifts the nervous system from defensive mobilization to grounded presence. When practitioners release the demand that emotions should be different, dysregulation loses its fuel.
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