My Story

In every life there is a core force that grounds and guides it. Mine is the capacity to access strength; my own as well as the strengths of others.

I came to this awareness gradually. My initial training as a psychologist began in India, where I was born and lived for 25 years.  I then moved to this country, and have lived in the Boston area ever since. Fusing together the many ideologies of this country with the wisdom of a very ancient culture has been the mantra of my life.

I became sensitized to the richness and the complexity of a mother’s life from an early age. India is a culture where community is strong, and this exposed me to extremely diverse women on a daily basis.  I grew up with a woman as the Prime Minister of the country, with women who stayed home full time like my mother, and with women who were serious career women like my mother-in-law. For every single one of them, their children were their most important source of love.

My biggest school of learning has been the “seeing” of how hard a mother must work to feel she is a “good mother.”  This began with observing my own mother, and has now generalized to every woman I meet.  I learned to “see” the cluelessness about, and the invisibility of, our very real work as mothers.  It was initially confusing to see this work judged as “less than” publicly visible work, and it’s stresses labeled as psychological symptoms.

Ultimately, this public invisibility and general lack of understanding about a mother’s work led me to push aside received wisdom and create a new lens.  The framework for this way of looking at a mother who walks into my office focuses as much on her contributions to her family, her strengths,  and her resilience as it does on her reasons for contacting me. New developments in psychology enabled this framework: I owe much to the outstanding scholarship of thoughtful women. My deep grounding in Eastern thought and practices has provided my growth with a base that is rock steady. We are much more than what we “do,” and life is a spiritual journey at all times.

I have been a meditator for over forty five years. That practice faltered seriously when I became a mother. Curiosity about why this should happen to an established practice led to a journey of exploration about the  gender based origins of Eastern wisdom based models of thought.  The results taught me to filter it all through the lived experience of a mother.

My guiding conviction was that a mother’s work of love has been invisible, and therefore, it is valid to be curious about any thing that claims to be normative, suited for “everyone,” and consider if it actually does fit the meditator.  The joyous realization that all true wisdom based practices are amenable to adaptation led me to adapt meditation practices in ways that worked for my clients; mothers like me.