Hi,
Right about the time you get this in your inbox, I will be in the middle of my first session of a new kind of therapy with a therapist in the US. I am being a bit superstitious and not talking about what the therapy is yet – sorry! maybe soon – but it is unlike anything I have ever tried. And I have tried a fair few things.
I am excited but also nervous. To distract myself, I have decided to catalogue all the different kinds of healing I’ve accessed in my life – seven so far – and the dominant feeling or emotion associated with each. If nothing, the exercise will help me ease the tension by reminding me of my vast privilege.
Actually, I have an idea that should make this more fun. Let’s do this together! Go ahead and read my list, and then share yours.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a doctor or healer, and NOTHING here is a recommendation. Please talk to professionals if you need help.
Western medicine (can you call that ‘healing’?)
My mother was a nurse, and the small one-bedroom house where I grew up was basically a sanatorium for sick relatives and family friends. I was myself a sickly child, and according to family lore, I was only kept alive by all manner of pills and injections since I was 27 days old. Our only long-distance family vacations were ones where the primary purpose was getting my heart or tonsils or rib cage (apparently I have only 11 pairs of ribs) checked by so-and-so child specialist in Chennai, and then a two-day whirlwind tour packing in as many temples as we could, before starting the day-and-a-half return train journey.
I know western medicine (called "allopathy" in India) is not generally regarded as "healing" or "therapy" – words that have more holistic undertones. But you have to understand that I am talking about a time and place (80s and 90s, small-town India) where the mind wasn’t even a thing. You didn’t get healed. You got cured.
Dominant feelings: faith. Pain.
Homoeopathy
A maternal uncle of mine was a homoeopath. Now, homoeopathy is dismissed in much of the world as bogus science, but in India there is an entire government ministry dedicated to it and other "traditional" medicine systems.
So anyway, this uncle had a wooden medicine box. It was a beautiful chestnut-coloured thing, with slim cylindrical holes inside where he stored his tinctures and tiny globules of sugary powders. I used to lust for that box.
Fun fact: the first time I went to a homoeopath as an adult, one of the questions the doctor asked me was: "Any history of madness in the family?"
Dominant feeling: tasty.
Ayurveda
Ayurveda was an exhausting experience. I mostly resorted to it for a painful condition in my leg muscles and bones. It wore me out with the sheer permutations and combinations of the medicines and all the dietary restrictions. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it. I think I just got bored with the various kashaya and tailam I was prescribed by the very friendly vaidya in a big Ayurvedic hospital in Delhi. The one thing I am still up for is a good, robust Ayurvedic massage or abhyanga. Never turn down a good massage.
Dominant feeling: sticky.
Psychoanalysis
My first experience with psychoanalysis was in the second year of college, when I started to suspect that something was seriously wrong with my mood because I’d cry all the time, started hurting myself, and generally became insufferable company.
The therapist was the first man who believed I was ill. We mostly just discussed Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez novels that were part of my syllabus, but I fell in love with him, even wrote him poetry.
That first impression was so strong that it cemented my faith in psychotherapy, even though back then I only knew that Freud was an old man obsessed with sex. I am now on to my third therapist. Psychoanalysis has saved my life, probably as much as all those pills and injections.
Dominant feeling: comfort.
Past Life Regression
I went for my first past life regression session after reading Brian Weiss’s massive bestseller, Many Lives, Many Masters. Start there if you don’t know what past life regression is. And don’t @ me with your "this is mumbo jumbo!" messages, though if you really want to know, Weiss is a graduate of Columbia University and Yale Medical School.
I was barely out of college. By now, depression had begun to properly feast on me. A friend recommended this healer, and I went not knowing what to expect. Visions were seen. Sounds were heard. Narratives were created. I was shook coming out. Hands down the most interesting healing experience of my life that actually helped me configure some tricky relationships in this lifetime.
Dominant feeling: "Everything makes sense."
Aromatherapy
Also right after college. Travelled two hours in peak summer, changed two buses, smelt some nice stuff, returned home, was knackered, passed out, got robbed while I was peacefully asleep. Not blaming the scents, but not going back.
Dominant feeling: "Lock the door."
Reiki
The same friend who introduced me to past life regression also introduced me to Reiki, the Japanese energy-based healing system. I was in my late 20s and was mostly drawn to it because this friend had healed me a few times, including once when I had a very sore throat right before a college function where I was supposed to sing.
I loved learning Reiki because it felt like the least intrusive, most imaginative healing practice I’d ever been exposed to. Somehow, despite some good results on myself and a few others, I fell out of practice. But I have a feeling I will return to it.
Dominant feeling: Guilt. Anticipation.
So that’s that, now on to my eighth. Wish me luck, and I wish you all the healing in the world. And let me know what you’ve tried – and what the dominant feeling you got from it was – below this newsletter!
Stay safe. See you next week.
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