Excerpt from The Yoga of Self-Love
INTRODUCTION
One day, as a teenager in India, I had been watching a television program showing different poets reading their work in Hindi. One woman had read her verses, titled “Boxes of Pain.” She shared that over time, many women become boxes of pain from the hurt they gather all through their life. Vowing that I would never let myself become one of them, I decided to be a box of joy and positivity instead. So I made a checklist of things I was going to do to get there and live happily ever after.
My response was not unusual. In fact, both scientists and seers observe that human beings are wired to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. We go to great lengths to control life and play it safe. Yet pain has its own gifts, and Mother Nature has her own way of making sure those gifts are served to us. And if we are wise, we will open up to receive them.
As much as I wanted to be happy, my struggles with pain began in my forties. Starting with a mild restlessness, it grew over the next months into worry, shifted into obsessive thoughts, and was followed by a deep, ongoing hopelessness.
Raised in India with barely any education about mental health, I did not understand what was unfolding in me. Also, I had just started my meditation and self-awareness studio, Full Bloomed Lotus, and had moved my small meditation and discussion groups out of my home and into a rented space, hoping to expand my audience. So, day after day, I followed what I believed was the right choice—repressing negative emotions, going out into the world, and doing what needed to be done.
It was Carl Jung, the Swiss thinker and psychoanalyst, who said, “Your destiny awaits you in the paths you take to avoid it.” And so it was that the more I turned away, the more I ended up with the pain I wanted to escape. Months passed this way. And just when I thought I would never find joy again, I had a breakthrough. The key to my healing was revealed in a dream that exposed the disconnect between my adult self and my inner child, who had been previously unknown to me. At the culmination of the dream, that child and I were reunited, and I experienced the joy of wholeness for the first time in my life.
Inspired by the dream, I delved into my childhood, uncovering stories in need of closure and pain in need of release. Applying insights from spiritual teachings and using my imagination, I forged a healing path, coming up with many different exercises that I used to rewire my thinking and emotions to integrate my inner child—my original self. This also helped me individuate from my powerful mother, whose fierce love had kept me from finding myself.
The inner child is our essence, a drop of the divine, and the way nature created us to be. The inner adult—our ego—is our personal manager, who negotiates the world outside. Over a lifetime, by internalizing our failures or peoples’ judgments of us or by comparing ourselves to others, the inner adult unconsciously wounds and rejects this deeper, truer self.
When we do inner-child work, we’re healing and reclaiming the hurt and neglected parts of ourselves. This is not to say that everything about our natural self is perfect. Like all things in nature, such as rivers and mountains, human beings were created with potential, not perfection. And just like we build dams to conserve and redirect the water or dig tunnels to make pathways, the role of the inner adult is to understand and appreciate our primary natural resource—ourselves—and work with it to channel our light, intentionally and powerfully.
Continuing on this path of self-discovery, I met many others, both women and men, whose stories were different from mine but whose struggles were essentially the same. We were all in the midst of transitioning from the first half of life—when we are led by our conditioning, upbringing, and external environments—to the second half—when we are led by our soul to become the person we were always meant to be.
The challenges of the midlife transition are universal and among the world’s best-kept secrets. Most of us are unprepared for the seismic changes that await us in our forties, fifties, and beyond. Our hormonal makeup changes, relationships evolve, marriages lose their freshness, children step into adolescence, parents enter the final leg of their life journey, and our own bodies gradually begin to age. These stages are unavoidable, and they are not the problem per se. When they occur upon an inner psychic structure that has already been weakened by the wounds inflicted by nature and nurture in the first half of life, they cause the entire system to weaken. We feel fragile, yet we try to power through the way we always have. We break open as a result. It comes as no surprise that, as per the CDC’s 2021 statistics, adults aged thirty-five to sixty-four account for almost half of all suicides in the US.
Yet, we are not the first people on Earth to feel this angst. Spiritual teachers and thinkers have already walked this journey and left us the breadcrumbs of their teachings. When we navigate these transitions with the deep wisdom of the ages, unlearning the old beliefs and cultivating the deeper truths of the ages, we arrive at a life far more meaningful and real than ever before.
The happily-ever-after we were promised in youth is possible, but not from the world outside alone. Pleasures from earthly experiences, while being enjoyable, are not permanent, whereas the world within is rich with treasures that bring about abiding joy.
As I experienced fulfillment from my own transformation, I began sharing my understanding and methodologies with others on the journey, guiding them to heal and integrate their deeper identity—their inner child—into a new sense of self. I witnessed their transformation as they made their way into the second half of their lives in alignment with their true nature.
Encouraged by these successes, I offer this book so these teachings can reach a wider audience and help others navigate the emotional peaks and valleys of the midlife years and after. I wrote The Yoga of Self-Love as a memoir to share relatable anecdotes, inviting you to walk alongside me rather than as a one-size-fits-all prescriptive approach. Each chapter concludes with reflections and exercises that provide tools to guide you on your own journey toward wholeness and self-love.
As Dr. Deepak Chopra said, “Joy is a return to the deep harmony of body, mind, and spirit that was yours at birth and that can be yours again. That openness to love, that capacity for wholeness with the world around you, is still within you.” May this book and its wisdom help you heal and embrace your precious and sacred inner child and return you to the joy and wholeness that is yours to claim.
May it empower you to play the unique role that only your natural self can play in this world, no matter where you are in your life.
