Understanding my Practice as Bhūta vidya

The blueprint of my psyche-therapeutic practice lies in my interest in the anthropology of consciousness. Initially, as a student of anthropology, I was very impressed with how pre-modern cultures and civilisations always looked at the meanderings of the stars to understand their destinies and observed the seasons of nature to heal their body-minds. Over time, the ancients came to delineate clear patterns in the sky and on the earth that spelled health and illness, fortune and misfortune.

Deeply impressed with the wisdom of the deep past, I can describe my practitioner’s journey from being a young intern at a methadone support clinic in Tenderloin, San Francisco to my present private practice in South Mumbai, as one of wanting to personally create a working therapeutic modality that integrated Western psychology with the Vedic arts of Jyotiṣa and Āyurveda.

I feel Jyotiṣa and Āyurveda have afforded me great depths to expand my psychotherapeutic tool kit to observe bio-energetic patterns: patterns in myself, in my clients, in nature, and in the world around me. Over time, I have come to appreciate that the patterns in a person’s life affect the bio-energetic configurations of their body, mind and consciousness.

The extent to which the patterns in an individual’s life synchronise with the rhythms of nature predicates the scope of their well-being. It has been my observation that for most of us living in an urban environment with trash, noise, overcrowding, and all kinds of pollution, we are most clearly out touch with the natural world and our deepest selves. We are in a subconscious state of eco-trauma, where we are dealing with the brutal pain of witnessing the assault on the biosphere.

Read more at http://www.sonerajhaveri.com/blog/jyotisa/understanding-my-practice-as-bhuta-vidya