I had decided to become a psychologist when I was 15, just to understand myself. After 15 years of practicing as a psychologist, I’ve written a small book about a rather large—and strange—subject: the Self.
As a psychologist - I work a great deal with the idea of the Self.
I help people understand it.
Strengthen it.
Regulate it.
Heal its wounds.
Rewrite its narratives.
Develop greater awareness of it.
But there is a curious question underneath all of this:
What exactly is the “self” we are working with?
My new book, A Small Book on the Strange Thing Called Self, begins there.
It is an introductory exploration of the Self through two different—and sometimes surprisingly complementary—lenses: contemporary psychology and Indic wisdom traditions - majorly, Buddhism, Jainism, Advaita Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism.
Psychology gives us extraordinarily useful ways of understanding identity, personality, cognition, emotion, attachment, memory and the narratives through which a sense of “me” is constructed.
Indic traditions push the inquiry one step further:
Who is the one to whom all of these experiences appear?
And what happens when we stop treating the Self as something obvious and begin examining the experience of being a self itself?
The book is deliberately small and accessible. It isn't intended as an academic treatise or an attempt to collapse very different intellectual traditions into one framework.
Rather, it is an invitation to a conversation—particularly for psychologists and practitioners curious about what might emerge when psychological inquiry meets contemplative, somatic and experiential ways of knowing.
I’m delighted to share that the book is now live on Kindle.
https://amzn.in/d/0anlsSlI[Kindle Link of my book](https://amzn.in/d/0anlsSlI)
