Answers on a page
Bibliotherapy, that claims to provide the answers to life’s problems through books, is among the latest alternative therapies to have entered the market. Gargi Gupta puts herself through one session. But is she entirely convinced?
Books have been called man’s best friend, his wisest counsellor in trying times, and his most patient teacher in the ways of life. But books can also act as psychic healers, as seers you can turn to for direction in difficulty. This is the premise of “intuitive bibliotherapy”, a form of alternative therapy that involves, says Sonia Mackwani, a Mumbai-based clinical psychologist who developed it, “perceiving life message through books”.
Mackwani has been using the therapy on her patients for the past two years and propagating it through her NGO, Touching Lives, that runs an open school and works for the holistic welfare of the community. Being a new therapy, there aren’t many practitioners yet, but Mackwani says she has been propagating it through workshops in Mumbai and other places like Faridabad, Bhubaneswar and Pune. Mackwani also trains teachers at Touching Lives in using bibliotherapy to help their students, and is writing a book which will collate case studies and lay down the modus operandi for bibliotherapy.
“Bibliotherapy” is a compound word that stands for “therapy with the help of books”. Bibliotherapy, in this sense, has a long tradition that goes back to Aristotle and is practised by psychotherapists all over the world. But Mackwani’s use of books as therapy is slightly different; here it is not the content of the entire book that is taken into account but the message contained in stray phrases that pop out when you randomly open the book. Even this is not new, points out Sanal Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Association. “Many Christians open the Bible when faced with a dilemma and take as a message whatever Psalm their eyes fall on.” Besides, Edamaruku continues, it is dangerous to take seriously random phrases out of context: “What if the phrase you see tells you to go and kill someone?”
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Does “intuitive bibliotherapy” work? I decide to check out for myself.
I book a one-to-one session with Amrisha Ahuja, a post-graduate in psychology from the University of Mumbai, a clinical hypnotherapist, Reiki practitioner and part-time television actor who used to be Mackwani's associate and has recently shifted to Delhi. Ahuja became interested in bibliotherapy, she says, as a result of her interaction with Mackwani. “I found that I had been using bibliotherapy all along without realising it. I remember once when I was feeling uncertain about whether to do a two-day Reiki course from a well-known institute or a 21-day workshop with a lesser-known practitioner, I picked up a book and the first phrase that my eyes fell on said that there were 21 steps to success. That decided me.”
Our session is held in a small classroom inside a kindergarten in Rajouri Garden, a cheerful space with cartoons on brightly-painted walls. Ahuja lives here and uses the space to conduct personal sessions and group workshops after school’s over for the day. Charges for each session are Rs 500. Ahuja has asked me to bring along any book that I liked, and I have chosen a collection of six novels by Jane Austen, which I have read and re-read many times over, and turned to whenever I needed a pep. Austen, however, remains unopened during the session and we proceed with books that Ahuja says she’d chosen “randomly” from her collection. These are The Alchemist and The Fifth Mountain by the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, and Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. We begin with a discussion of what has led me to seek her out — how I have come to know about bibliotherapy, what is the question I am seeking an answer to, whether I have tried out other alternative therapies, etc. “You have to be receptive,” Ahuja says, “to get the answers you seek.” In other words, cynicism is not going to get me anywhere.
We begin with what Ahuja calls “grounding exercises”. The lights are switched off, and Ahuja asks me to shut my eyes and breathe deeply while she, softly and insistently, renders a set speech about a “white light” originating from my body and rising higher to merge with the “higher ideal” and “roots” growing from under my feet and connecting me to the earth. Ten minutes of these basic hypnotherapy exercises and the mood is set. We then turn to the books, and Ahuja tells me to pick any I like, and to think of my question while I place it between my upraised hands. “Open the book to any page,” she directs next, and read whatever your eye falls on.” I’d picked Coelho, and the line that leaps out is the dictum, “Look for the child in you” on the top left corner of the right hand page. Is it the answer to my question — a rather broad one about whether I am on the right track in life and whether I would find success along it. “It gives you a direction in which to proceed,” Ahuja tries to give direction to my inchoate thoughts.
Perhaps I could read a meaningful “answer” into the phrase — but, as I walk back to the Metro Station, I am not sure that it has much relevance to what I had asked or even whether it is quite the “answer” that I have been looking for.
An abundance of alternatives
PAST-LIFE REGRESSION THERAPY functions on the belief that unresolved problems from an earlier life may be the cause of troubles in the present one. It’s based on a belief in re-incarnation that characterises many Indian and Western mystical traditions. Developed in the 1950s, past-life regression therapy involves hypnotising the subject and then asking a series of questions to unravel repressed memories of past life.
MERLIN THERAPY HEALING SYSTEM is named after Kind Arthur’s legendary wizard. It’s quite like reiki, in being a system that works on the system of “therapeutic touch”, and was “discovered” in 1998 by an Englishman, Mark Andrew “Anup” Karlsson. There are practitioners in China, Mexico, US, UK, Australia, Singapore, Thailand and India — and not just in the metros but also in far-off Vijaywada and Rajkot.
SU-JOK THERAPY is Korean for hand and foot healing. A variation of reflexology and acupressure, Su-Jok works on the concept that micro-points in our hands and feet are connected to different organs of the body. Su-Jok therapists manipulate these pressure points using micro needles, magnets, and plants seeds to cure and prevent diseases.
PSYCHO NEUROBICS is a variation of “neurobics” or mental exercises to keep the brain alive that were developed by the neurobiologist Lawrence Katz and Manning Rubin. Psycho Neurobics marries this with the concept of chakra and yogic asanas to cure diseases.