Thursday, 21 May 2026 A forty-five-year-old mother had been in generalised anxiety disorder for eight years when she came to me. Two prior courses of therapy. One course of an SSRI. A meditation app on her phone with a four-hundred-day streak. Her sleep had returned to baseline. Her appetite had stabilised. Her panic frequency had halved. And by every standard she still recognised, she was unwell. I asked her one question at the second session. "What does your therapy ask you

Tuesday, 19 May 2026 A fourteen-year-old came to my consulting room three days before her board examination. Her first sentence was specific. "I can hear everything in the room. I cannot stop hearing." She described, in detail, what her senses were doing without her consent. The pen-tap of the student two desks away. The clock. The proctor's footsteps. The breath of the girl behind her. The smell of the room before an examination begins. The visual scan of who had reached pag

By Devdarshan Bastola | Anandoham Health | May 14, 2026 A young medical intern — twenty-four, two years into a high-pressure hospital posting, living far from family — sat opposite me after six weeks of what she described as "useless" therapy with a previous clinician. She had been offered good, evidence-based cognitive work. She had followed the homework. Nothing had moved. Her description was precise: "I could see what she was trying to do. I just couldn't believe it would

By Devdarshan Bastola | Anandoham Health | May 12, 2026 A client in her late twenties — only daughter, recently broken off an engagement — sat across from me and said something that I think describes most therapy honestly: "I keep doing the same thing. I keep choosing the same kind of person, the same kind of job, the same kind of avoidance. I can see the pattern. I just can't stop being the pattern." She was not asking for insight. She had insight in surplus. She was describ

By Devdarshan Bastola | Anandoham Health "If I accept where I am, I'll never change." I have heard a version of this sentence from almost every high-functioning client I have worked with. It is the unspoken rule of achievement culture: dissatisfaction is the fuel, and contentment is the enemy. But there is a second misunderstanding, quieter and more damaging — and it comes from inside the so-called spiritual world. It is the idea that santoṣa means feeling content when things