Why choose LandWell

LandWell was formed a decade after my move to the UK from India. I had been here before as a student, travelling back and forth for my degrees and returning “home” each time, and I assumed that meant I knew the city. It did not know it beyond the freedom of student life. Working or studying in a place and building a life in one are two different landscapes, and nobody tells you that really clearly until you are inside the second.

I have a mental memory of the first seasonal change, of rebuilding a professional life in a country that did not recognise what I had already built, of forming friendships in adulthood without the scaffolding of school or family, of a phone call home at a strange hour in a voice that says ‘everything is fine’.

I also have the clinical side of it. I read psychology at LSR, University of Delhi, then took two Master’s degrees in London, at LSE and at City, University of London. I practised for five years in New Delhi before completing two Therapy & Counsellor training’s at the Diploma & Certificate level the Gestalt Centre in London once again.

So I have moved through the educational systems of two countries myself, and I know what it is to sit inside an admissions process whose rules were never explained to you. When we talk about schools for your children, none of it is abstract to me. And because the clinical training sits alongside the lived experience, you will not need to explain the cultural context first and then get to the feeling. We can start at the feeling.

• LSR, University of DelhiBachelor’s degree
• LSE, University of LondonMaster’s degree
• City, University of LondonMaster’s degree
• The Gestalt Centre, LondonDiploma & Certificate

I work within the Gestalt modality, which pays close attention to the field: Everything that surrounds a person and everything they are in contact with, their environment, relationships, body and history. Relocation is unusual because it changes that entire field at once. Not one relationship, not one job, but the ground beneath all of it. Move countries and the ground you relied on your whole life without thinking about it is replaced overnight. Everything demands attention at once. That is exhausting, and it explains why capable people feel so depleted by a move they genuinely wanted.

My work is not to make you feel better quickly, because that rarely lasts. It is to build awareness of your own part in this new environment: What you are reaching for, what you are avoiding, what you are still finishing off from the place you left. From awareness, choice becomes possible.

Not a permanent state of contentment, and not a city that feels exactly like the one you left. Something more useful than either. It looks like being able to say what has been hard without first justifying why you are entitled to find it hard. It looks like your own needs re-entering the family's calculation rather than waiting at the back of the queue. Most of all it looks like a life here that you have chosen and shaped, rather than one that happened to you while you were busy managing everybody else's.

A move of this size asks something no checklist accounts for. It asks you to rebuild the ground you stand on, in full view of the people who depend on you, while still carrying everything you brought. That is difficult, and it deserves better than being endured alone.