Kaif Mahmood, MPhil

Through therapy sessions, I offer a space for the self to unfold. The parts of us that we show to the world, and those that we don't. The parts of us that we have pushed away from our own attention. These parts are not merely thoughts, but living emotions. To meet them is to meet a deeply felt experience, and to meet it as it presents itself in the body, the heaviness in the chest, the stiffening of the eyes, the scrunch in the belly, and so on. Through therapy, we meet aspects of our experience that are not yet experienced fully. Meeting them as living, somatic realities brings us fully alive, rooted in a deep calmness, yet emerging into life with meaning and intensity. We see that much of life seems to be programmed to take us away from this full aliveness, and we slowly re-form our lives listening to an inner voice that is deeper than the noise around. Eventually, a therapist can help us go only as deeply into ourselves as they have gone into their own inner world. Personal therapy, and other practices that deepen the inner life are the ground on which theoretical training and guidance act as seeds that can bear fruit. My formal training is in studying psychoanalytic psychotherapy for six years at Ambedkar University, Delhi (2012-2014 and 2015-2019), and before that, a year spent studying cognitive behavioural therapy at Amity University, Delhi (2005-6), after which I left, finding myself quite unsuited for that approach. Into this I bring my own journey to live deeply in the ever-unfolding present, aided by many years of psychotherapy and an engagement with contemplative and spiritual traditions from different times and places. Some persons in this field who have shaped my work and being are J. Krishnamurti, Carl Rogers, Martin Buber and the silent earth, the still trees and the profoundly present dogs, cats, squirrels and other animals that scamper around them.