PARINAMA
IIT Goa Center for Personal Transformation and Wellbeing

Personal Transformation and Wellbeing center at IIT Goa is a nurturing space for self-awareness, self-care and conscious life. Each of us is on an evolutionary journey where we constantly have to make our vision for our personal and professional lives into a lived reality. The purpose of self-awareness education is to help individuals connect to who they are and what they want to manifest-consciously. When we learn how to use our awareness to observe patterns of thought and behaviours that no longer serve us, just the seeing of it can help us look at more unexplored options, this creates space for freedom and Agency (the ability to choose consciously). When we have agency we can begin to change. When we begin to embody the changes we wish to make, then we naturally adopt lifestyles, approaches and habits that serve personal transformation
and wellbeing.

Personal Transformation and Wellbeing Center will be a space to 

  • Attend to the whole person and help them develop their emotional, psychological, somatic, social, intellectual intelligences.
  • Maintain wellness and health of the students through sessions that can be preventive, restorative and reinvigorating.
  • Promote relational wellbeing- i.e., how you are in relationship to yourself and others in your community.
  • Educate the participants towards holistic self-care that includes practices that create a sense of safety and grounding within the self, and help individuals come into the Now.
  • Initiate discussions where students can learn to connect to their questions, observations and personal insights on life and relationships.
  • Deepen into human qualities of presence, love, kindness, compassion, empathy, and self-awareness, towards an Empathetic leadership of integrity and authenticity.

Details of the wellbeing educator:
Pushpanjali Sharma is an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies with a specialization in Embodied Studies, from Lesley University, Cambridge, U.S.A. She has researched, practiced and facilitated somatic/ mind-body practices with both individuals and groups helping them reconnect to their whole selves which includes their hearts, their voice, the wisdom of their bodies and their soul through deep sensing, feeling, and listening to the inner self/inner guidance. She has helped people embody deeper connection, clarity and deeper commitments to all that they are and what they want to do. She has helped them heal distressing emotional experiences and connect to their inner child, inner parent and inner guide. She also helps them bring in more balance, ease, creativity and authenticity into their lives. She is also a performing artist- singer, dancer and actor who has studied Arts as a healing and thereupetic practice, through which she has developed her own approach of what she calls Transformative Creative Practice. She is also a yogini and a regular practitioner of various meditative practices from Eastern Spiritual Traditions that work on the inner child, mindfulness, healing the masculine-feminine polarities, compassion and reconciliation.

She is also an educator and has been developing new content and pedagogical approaches that include socio-emotional learning, creative thinking, experiential embodied education for children and adults. She is currently writing songs that bring comfort and hope in these times and is also writing stories for children.
Curriculum Vitae

Individual session with the counsellor:
You can set up an appointment for one-on-one session by writing
to counsellor@iitgoa.ac.in. In all individual sessions, strict confidentiality will be maintained at all times.

Group sessions:
As a part of my offering, I am planning to facilitate group sessions that will include self-awareness and self-care tools from the field of Somatics (mind body practices) and my approach of Transformative Creative Practice that I am planning to start online this year.

If you are interested in group sessions with wellbeing exercises and personal transformation tools that serve self-healing, self-knowing and self-expression, please do write in to counsellor@iitgoa.ac.in

Professional Services: YourDost
Besides the on-campus counselling services, IIT Goa has also tied up with YourDost, a Bangalore-based company which provides an online counseling and emotional support platform designed to foster mental wellness. It anonymously connects any individual seeking help with the right expert from their panel consisting of psychologists, psychotherapists, counselors, life coaches and career coaches, who understand you and guide you through completely confidential individual sessions.

Please visit the following website and avail their services after registration (free for IIT Goa students, staffs and faculty members.)
https://yourdost.com

Video-
We have recorded an introductory educational video in English as well as Hindi on “Self Awareness Education and Holistic Self Care” The video covers the various topics around psychological and emotional wellbeing, and what all can be attended to in the field of holistic health. It also raises some important questions for reflection around self-care and self-help. This video also brings out misconceptions around seeking help, it instead seeks to expose you to how it is normal to want to learn how to help yourself, resolve issues that need to be addressed, overcome your challenges and heal from difficult experiences.

These are two video links:

English version- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVlsST39_k0
Hindi version- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoRfU8orZN8