When I got hold of Neena Verma’s latest work, RISE: The ‘Deep Resilience’ Way, I noticed the stellar testimonials on the cover from personalities ranging from Olympian Abhinav Bhindra to MP Manoj Jha, and even Fortis Healthcare mental health chief Dr Samir Parikh. Just an hour into the book, I realised why these experts were lauding Verma’s writing.
As a facilitator of ‘deep resilience’, Verma lets us in on the truth of life—we need to own the storm, embrace it, to navigate through it. It is after this that she introduces the core concept of her book, RISE.
Restorative Adaptation, Imaginal Growth, Supple Strength, and Expansive Emergence, or RISE, is how we achieve it, Verma writes.
As she explains this, Verma constructs a model called the Wellspring of ‘Deep Resilience’, making it easy even for the uninitiated to follow along.
By the contents page alone, one might wonder if the book reads like coursework. It actually does the opposite. In fact, Verma personalises it so much that the human element in it makes for an enjoyable read, very much like her earlier work, Grief...Growth...Grace.
Verma introduces the concept of resilience quest through her transcended elder son Utkarsh’s journey, when he was just 12 years old. She recalls how it was Utkarsh’s innocent wisdom that kept her from drowning in her grief when she lost him to destiny in 2014. This heartwrenching account becomes a learning, and it imprints into you, the reader, a deep sense of how to navigate grief.
As for me, I connected it to how resilience became a learned behaviour in the years after I lost my mother rather unexpectedly. That time, at twenty—as a two-year-old adult—I had every reason to spiral. It was my ‘dandelion moment’. But I had a few good souls who instilled in me the resilient way. I was lucky, but I know many who aren’t. For them, Verma’s book becomes a gateway into how we evolve as people after treading the path of deep loss and grief.
From an experience of adversity, of trial, of trauma—a ‘dandelion moment’—Verma essays how we can recollect the scattered seeds of resilience, and blossom once again.
People are different, and they cope with feelings in different ways. Verma understands that and tailors the process to fit as many people as possible. The book, in itself, emerges as an exercise on accessibility, or grief can come in many ways, and not everyone has the tools to go through their personal storms.
In fact, Verma urges the reader to take professional help or guidance at apt points in the book where they could be overwhelmed. This show of empathy makes RISE not only an engaging read but also a great example of how to essay a complex topic to an audience who may be grasping at straws when faced with acute sadness and loss.
After each chapter, Verma provides an exercise called REAP—Resilience Embodiment And Practice—which takes you once more through the core concepts of the RISE methodology.
The publisher’s decision in the way they chose present these exercises and the infographics was my only bone to pick, but that is the page editor in me speaking. Hopefully, the next edition will take care of this. However, the human in me was too involved in the book to put too much weight on it.
There are 10 REAP modules in all, and they take you from acceptance to resilience in such a natural way that you feel lighter.
‘May hope, will, vision and grit be our muse,’ writes Verma as she closes the book with a bit of poetry.
For me, reading RISE was a wholesome experience... If you are young or old and grappling with a recent loss, this book might shed some light on how to move forward—not past it, but through.
RISE: The ‘Deep Resilience’ Way
By Neena Verma
Published by Rupa Publications
Price Rs 395; pages 278
