I am unaware of holistic centers for the terminally ill and maybe a internet search or search with old age homes, social work colleges, hospitals and cancer societies can give you a list. You could also check with the College of Social Work, Nirmala Niketan, Churchgate, Mumbai and The Tata Institute of Social Sciences at Chembur.

You can contact me on my email - ameeta_shah@hotmail.com by mentioning life positive reader in the subject line.

Life planning is often a very useful exercise. It helps set the direction and then your hard work is aligned towards that and not scattered and wasted. Usually then one can learn where to say ‘no’ too. In today’s world with so many choices and possibilities available we often go off track staying busy though not getting our real progress in the area we are interested in. Also once you are clearer it is easier to convince others in your family or friends to be co-operative or helpful to you in the managing the direction you want.

A very good way to know life planning is to know your different roles in the family as husband, brother, sister etc and role in professional areas. It can help to know your core values or things you believe in strongly as well as what are your interest and talent areas. You can then see which profession can give you these opportunities. Once you have this broader map you can map in the tasks and sequences in which those tasks can be done to reach your potentials and your vision.

Additionally you can think what can make your daily routine that would add to your health and well being such as food, lifestyle habits, exercise, meditation etc. This will keep you fit mentally and physically to sustain your motivation and follow through on your pathway.

The way to build back your confidence will be to understand your failures better. Look at your failures as a core part of living and focus on understanding them and how they happened. When we have not understood our failures we become judgemental and fearful. Make your failures valuable to you by strengthening your learnings from it. Learn not only who is to blame or what is unfair and put more focus on what could you have done differently at each stage of the work process. Do your failures have a pattern? Are they in the area of finance, organization or relationships or marketing or presentation skills? Train yourself in these from reading books or a coach or a professional or your own practice and observations. Sometimes the learning is that you need to work in a different aspect of the field or even a new filed to suit your personality. Sometimes whilst leaving a job or losing clients, you may ask for feedback too. Often failures happen only because of a few small inefficiencies whilst the rest of our work is on track and successful. Yet such small inefficiencies can mean job loss.

Value what you have gained through this experience. Apart from your area of failure you would find that you have had other gains of knowing different people, learning different skills and experienced different events too. Think how these gains add to your CV and to your potentials for the job market. think how they add to you personally too. Only when you see this can you speak about it and market ‘your skills and experience’ accordingly.

Treat your failures as a measure of your ability to take risks and participate. When we take up a new task we risk failure, and that ability to risk ourselves is far more important than if we fail or succeed. You could keep yourself failure free by avoiding all challenges but how would that be useful. This is a bigger failure than making attempts that have not succeeded. A child who participates in a competition can be complimented for this participation and even if she performs poorly her spirit can be admired. Even when the child fails to win, we can notice with her that her skills and knowledge in the subject area of the competition have improved so she can feel good about herself. It is the same for an adult with the jobs one takes and fails in. So be proud of every failure it is a sign that you take risks, you are a doer and you are not an avoider.

Be proud of your resilience too that after every failure you have made your next attempt and probably taken some damage control measures to build back your reputation or to cover your loss or manage the period in between till you can get another job. Resilience is defined ‘as the ability to bounce back from setbacks.” All motivation experts tell us motivation needs setback strategies that keep you going and not stopping with the setbacks and failures.

Every aspect of our lives needs our attention and appreciation. Somehow we create a hierarchy where spiritualism is higher than our emotions and our physical tasks. However every aspect of your life is important. When one is looking for motivation for the bigger things in life, bring it back by believing in the basic routine tasks and small pleasures. Set up small doable tasks and feel a sense of moving forward with these. Know that you want to look after your body, your fitness, cooking or planning a meal, your day to day tasks, cleaning your physical spaces. Take pleasures in small enjoyments such as meeting a friend, or greeting your local grocer, eating a tasty meal or listening to a piece of inspiring music. Let your spirituality and meditation be part of your life not take you away from practical issues and needs. Pace yourself too when you have had setbacks. Take smaller steps. This way you will find that your zeal to go ahead is back and you are calmer.

Usually when people have taken a tough stand, it can be difficult for you to take the burden of making everyone get along. It can make you too stressed sometimes to the point of breakdown. Sometimes a more peaceful way can be to show that you appreciate each side for yourself and you also accept that they do not get along.

It is better for you to focus on how you could keep up your relationships with each side especially your parents without offending the other side. You can reassure your husband and in laws that you recognize their frustrations with your parents though you may choose to stay neutral. When you do not defend your parents to your in-laws they can then be encouraged to trust you not to be influenced by them negatively or not to not take information from here to there. You can then be able to assert that you need to do your duty to your parents and meet them and maintain some relations with them. At most you can show readiness to make adjustments and meet your parents at non conflicting times to your husband’s and in laws timings.

Trying to make them get along with each other you will find that both parties think you are taking the others side and that you are prejudiced and they will get angrier with you for not understanding. They will mistrust you and see your defence of the other side as being on the other side. Let each side know instead that you are helpless in improving the other side and show them that you understand their frustration. It is possible to be a middle person who sees the positive and negatives of each side and that is what you may have to do. Stop defending one side in front of the other. Instead show not agreement but understanding for the difficulty they are facing.

You can sometimes give some insights to your husband and in laws in a light way about the fact that misunderstandings can be differences and not bad intentions of one to another, or sharing of some positive things your parents have done or thought for in laws or husband, or how it would not be appropriate in society. Sometimes you can just keep each side updated about neutral happenings in each household and often times small helpful gestures when someone is ill help to ease the situation. These comments can be few and left without taking the conversation to a forced conclusion else your in laws will react again with you. Instead you can leave it with “It is your choice of course but I thought I should share what I feel or how they feel.” Highlighting mutual goodness of both in your conversations can also help. “You’ll do this fast for the festival day and my father does this too.”

This way at least you can feel less stressed and easy and keep up your good relations with all.

Three things can help without getting into medications. True this is a shock and a loss, yet one focus is that you have to believe in the goodwill you looked after the girl with. It has not gone waste. That has helped the girl and she has benefitted with good health and even some training from you in how to live and manage day to day challenges. Your efforts have given her stability for those years and the possibilities for a good life. Beyond that it is for the person to make the right choices for themselves. Also she will in her life at different stages of life ponder and remember your kindness and secretly appreciate you even if she is not in touch with you. Sometimes a person gets lost into another task and later the value hits home. To an extent all of us value our teachers and parents later in life when facing life challenges once we are through with the confidence of the youth days.

Secondly, remove the thought then that she was fooling you and recognize that it is the feelings and temptations that take hold. It is also the immaturity of the girl that she was not able to find some way to open up to you even through a note. She could even have temporarily stopped your efforts by disagreeing for marriage on some other pretext till she was clear about this boy and could tell you. But she may not have had the skills and maturity to manage this. At least that way you would not have gone through so much to find a boy for her.

Understanding how things happen can free us from feeling bitter or betrayed. When youngsters even our own children fall in love they do not open up at home to the family and parents. They keep it a secret because they think or they know their parents may not accept. Also they themselves are not sure of their decision and they want to think it over without anyone else telling them what to do. In more than 50% of the cases where a young person finds their own partner their family will not know for quite a while unless the relationship with parents is informal apart from being loving. It is a normal matter for children to want their space and independence to decide. However when you were trying to find a boy she needed to have opened up.

Fear or awkwardness of telling you could have stopped her. What stopped her from opening up and telling you about this boy she liked is the key question. She could have been too much in ‘awe’ of your authority and so not know how to open up about her feelings. Was the boy she chose not a ‘responsible’ sort of person or was he from a different religion? That could have made her fear you would stop the relationship or force her into a relationship she does not like so she may have thought it is safer not to open up.

We think the person is fooling us but actually they are caught in a conflict too – to tell you and lose the person or to hide this and keep the relationship. At certain stage the overconfidence, their longing for love and their inexperience can make them susceptible to the charms of another without being able to see what would be safe or not. Sometimes they are making a good decision but we are prejudiced and not able to accept a good person because of social conditioning that that boy’s caste or religion makes him unsuitable.

So let go the feeling of being fooled and replace it with understanding the way such things happen and the difficulty that the girl would have too. Counselling and therapy methods can help relieve the shock and loss you have experienced.

Thirdly If you feel the boy is decent you may initiate contact and let her know you accept them both and sort out this situation, forgiving her for keeping it a secret and telling her not to be fearful next time. In other words this could be an opportunity to educate on how to open up when you feel scared. She will actually be happy to have you back in her life. If you feel the person is not suitable then of course you may only call her and speak to her one on one if there is such a possibility and thereafter keep the distance in the relationship.