Anshima Gupta, the Angel

A victim of a pattern of emotional, physical and sexual abuse, she did not lose hope. Instead, she is now generating hopes and inspirations in the minds of the young, particularly from the socially and economically disadvantaged groups. She is Begaluru-based Anshima Gupta.

Through her city-based volunteer group of 12 — Akshar India Fellowship — she is tutoring the kids online during the pandemic so that there is no discontinuity in their education. From retired schoolteachers to IT professionals, individuals join Akshar India for a 26-week fellowship and help the school children.

Before the pandemic, the volunteers used to visit these children in their localities on weekends to help them catch up on their lessons. Now, they have moved online and even donated mobile phones to the 16 class 8 kids to enable them to attend classes.

Hailing from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, 32 year old Anshima is a mental health therapist. She has chosen to stay in Bengaluru during the pandemic instead of going to her home in Kanpur because she loves these children. She has been trying to balance her own expenditure as well as funds for the programme from the little that she earns from her online mental health work.

In fact, Anshima has a love for learning new things and is a student of and for life. She is a spiritual mentor, an educator, a singer, a poetess and a dancer.

She is the founder of “Commit To Self”, one of a kind spiritual consultancy cum one on one spiritual mentoring service. It is the first spiritual and mental health services platform which says that anxiety and depression are not bad. Depression is the path to spiritual growth, creativity and life purpose.

Anshima had a glimpse of her truth at the age of 26. Her “unusual” early awakening is a result of the extreme inner suffering she underwent as a victim of a pattern of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. It is also the result of the untimely death of a close friend through suicide. Further, it’s also because her career and relationships failed miserably even when the right inputs were put in. It was impossible to be able to piece all of her experiences together into a logical scheme of things. At the age of 18, she questioned her existence and the purpose of life. She read text written by enlightened masters and chose awakening over every other thing. She learned healing techniques to relieve herself of her sufferings but eventually also ended up finding her life purpose. She is a gifted healer and knows a lot of healing techniques intuitively without formally learning them through a class/course. Now, she uses her inner wisdom to help awaken others. 50% of what she teaches is knowledge acquired from her spiritual teachers. The rest comes from what she has learnt from her own life journey and inner awareness. She believes that inner wisdom has nothing to do with old age and grey hair. Inner wisdom is available for everyone in the here and now. It just depends on whether we are open to it.

Anishma has a degree in Economics Honours from SRCC, Delhi University and a Masters degree in Fashion Management from NIFT, Hyderabad. She has a Diploma in Clinical Counselling from the India Institute of Counselling, Delhi and a Diploma in Clinical Hypnotherapy and Past Life Regression from EKAA institute, Mumbai.

Anshima’s Growth Journey

Anshima directly took support from a Clinical Psychologist and Counsellor way back in 2007. She felt supported and heard but she did not feel completely healed to be in a position to say that she was happy or doing the best she could as per the potential she had. Her seeking did not stop because she did not find inner peace. She still felt lost and confused and knew that something within her had changed and she did not know how to interpret it or name it. It’s only later in life that she got to know that this was the beginning of her spiritual awakening.

She attended various “satsangs” and spiritual programs which only gave some temporary relief. However, that didn’t stop her from attending these programs. Hence, she continued to find recourse in reading spiritual and philosophical content. Ayn Rand, Swami Vivekanada and ISCKON foundation books were the first few reading material she discovered in her universe. A lot of peace came from each of the books she read. She kept on reading more and more psychological and spiritual texts in the hope that she would find her answers some day.

In 2015, she started teaching a group of 25 underprivileged children and felt complete for the first time after the initial crisis set in. She felt different and realised this was her purpose and continued to gain happiness from bringing joy in the life of these children and their families. Further on, she realised that her purpose was also to heal other people by teaching them the techniques she used to heal herself. All these realizations came to her organically without any push. She did not shy away from doing anything new.

Her journey is definitely not logical by conventional standards. The beauty of her journey is in the surrender she made towards what the universe showed to her. The beauty of her journey is in embracing the randomness and in learning to adapt to every new moment.